Kierkegaard as an Educational Thinker: Communication Through and Across Ways of Being

Attempts to build bridges between Kierkegaard and current educational debates or dilemmas are in danger of appearing facile to friends of Kierkegaard, and opportunistic or irrelevant to each opposing side in educational controversies. In hope of reducing such extravagant risks, this essay explores some aspects of Kierkegaard on communication and on ways of being, i.e. his spheres or stages of existence. Communication through ways of being seems relatively straightforward. Communication across ways of being can seem either absurdly complicated or (if aiming at unravelling such complications) wonderfully illuminating. This Kierkegaard could become a creatively awkward, Socratic partner in educational attempts to critique and deepen current accounts of language and communication, narrative and accountability, reason and justification, personal and social development, emotional intelligence and (of course) moral and religious education (with or without 'spiritual' development) as well as political or citizenship education. Wittgenstein found in Kierkegaard one lifelong Socratic conversation partner. If other educators can do this in their own ways, Kierkegaard can still breathe more lively passion into the cold embers of educational discourses.     

Examining the Effectiveness of a Multicomponent Reading Comprehension Intervention in Middle Schools: A Focus on Treatment Fidelity

In this experimental study, we examined the effects of a multicomponent reading comprehension intervention in sixth- to eighth-grade English language arts classes with a focus on factors to enhance treatment implementation. We tested the contribution of a theoretically derived fidelity framework that included adherence, quality, dosage, program differentiation, and student responsiveness. The study was conducted in three schools, involving 14 teachers and 859 students. English language arts classes were randomly assigned to the Comprehension Circuit Training intervention (n?=?30) or typical practice comparison (n?=?31) conditions, and all teachers taught in both conditions. Findings indicated that there was no reliable difference between the intervention and typical practice groups on standardized or researcher-developed proximal measures. To investigate the relationship between fidelity and student outcomes, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to determine the relation of the indicators to a latent fidelity factor. Results of the CFA revealed a single fidelity factor composed of the adherence, quality, dosage, student responsiveness, and program differentiation variables. The fidelity factor was statistically significantly related to outcomes on a standardized comprehension measure (γ?=?.86, p?γ?=?.52, p?相似文献   

Giambattista Vico and the wisdom of teaching

This paper offers a rehabilitation of the neglected eighteenth-century thinker and philosopher, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), and defends the contemporary relevance of his construction of the wisdom of teaching. Reinventing the ancient traditions of European rhetoric, and reacting with great critical hostility to the pervasive educational influence of the thought and methods of Rene Descartes and his followers in the Jansenist movement, Vico’s major writings and public lectures sought to articulate a complete philosophy of education quite at variance with the styles of rationality and pedagogy favoured in the European Enlightenment. In his insistence on the key function of poetics, narrative, myth, religion, shared common sense, emotion, belonging and ritual in the formation of the educated person, Vico laid stress upon the role of the imagination and its nurture in the development of a properly enlarged and sympathetic rationality. With the implications for teaching methods, curriculum and the understanding and protection of the unique capacities of childhood, Vico has much to offer the philosophy and practice of modern education as it faces the multiple allures of hyperationality and the attenuated knowledge-economy account of its central aims and purposes.     

Using order to reason about negative numbers: the case of Violet

This case study illustrates how a 2nd-grade child, Violet, used an ordinal view of number to reason about positive and negative integers and arithmetic involving integers. Violet’s ordinal view of number facilitated her ability to reason about and correctly solve some integer-related problems and constrained her solutions to others. We demonstrate how Violet’s thinking evolved over time while she extended the properties of whole numbers and addition and subtraction to the integers. Using this case study as a basis, we propose a series of developmental milestones that build toward one’s understanding of integers and integer arithmetic in an order-based way. We believe that understanding Violet’s order-based reasoning can help us listen to other children.     

Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite and the spaces of revolt

In this article we will contribute to the contemporary theoretical debate about film by considering, from a history-of-education perspective, the film Zéro de conduite by Jean Vigo (1905–1934). This film is classified under the umbrella of “poetic realism”: a product of cinéma de gauche and an avant-gardist, surrealist and anarchist-catalogued film by a film-maker described by many as very talented and creative. The paper is divided into five parts. In the first part we sketch Vigo’s own biography and the social biography of the film. The second section documents the response to the film both at the time of its release and subsequently. In the third section we explore anarchist ideas about education both in theory and practice. In the fourth section we use this understanding to analyse the film. The final section returns to the question of film as an underused resource and the possibilities of bringing new elements into historical practice.     

Manipulating the data: teaching and NAPLAN in the control society

High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the ‘good teacher’. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This article argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.     

The power of one? Conditions which challenge managerial professional development practices

This paper draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field to better understand and appreciate the conditions which encouraged the productive professional development (PD) practices of one very capable teacher working in a secondary school in the British Midlands. Rather than celebrating this teacher's practices and perspective as evidence of the capacity of the heroic individual to overcome sometimes adverse circumstances, this paper reveals how the experiences of this teacher can be understood as an instance of the socially situated self, engaged by and engaging in an alternative politics to that associated with more managerial conceptions of teacher learning. This research calls for a cautious approach to those renderings of educational practice which construe the creative potential of the habitus, without sufficient regard for the actual conditions which contribute towards this creativity. In this way, this paper is presented not as an example of how one teacher overcame significant barriers to substantive learning practices – as a morality tale for other, individual educators to emulate – but as a provocation to suggest how some teachers' access to professional/community resources helps them sustain a clear focus on substantive learning.     

Religion,education and the post-secular child

This essay endeavours to reframe current discussion of the relationship of religion to education by highlighting an often seriously neglected element of contemporary educational thought: the changing, post-secular understanding of childhood in the globalised age. Drawing upon recent ethnographies of childhood, and an older anthropological scholarship, the essay seeks to illuminate the place of religion and religious experience in the education of the young by interrogating prevailing and competing perceptions of childhood that often implicitly underpin the discussion of the relationship of the ‘post-secular’ to both liberal and critical-constructivist accounts of educational purpose. In rehabilitating this core concern with childhood, the essay also seeks to recover the ‘pre-secular’ child of folklore, myth, fairytale and romantic aesthetics in order to propose that current Western conceptions of the child are constitutively implicated in these living legacies.     

Facilitating the learning journey from vocational education and training to higher education

An increase in students who enter higher education in Australia following their studies in the vocational education and training (VET) sector has led to heightened national interest in the transition experiences of these students. This paper reports on the experiences of students who, as a result of their VET studies, entered a relatively new, large, metropolitan university in 2009 and 2010 in the fields of Business and Law, Early Childhood and Nursing. The investigation elicited responses from students about a range of personal, administrative and academic experiences. A total of 529 students responded to a survey, 74 students were interviewed by telephone and 33 students attended focus groups. A major finding of the research was that many students saw the new learning context as a positive factor and responded to challenges with enthusiasm and resilience. Despite this, it seems that the transition period, particularly the first semester of study, is an unnecessarily stressful time for many students and that this could be mitigated by the provision of timely information about differences between institutional and learner expectations, workload, administrative processes and learning practices.     

Program Readings

Richard C. Burke Instructional Television: Bold New Venture (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1971—$5.95)

Harold S. Davis (ed.) Instructional Media Center: Bold New Venture (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1971— $7.50)

Ralph J. Amelio, Film in the Classroom: Why to Use It How to Use It (Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum/Standard, 1971—$4.50, paper)