Student teams’ development over time: tracing the relationship between the quality of communication and teams’ performance

Current discussions in higher education and alumni training acknowledge the challenges training programs face in responding to the authentic needs of the labor market. In addition to academic knowledge, higher education institutions are expected to provide general twenty-first-century skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and interpersonal skills. To meet these challenges, many institutions utilize collaborative pedagogies such as learning in teams. However, teamwork in higher education tends to focus primarily on the task aspects of performance at the expense of the team aspects, and for educators, there may be no feasible way to assess whether the students are learning to work successfully as teams. This paper explores how new student teams (n?=?3) that simulate real business teams by taking a challenging entrepreneur assessment, developed over three semesters for general skills (i.e., communication), and whether the improvement in their communication also indicated the teams’ improved performance (i.e., financial success). As an analytical tool, the study relies on initial parameters on teams’ microdynamics of communication [Losada, M. (1999). The complex dynamics of high performance teams. Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 30, 179–192] normalized with fuzzy logic. In accordance with the current understanding of team development, the results did not show any linear improvement, but the quality of communication in the teams improved episodically. Further, the results provide evidence of the possible relationship between the improved quality of communication and the teams’ collective financial success. However, in future work, due to the lack of sensitivity of the parameters in this context together with the recent criticisms of the mathematical basis of the patterns of team dynamics based on Losada's parameters, they will be reexamined with a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis.     

Citizenship education in Ukraine and Russia: reconciling nation‐building and active citizenship

This paper examines the discourses framing citizenship education in Ukraine and Russia from perestroika to the present and assesses the role of the Council of Europe in promoting democratic citizenship in both countries. We argue that there is a tension between the discourses of active citizenship, strongly disseminated by international agencies (the Council of Europe in our case), and national consolidation, pursued by Ukraine and Russia since the fall of the Soviet regime. While the beginning of the 1990s was marked by democratization and individualization, from the mid‐1990s the emphasis on state cohesion became more prominent in both states. From the end of the 1990s, however, citizenship education aims started to diverge, despite a similar approach of the Council of Europe to the two countries. In Russia the government reinforced the state cohesion agenda, which led to the patriotic education discourse gaining strength. In Ukraine, nation‐building was made secondary to bringing the education system in line with international standards in order to improve the country’s competitiveness. The nature of citizenship education in the two countries therefore seems to be more a reflection of domestic political developments than the product of international policy agenda.     

Page,text and screen in the university: Revisiting the Illich hypothesis

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text.     

Perspectives on Donald Super's Construct of Career Maturity

The evolution of Donald Super's construct of Career Maturity (CM) is traced from the Career Pattern Study of the 1950s to the innovative research of the Work Importance Study in the 1980s. Successful attempts to establish the portability of the CM construct across countries, particularly in Canada and Australia, are described. An overview of instruments derived from Super's theories about career development and maturity is presented, together with an overview of research on the correlates of CM. Reference is made to implications of changes over time in the nature of work and the nature of careers for Super's theories. As others have recognised, evolving changes in these areas mean that theories, to remain relevant, also need to evolve. The article includes discussion of some of the dimensions identified more recently as useful in explaining career development levels and patterns, including career indecision and work role salience.     

Balancing trust and control through dialogue meetings in Norwegian school district governance

Increased attention has been paid to school superintendents and their role in school reforms. Still, there are few studies on dialogue meetings between actors at different levels in the school hierarchy. The current paper investigates how a superintendent balances between trust and control while supporting school development through dialogue meetings. Drawing on interviews, reflection notes, and longitudinal observational data from dialogue meetings, comprising a superintendent, subordinated school leaders, and team leaders, this action research study provides insight into requirements for productive dialogue meetings. We argue that superintendent leadership through regular dialogue meetings can foster trust-building, empowerment, and professional commitment.

     

World and Life or Education and the Question of Meaning (of Life)

The ambiguous meaning of the concept of life is considered by recalling along with Hannah Arendt the old distinction between zoé and bios. Life as bios is the life of someone and always intrinsically relational and worldly, thus bound to the existence of a world. The first question for life as bios being not happiness, but meaning. Life as zoé, as bare life — sacred to the credo of our time and constituting the silent premise underlying much social theory and philosophy — in turn must be defended in its own name and for the sake of happiness against everything that is durable and limits its growth and fertility and therefore it includes deafness to the question of meaning and destruction of the world, that is, of the conditions of human existence as bios. In order to help the preservation of a human life, the question of meaning has to be heard and the world has to be taken seriously. Accordingly, education should not so much orient itself towards the acquisition of the value of (bare) life, but above all help to avoid the time and space in which the question of meaning arises be occupied.     

Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K–12 Education in the United States: Findings Related to Research and Evaluation

The Panel on Educational Technology was organized in April 1995 under the auspices of the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) to provide advice to the President on matters related to the application of information technologies to K–12 education in the United States. Its findings and recommendations were set forth in March 1997 in the Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K–12 Education in the United States. This report was based on a review of the research literature and on written submissions and oral briefings from a number of academic and industrial researchers, practicing educators, software developers, governmental agencies, and professional and industry organizations involved in various ways with the application of technology to education. Its most important finding is that a large-scale program of rigorous, systematic research on education in general and educational technology in particular will ultimately prove necessary to ensure both the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of technology use within our nation's K–12 schools. Finding that less than 0.1 percent of our nation's expenditures for elementary and secondary education are currently invested to determine which educational techniques actually work, and to find ways to improve them—an extremely low level relative to comparable ratios within the private sector—the Panel recommended that this figure be increased over a period of several years to at least 0.5 percent, and sustained at that level on an ongoing basis. Further, because no one state, municipality, or private firm could hope to capture more than a small fraction of the benefits associated with a significant advance in our understanding of how best to educate K–12 students, the Panel concluded that such funding will have to be provided largely at the federal level in order to avoid a systematic underinvestment (attributable to a classical form of economic externality) relative to the level that would be optimal for the nation as a whole. This paper originally appeared as Section 8 of the report.     

Reflections on being female in school science: Toward a praxis of teaching science

This essay interrogates the phenomenon and the implications of being female in school science through girls' and young women's stories interwoven with my own narrative as a woman teacher/researcher in science education. The intent is to raise awareness of issues related to being female in conventional science teaching, and to suggest some alternative perspectives and approaches for action and reflection. I discuss several directions within my teaching which announce my own interpretation of bell hook's “engaged pedagogy,” which emphasizes a commitment to self-actualization and well-being for both teacher and student. My choice to integrate disparate writing styles (conversational and scholarly) was a deliberate effort to resonate issues between practice and theory and interrupt this separation. J Res Sci Teach 35: 463–471, 1998.     

Evolutionary approaches for sustainable innovation policies: From niche to paradigm?

Fostering technological innovation is considered as an important element of policies towards sustainable development. In the past 10 years, evolutionary policy approaches have been increasingly advocated. For several reasons, they seem well equipped to underpin sustainable innovation policies. They focus on dynamics of change and their drivers, they allow for a substantive perspective on technologies beyond mere input-output relations, taking into account trajectories and different characteristics of innovation, and they are able to describe circumstances under which established technologies might persist even when they are to some extent inferior to their new competitors (lock-in). However, the policy effectiveness of evolutionary approaches in cases in which radical or systemic changes are involved is not yet proven. In this paper we assess the theoretical rationale, instrumental aspects and the coping with policy constraints of three evolutionary policy approaches which have also been used in empirical studies: strategic niche management, transition management and time strategies. Each approach has its strengths and specific problems and all three have to be further developed and tested out but they hold promise for contributing to non-incremental change with economic and environmental benefits, by shaping processes of variation, selection and retention, with the outcomes feeding back into policy. They may also be used in other areas in which innovation direction is important, for instance health care or food.