Is it ‘all about having an opinion’? Challenging the Dominance of Rationality and Cognition in Democratic Education via Research in a Gallery Setting

This article reports on findings from a research study exploring the potential for democratic learning in a gallery education project which took place in the UK in 2006–7. In doing so, it also explores a pressing issue for education today: the question of young people's democratic education in a time of political crisis in Europe. The focus of the article lies in a critique of the primacy of rational thought, cognitive skills and verbal discussion within democratic education, and an exploration of the potential role of the arts and art education in challenging this. Specifically, the article argues that there has been an affective and corporeal deficit in democratic education, and that some forms of gallery education are well placed to address this. Although the data discussed derive from a particular time and place (the UK in the latter days of a government that rigorously pursued an agenda of social and economic inclusion through both education and cultural policy), they also have relevance beyond their immediate context, illuminating the nature and dynamics of the process of democratic learning, and its aesthetic and artistic dimensions.     

Anonymous versus public student feedback systems: metacognition and achievement with graduate learners

Educational technology research and development - The aim of this repeated measures study was to examine an anonymous student feedback system (delivered using clickers) versus a public student...     

Development of reasoning associated with pictographs: Representing, interpreting, and predicting

A developmental model involving four response levels is proposed concerning how students arrange pictures to represent data in a pictograph, how they interpret these pictographs, and how they make predictions based on these pictographs. The model is exemplified by responses from three related interview-based studies. In Study 1, examples of each response level are provided from 48 preparatory- to tenth-grade students. Students from higher grades were more likely to respond at higher levels. In Study 2, 22 students were interviewed longitudinally after a three-year interval; many improved in response level over time, although a few responded at lower levels. In Study 3, 20 third-grade students were interviewed and then prompted with conflicting responses of other students on video; many improved their initial responses to higher levels after exposure to the conflicting prompts. Associations among levels of representing, interpreting, and predicting were explored. Educational implications are discussed concerning reasonable expectations of students and suggestions to develop these skills in students at different grades. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Wellness of Undergraduates: Comparisons of Traditional and Nontraditional Students

Wellness scores of 1,249 traditional and 318 nontraditional undergraduate college students revealed low levels of wellness in multiple areas in comparison with non‐student adults and within‐group differences according to demographic variables. Profiles of wellness for traditional‐ and nontraditional‐age students revealed significant differences on 4 subscales. Nontraditional students of color scored lower than traditional Caucasian students on Total Wellness and several component indices. Implications for student development and counseling programs are discussed.     

Making death,compassion and partnership ‘part of life’ in school communities

Death can be considered a social taboo, a common source of fear and public avoidance. School communities are not immune to this, as the topic of death is constantly avoided. It is vital to understand how we can socially and culturally cultivate a positive regard for death, dying and bereavement in our school communities. Community members need to discuss these difficult issues and use strategies to enhance compassion, connectedness and support. In this literature review we reason that death is specifically not ‘part of life’ in school communities. Due to the dearth of school community-based literature on this issue and the progressive literature residing in palliative care, we aim to coalesce palliative care and school-based research, evaluate it and highlight compassion and partnership as a way forward for school communities. Essentially, our societal attitudes about death and dying have been profoundly altered and our community ownership of these normal life events has largely disappeared. This is demonstrated for example, by palliative care moving from the social grass roots ‘modern hospice movement’ formed in the 1960s and being reintegrated into the mainstream health care system by the end of the 1990s, resulting in an overall medicalised morphing of death, dying and bereavement issues. Therefore, we recommend that further research be conducted in how to develop compassionate schools to inform us how death may be continually made ‘part of life’ in school communities, for the benefit of students, teachers and families alike.     

Safe or unsafe? The paradox of action learning

Business Driven Action Learning (BDAL), as a learning philosophy that attempts to create real value for business is often used by executive education providers in their management development programmes. As the action learning facilitator, I found that the learning that took place during such a management development programme resulted in participants experiencing stress, anxiety and high levels of frustration, which threatened the learning process. The resulting paradox in the learning environment is that the same anxiety that is necessary to ensure that learning took place has the propensity, if too high to hamper learning. Utilising the findings from this research, this account of practice makes recommendations for the action learning facilitator to consider while guiding action learning sets (groups). The facilitator can alleviate many of the fears by emphasising that anxiety is necessary in the learning process. The facilitator can mediate the learning relationship between the individual participant and the learning environment as depicted in the model at the end of the article.     

The participation of women faculty in Chinese universities: paradoxes of globalization

This paper contributes to a discussion of how globalization is affecting women faculty in different countries around the world. It reports on a collaborative, international research project designed to understand the participation of women faculty members in Chinese universities, sketching the historical context necessary for understanding women's place in universities in China, describing the process of surveying university faculty on gender issues and reporting the findings of the survey for universities that prepare secondary school teachers. The paper concludes that in China, ‘gender consciousness’ is a major barrier preventing women's full participation as faculty. As a result, women are likely to increase their disadvantage in the next few years as Chinese universities expand, diversify, emphasize research and broaden their links with the rest of the world.     

Reading and Reinterpreting Picture Books on Children’s Television: Implications for Young Children’s Narrative Literacy

Bookaboo is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, 2006) as a case study, this article explores how this type of adaptation of picture books transforms the original narrative, with implications for children’s developing narrative literacy. Taking a multimodal social semiotic perspective, this study investigates the changes in meaning which result from the employment of semiotic resources such as animation, sound, and camera movement in the representation of the book on the television show. We argue that the deployment of such resources can subtly reshape the meanings expressed through the modes of language and images in the original picture book, potentially affecting the child viewer’s engagement with the narrative. Examining the use of these resources in the picture book’s televisual representation is thus an important first step towards developing frameworks for evaluating the ability of television programmes that incorporate picture book reading to support children’s literacy.     

The Teacher as Researcher: Developing the Skills with Pre-Service Art Specialist Students

This paper details a project which involved a group of art specialist Diploma in Education students, two lecturing staff plus a group of primary school children in a series of planned art activities for two terms. The Saturday Morning Art programme (S.M.ART) was developed to enable the students to systematically focus on art learning in these classes by using largely qualitative research processes within a case study framework. By introducing these pre-service trainee art teachers to research techniques which they can then use, we believe we are preparing them to be self-evaluative and reflective practitioners in the classroom.     

Student attitudes toward science and sciencerelated careers: A program designed to promote a stimulating gender-free learning environment

A project designed to foster the full and fair participation of girls in high-school science classes addressed obstacles, both perceived and actual, to equal participation. In order to modify existing classroom techniques and environments, a Teacher Intervention Program was designed. By means of a workshop and periodic personal communications, teachers were sensitized to the importance of a stimulating, gender-free learning environment. In addition, they were presented with a variety of methods and materials which had been shown to encourage girls in science. Twelve teachers, who were selected randomly, taught in diverse communities throughout one Midwestern state. The subjects tested were students in 24 general biology classes taught by the 12 teachers. Although both qualitative and quantitative measures were used during the research, only the quantitative results are discussed in this paper. Using ANOVA's, treatment group by student sex, a comparison of the mean scores was made for all students, as well as for all females and for all males. The results indicated that the experimental group, compared to the control group, had significantly higher mean scores on tests of attitudes toward science, perceptions of science, extracurricular science activities, and interest in a science-related career.