HPE teachers’ negotiation of environmental health spaces: discursive positions,embodiment and materialism

A National Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has recently been developed in Australia. This new curriculum reflects, among other educational priorities, both environmental sensitivities and a commitment to the enhancement of young people’s health and wellbeing. HPE is one of the key sites in the curriculum where a focused consideration of the relationship between the environment and health is possible. However, to date no research has considered the ways that HPE teachers might recognise and negotiate these spaces. The research described in this paper addresses this gap through an analysis of semi-structured interviews with generalist primary and specialist secondary HPE teachers, drawing on a ‘narrative ethnography’ approach derived from cultural geography. This analysis highlights the consequences of the absence of a knowledge tradition that explicitly links the fields of the environment and health in HPE. Participants who were able to conceptualise environmental health almost exclusively drew on dominant neoliberal and risk discourses. At the same time, teachers’ embodied histories and affective encounters with non-human nature helped them to rupture or challenge dominant assumptions about environmental health. We argue that corporeal knowledge developed through embodied experiences has the potential to assist teachers in formulating environmental health in ways that highlight how interactions with the environment might enhance health and wellbeing.     

The formal setting as context for cognitive activities. An empirical study of arithmetic operations under conflicting premisses for communication

The general concern of the present article is to contribute to an understanding of the contextual determination of cognitive activities. More specifically, the focus of the empirical research reported has been to study how pupils define and deal with cognitive tasks in situations that are recognised as pedagogical in character. Within the context of their everyday mathematics teaching, 206 twelve year old primary school pupils were given work sheets containing elementary arithmetic problems. The experimental treatment consisted of introducing (through headings and instructions) pedagogical definitions of problems that were in conflict with the nature of the problems themselves. The results indicate that the predefinitions of cognitive activities typical of educational contexts have a strong impact on the way problems are dealt with. Clear differences could be discerned between groups at different achievement levels in the extent to which the cues present in pedagogical contexts were used in defining the problem. A crucial aspect of what are conventionally conceived as differences in mathematical ability seems, judging from the present results, to have more to do with the capacity to decipher ambiguous communicative situations than with the mastery of a mathematical algorithm per se.     

Academic Freedom,Innovation, and Responsibility: Towards an ‘Ethical GPS’ in Higher Education and Science

In lieu of the usual ‘From the Editors’ piece, Jan Sadlak, Director of UNESCO‐CEPES, and Henryk Ratajczak, Vice‐President of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (EAASH), describe below the scope and highlights of the International Conference on Ethical and Moral Dimensions for Higher Education and Science in Europe, held in Bucharest on 2–5 September 2004. The articles in this issue, some of which are drawn from Conference presentations, are also introduced here.

The Conference was organized by the above two organizations, in collaboration with the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo and the Division of Basic and Engineering Sciences of UNESCO in Paris. It took place under the joint high patronage of Mr. Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic, and Mr. Ion Iliescu, President of Romania, and received further distinction in the form of special messages from Pope John Paul II, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, and Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura, Director‐General of UNESCO. All Conference documents can be accessed on the UNESCO‐CEPES website, ?www.cepes.ro?.     

The things (we think) we (ought to) do: Ideological processes and practices in teaching

Ideologies of education and of teaching are complex and layered, and they contain macro-social, institutional as well as micro-ideological levels. Building on cases from the UK and South Africa, this paper argues that notions of ‘professionalism’ among teachers display such ideological layering, and that such notions are heavily invested with interests that transcend the operational or institutional scales. In the case of the UK, we discuss the way in which a teacher described her experience of taking a degree course, exposing a rift between individual, experiential knowledge and institutional, organisational knowledge, characteristic of the large-scale transformations of the educational field in the UK. In the South African case, we show how a white teacher instructing black township children deploys images of the disciplined body that derive from the Apartheid ‘old order’. In both cases we see that views of professionalism are infused with micro-ideological, practical beliefs as well as with macro-ideological social and political views. In terms of the implications of our line of argument for teacher education we conclude that student teachers should be taught explicitly about the discourses by which teaching is constructed so that they are able to reflect more critically on their professional practice.     

Teacher education pedagogy: disrupting the apprenticeship of observation

Teacher educators are challenged to enact a pedagogy that helps facilitate conceptual transitions in preservice teachers away from the naïve notions formed during their long apprenticeships of observation. This study examines one ‘educative experience purposefully embedded in meaningful pedagogical experiences’ using the three-level model of teacher learning. Findings indicate preservice teachers derived a range of learning from the educative experience, and most were found to be surfacing, confronting, and beginning to replace naïve notions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Findings also suggest several characteristics of teacher education pedagogy that disrupt the apprenticeship of observation, including the presentation of dramatically new ideas to elicit the awareness of unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning; the usefulness of affect in awakening that awareness; and opportunities to develop metacognition and process reactions through writing that surfaces prior ideas and articulates new understandings.     

德国国家科技图书馆科学内容ＤＯＩ注册中心研究进展

本文介绍了科学数据注册的背景及“原始科学数据出版与引用”项目概况,研究了科学数据唯一标识符定义和结构,分析了德国科技图书馆中科学数据的注册过程及所需要的基础设施,论述了科学数据的可引用性,并给出了3种其他科学内容注册的实例,总结了该中心科学数据DOI注册的现状和下一步发展的方向。     

Presuppositions and relation of cognitive functions in a schoolreadiness curriculum

The schoolreadiness curriculum by Dumont and Kok (1973) is a Dutch adaptation of the curriculum by Connor and Talbot (1966). It contains presuppositions about the teachers’ diagnostic skills and about the sequence of 5 different levels of functions and behaviours. The latter two were tested for 13 cognitive functions, e.g. Visual Perception, Number Concept, etc. The presuppositions about the teachers’ diagnostic skills could not be denied. They judged the cognitive levels of pupils who were, according to an objective measuring device for schoolreadiness, classified as «not» and «questionably» schoolready to be significantly lower than pupils who were classified as «schoolready». The presupposition about the sequence of levels received little support. Three out of 13 functions revealed this sequence. The relation between the functions was explored. Substantial correlations between all functions in two samples of subjects suggested a general memory or attention factor. Correlations within and between groups of functions suggested two specific factors, a quantitative-relational and a spatial orientation factor.     

Collaboration, integration and change in children's services: critical issues and key ingredients

BACKGROUND: Government and state policy, irrespective of jurisdiction, increasingly require and indeed specify the nature of collaboration with regard to the delivery of child welfare services for maltreated children. The rationale for collaboration appears obvious in as much as it is aimed at promoting multidisciplinary practice in order to meet the needs of the vulnerable child. However, collaboration, whilst a useful and motivating concept, is in reality far from straightforward and contains complexities and ambiguities. AIM: The aim of this paper is to explore these complexities and ambiguities to provide an overview of key developmental frameworks relevant to the creation and maintenance of strategic high-level multiagency partnerships. COMMENTARY: The authors begin by exploring the characteristic features of different levels of multiagency collaboration that is communication, co-operation, co-ordination, coalition, and integration. As the emphasis in a variety of jurisdictions in the Western world is on the highest levels of collaboration namely coalition and service integration this is the focus of the paper. The authors synthesize the main literature in the field to consider the critical elements for effective collaborative endeavors at this level including predisposing factors, mandate, leadership, machinery, process, and outcomes. The paper concludes by recognizing that the drive towards integrated services is occurring in a climate of continuing change. The need to identify the impact of such an environment when managing multiagency partnerships is explored using five steps to change.     

Participatory planning for project sustainability of environmental education projects: a case study of the Secondary Teacher Training Environmental Education Project (St2eep) in Zimbabwe

Within the first year of the Secondary Teacher Training Environmental Education Project (St²eep) in Zimbabwe, project stakeholders, including lecturers, college administrators, local project coordinators, and donor representatives, expressed concern about the non‐sustainability of the project due to its over‐reliance on its international donor. In response to this challenge, a process of critical self‐reflection through self‐assessment workshops was started to give an opportunity for key project stakeholders to explore the challenge of project sustainability. Applying the principles of expansive learning theory to St²eep’s reflection processes, this paper shows how the contradictions that emerge from the interaction between different project stakeholders can be powerful sources for learning. This has resulted in new forms of activity to address the challenge of project sustainability in St²eep. The insights of this paper may be useful for other donor‐funded environmental education projects that are confronted with the challenge of project sustainability.