EDUCATING COMMUNAL AGENTS: BUILDING ON THE PERSPECTIVISM OF G.H. MEAD

A bstract .  In their search for more communal forms of agency that might guide education, contemporary educational psychologists have mostly neglected the theorizing of George Herbert Mead. In this essay, Jack Martin aims to remedy such oversight by interpreting Mead's social-psychological and educational theorizing of selfhood and agency through the lenses of the perspectival realism Mead developed in the last decade of his life. This interpretation understands education as concerned with the cultivation and coordination of cultural, societal, interpersonal, and personal perspectives. Within this framework, communal agency is understood as a self-interpreting, self-determining capability of persons. This agentive capability derives from immersion and participation with others within sociocultural practices and perspectives, but also includes reactivity to those same practices and perspectives. The education of communal agents as envisioned here emphasizes the social nature of education, students' experience and development, and the critical role of the teacher as a mediator between student development and social process. Such an education is grounded in the immediate experiences and perspectives of learners, but increasingly assists learners to move beyond their own experiences through engaged interaction with others and with resources for acquiring broader, more organized perspectives on themselves, others, and the world.     

“The story means more to me now”: teaching thinking through Guided Reading

This article describes perspective and imagery thinking strategies taught during Guided Reading lessons. These strategies are designed to enhance comprehension by giving students techniques for manipulating meaning. Social and physical perspective thinking strategies allow students to identify and apply a variety of perspectives, while imagery thinking strategies allow students to re‐view meaning through the application of still, moving and melting images. Comment from teachers and students involved in a project designed to trial these strategies indicate they may be one way of raising standards in English.     

自杀

Life was such a misery, he thought... a pain, a suffering, an agony. He wished he would die... somehow.... miraculously. He wondered if he should jump from a window and fall with a massive thud onto the concrete below, his blood spattering over the grey-white, leaving behind a momentary work of     

Experiencing and evidencing learning through self-study: New ways of working with mentors and trainees in a training school partnership

This paper uses self-study to analyse the development of a generative, research-based approach to mentoring initial teacher training students in a Training School/university partnership and its contribution to redefining teacher education practice. It focuses on the ontological values and co-learning of the authors as they work collaboratively with mentors to develop a democratic form of social practice and relations. The use of video to record the teaching and situated learning of mentors and trainees is explored as are the qualities and conditions which helped foster the shift in power relations between participants as they engaged in reflective dialogue and inquiry. Issues of sustainability and embedding such practices are addressed as is the contribution of practitioner-research accounts to the professional knowledge of other teacher educators, teachers and trainees.     

A cognitive model for the evaluation of units of instruction

Instructional Science - This paper describes an approach to the problem of how particular pre-existing systems of cognitive structures in individuals could be brought to bear on the design and...     

热爱英语2

本文作者曾在中国执教数年,遇到许多中国学生向他提问。他总结了其中较具代表性的问题一一予以了解答,希望对广大读者朋友有所帮助。     

Financing at the leading 100 research universities: A study of financial dependency,concentration, and related institutional characteristics

This paper presents results of a National Science Foundation sponsored study to examine the financing of the leading 100 research universities. The study examines the changing dependence of these institutions on the federal government for overall financial support, the shifts in the concentration of federal funding to and within higher education, and the various programmatic and resource characteristics of these leading research institutions. The study covers five fiscal periods, 1975 through 1979.Presented at the Twenty First Annual Forum of The Association for Institutional Research, Minneapolis, May 1981.     

Self-control in the monkeymacaca fascicularis

Two experiments tested two cynomolgus monkeys’ self-control—choice of a longer, more delayed reinforcer over a shorter, less delayed reinforcer. In Experiment 1, subjects exhibited significant selfcontrol in a procedure in which reinforcer amounts and delays were held constant throughout a condition. In Experiment 2, subjects exhibited significantly greater sensitivity to variation in reinforcer amount than to variation in reinforcer delay in a procedure in which the reinforcer delay associated with the self-control alternative was adjusted until each macaque was indifferent between the two alternatives. Both experiments indicated that, in laboratory paradigms in which humans show self-control and pigeons and rats show impulsiveness, macaques show self-control. These results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that species differences in self-control are a function of language ability or of specific types of prior training. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that species differences in self-control are related to the ratio of brain size to body weight (a possible indicator of general cognitive ability) or to shared phylogeny.     

Education and the Religious Thinker

This paper is concerned with the process of religious thinking as a linguistic form of investigating the world of values, which stands in contrast to theology and religious studies. It hinges around Wittgenstein’s comment, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help but see every question from a religious point of view.” It argues that scientific modes of thought are now so dominant that values education of all types are distorted as science itself was once distorted in an age when theological language held sway. The result today is the worrying growth of what is usually termed fundamentalism or literalism. The paper introduces the thinking on this issue from the curriculum theories of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, which have been ignored for nearly two centuries, before examining the work of a modern scholar, Christopher Arthur. Finally Whitehead’s insights arising from his later works are brought into play to conclude the argument.