An ‘energetic and controversial’ historian of education yesterday and today: A. F. Leach (1851–1915)

This article is posthumously published as the late Joan Simon’s most recent contribution to ongoing debates in historiography of education. Joan remained an active writer and a contributor to this journal and submitted the present article only months before her death, with characteristic determination to engage in historiographical debate, and to contextualize and defend her own contribution to the field. Like other periods preceding the Industrial Revolution, the later Middle Ages and Renaissance tend to have been neglected by historians of education in recent years, and the discussion below reminds us how recently, and for good reason, debate concerning the Reformation remained central to the historiography of education. Implications of the contemporary politics of education for historical interpretation are well illustrated. But the autobiographical threads of this piece also reveal the significance of personalities and academic politics in the configuration of prevailing interpretations of history. These factors impinge on the publication and editing of learned journals as well as more generally on the positioning of research in education history between its originating intellectual discipline on the one hand, and on the other the field of practice to which its insights contribute.     

Exploring students' intuitive ideas of randomness using an iPod shuffle activity

This article presents an activity that engages students in considering characteristics of a random sequence, in this case, a randomly generated playlist of songs using the iPod shuffle feature. Students examine simulated sequences of randomly generated songs from a small music library in order to identify characteristics that are used to develop rules that they then apply to judge whether three suspicious lists are likely to be nonrandom.     

Fashion in the classroom III: Effects of instructor attire and immediacy in natural classroom interactions

This is the third of three studies using complementary designs to investigate the effects of teacher attire on student perceptions of instructors and instruction in contemporary college classrooms. In line with Studies One and Two, modest effects of attire on perceptions of extroversion and competence were found; however, previous conclusions that instructor attire has little meaningful, predictable effect on ratings of attributes related to either approachability or credibility were reinforced. Student judgements of such attributes were influenced far more by teacher use of immediacy behaviors than by attire. In particular, positive effects resulting from teachers’ choice of formal professional attire were not supported.

This is the final study in a three‐part series designed to investigate the implications of instructor attire in the contemporary college classroom. Interest in this topic was sparked by collegial conversations regarding advice for new teaching assistants: What can they do to enhance credibility, approachability, and teacher evaluations? Does what they wear make a difference?     

Commonsense reasoning about the physical world

This paper reports on a programme of research carried out over a period of twenty years by Joan Bliss, Jon Ogborn and others, and aimed at understanding how pupils and students reason about the everyday physical world. Our starting point was the science alternative conceptions literature, particularly force and motion, where the results puzzled and motivated us to make sense of the diversity of the findings. In a second step a Commonsense Theory of Motion was developed, which served as a framework for four other studies in the area of force and motion. These revealed that children were indeed using their everyday knowledge to explain these physical notions. The next step was to ask whether children also reasoned in a commonsense way about the physical world more generally, which led to the development of both a new theoretical framework and a further study to investigate these ideas. The findings showed that the physical reasoning schemes shown to exist were: movement, action/force/effort, container, carrier, support, fall, barrier, resistance, space, flow, break/not break, rigidity, stretch/squash and balance. The last section describes some ideas for future research in this area.     

Historical mathematics in the French eighteenth century

At least since the seventeenth century, the strange combination of epistemological certainty and ontological power that characterizes mathematics has made it a major focus of philosophical, social, and cultural negotiation. In the eighteenth century, all of these factors were at play as mathematical thinkers struggled to assimilate and extend the analysis they had inherited from the seventeenth century. A combination of educational convictions and historical assumptions supported a humanistic mathematics essentially defined by its flexibility and breadth. This mathematics was an expression of l'esprit humain, which was unfolding in a progressive historical narrative. The French Revolution dramatically altered the historical and educational landscapes that had supported this eighteenth-century approach, and within thirty years Augustin Louis Cauchy had radically reconceptualized and restructured mathematics to be rigorous rather than narrative.