Facing our Heuristic Limits: Expanding the Terminology for Types of Positive Face

This article adds to Lim and Bowers’ (1991) framework featuring two types of positive face: competence and fellowship face. We propose the addition of three types of positive face: character, social, and status face. We differentiate between each new type of face by examining: (a) protective strategies adopted, (b) types of face threats, (c) corrective strategies, and (d) pejorative labels threatening/attacking each type of face. The heuristic value for the positive face terms proposed is also explored through re-visiting a scholarly article in which positive face is analyzed. Data presented in that article are examined through the lens of the three proposed positive face terms. Finally, broader implications of theorizing are discussed, particularly with respect to politeness.     

To vocationalise or not to vocationalise? Perspectives on current trends and issues in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in Africa

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the dichotomy of vocational education versus general education. This is more so as political pronouncements in many countries across the globe have taken on knowledge and skills as the key aim of the desire to improve access to education at all levels. Nowhere is this debate more tested, fiercely debated and gained controversy as in Africa. However, given recent developments in which knowledge and skills have become more acceptable terms in economically more developed nations, in which both are seen to go hand in hand, what is happening in Africa where development is highly sought but has proven to be more elusive? This has brought back to the forefront one of the dilemmas which has pre-occupied many African countries for a long time: whether to concentrate investment in general education or in vocational education. In this paper, I reflect on current trends and issues in TVET in Africa.     

The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children

This study investigated the benefits of self‐distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four‐ and 6‐year‐old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six‐year‐olds persevered longer than 4‐year‐olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third‐person perspective on the self, or finally, a first‐person perspective. Alternative explanations, implications, and future research directions are discussed.     

Posters that foster cognition in the classroom: multimedia theory applied to educational posters

Despite a decline in popularity within US society, posters continue to hold a prominent place within middle and high school science classrooms. Teachers’ demand is satisfied by governmental and non-profit science organizations that produce and disseminate posters as tangible products resulting from their research, and instruments to communicate scientific content to teachers and students. In this paper, we examine the design of such posters for their implied, underlying assumptions about learning and their alignment to the unique setting of the classroom. Based on this analysis and research into both cognition and the design of multimedia, we propose a design framework for educational posters that activates students’ attention, catalyzes cognitive processing, provides a framework to guide student’s construction of knowledge and connects to extended learning through live or web-based exploration of phenomenon. Based on this framework, we present a prototype poster and explore implications for poster producers, teachers, and academic researchers.     

Prospective elementary school teachers’ professional noticing of children’s early numeracy

The goal of this study is to develop the professional noticing abilities of prospective elementary school teachers in the context of the Stages of Early Arithmetic Learning. In their mathematics methods course, ninety-four prospective elementary school teachers from three institutions participated in a researcher-developed five-session module that progressively nests the three interrelated components of professional noticing—attending, interpreting, and deciding. The module embeds video excerpts of diagnostic interviews of children doing mathematics (representations of practice) to prepare the prospective teachers for similar work. The module culminates with prospective teachers implementing similar diagnostic interviews (approximations of practice) to gain experience in the three component skills of professional noticing. A pre- and post-assessment was administered to measure prospective teachers’ change in the three components. A Wilcoxon signed ranks test was conducted and found the prospective elementary school teachers demonstrated significant growth in all three components. Selected prospective elementary school teacher responses on the pre- and post-assessment are provided to illustrate sample growth in the prospective teachers’ abilities to professionally notice. These results, the first in an ongoing study, indicate the potential that prospective teachers can develop professional noticing skills through this module. Continued data collection and analysis from the ongoing study by these authors and future, longer-term emphasis on professional noticing for prospective teachers should be studied.     

How student beliefs about knowledge and knowing influence their satisfaction with assessment and feedback

Students’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing frame how they interpret their educational experience and their approaches to, and perspectives on, learning, teaching and assessment. This paper draws on previous research identifying the ways of knowing of undergraduates on entry to a UK post-92 university, findings from which confirm the prevalence of absolute beliefs in which knowledge is viewed as certain, uncontested and students are largely authority-dependent. Student perspectives on assessment and feedback are explored based on thematic analysis of student responses within two main categories of beliefs, absolute/dualist versus contextual/pluralist. The paper teases out the implications of these perspectives for students’ satisfaction with their assessment and feedback experience in the context of today’s increasingly market-orientated higher education environment. Findings demonstrate that student perspectives on, and satisfaction with, assessment and feedback are strongly intertwined with their beliefs on knowledge and teaching. Students holding absolute/dualist beliefs considered ‘good’ assessment and feedback practice to entail clear and unambiguous assessment tasks, criteria and standards along with the receipt of unequivocal and corrective feedback. The paper concludes that faced with assessment tasks that move beyond established facts and demonstrable theories it may only be students who view knowledge as relative and mutable that will likely be satisfied with their assessment and feedback experience.     

Ugly

Upon its publication in 1976, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America was the most sophisticated and nuanced Marxian social and political analysis of schooling in the United States. Thirty-five years after its publication, Schooling continues to have a strong impact on thinking about education. Despite its unquestionable influence, it has received strikingly little historical attention. This historical article revisits the scholarship of Bowles and Gintis and the milieu in which Schooling was conceived. Specifically, it contextualizes the production and reception of Schooling to better understand the emergence of Marxist thought in the field of education in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. It also seeks to understand how the emergence of Marxist thought in the field was connected to the rise of an Academic Left—an intellectual shift in the academy toward Marxist social and political theory as a framework to theorize democratic socialist movement-building against capitalism and concomitant state sponsored oppression in the 1960s and 1970s. This history suggests that as we engage in historical and contemporary work on radical ideas in the field of education, we need to push ourselves continually to think about the intersection of education with other fields and disciplines. The article also pushes back against a widespread depiction of Schooling as crudely mechanistic.     

Convergence crosscurrents: Analog in the digital and digital in the analog

Abstract

In this Perspective paper we propose a rethink on how we should approach digital and analog news. Although there are literatures that continue to focus on the many and varied characteristics of digital and analog news, we should not consider these as separate, opposing entities. In fact, the intertwining between the digital and the analog of news makes it difficult, if not impossible, to define separately what they are, even if this often is the practice in scholarly debate on news and journalism in new media. What we argue in this paper is that today, in opposition to binary definitions, it would be much more revealing, and also connected to actual media practices, to try to understand how much digital there is in the analog news and, vice versa, how much analog there is in digital news. This approach recognizes three dimensions in media platforms: digital, analog, and, between them, a cross-evolved, digitalized analog present in television, radio, and online newspapers. Recognizing these three dimensions enables us to explore more clearly the implications that the hybridization of digital and analog news has on the overall media system and on the state of news itself.