Democracy,caring and competence: values perspectives in ECEC curricula in the Nordic countries

The aim of the study is to explore how Nordic Early Childhood Education and Care policies frame values education in preschools with a special focus on the values of democracy, caring and competence. The study is part of a larger Nordic project, Values education in Nordic preschools: Basis of education for tomorrow, the aim of which is to explore values education from various perspectives, policy levels, institutional levels and personal levels. The study applies Habermas’s theoretical ideas of communicative actions, lifeworld, and the system. Here the focus is on the system level, namely, values in national curriculum guidelines that serve as the basis of pedagogical practices in preschools in the Nordic countries. Thematic research analysis described by Braun and Clarke inspired the qualitative analysis of the documents. In addition, a quantitative language-based approach was applied to the study. Keywords related with democratic, caring and competence values were selected. The findings reveal different dimensions and meanings of the three value fields, such as democracy as being and/or becoming; care as fulfilment of basic needs and an ethical relationship; and competence values as learning for sociality and academic skills.     

LeaD-In: a cultural change model for peer review of teaching in higher education

Peer review of teaching is recognized increasingly as one strategy for academic development even though historically peer review of teaching is often unsupported by policy, action and culture in many Australian universities. Higher education leaders report that academics generally do not engage with peer review of teaching in a systematic or constructive manner, and this paper advances and analyses a conceptual model to highlight conditions and strategies necessary for the implementation of sustainable peer review in higher education institutions. The model highlights leadership, development and implementation, which are critical to the success and formation of a culture of peer review of teaching. The work arises from collaborative research funded by the Office for Learning and Teaching to foster and advance a culture of peer review of teaching across several universities in Australia.     

The applicability of social network analysis to the study of networked learning

In this study, the aim was to examine how small-group collaboration is shaped by individuals interacting in a virtual multiplayer game. The data were collected from a design experiment in which six randomly divided groups of four university students played a voice-enhanced game lasting about 1 h. The ‘eScape’ game was a social action adventure developed as a part of the study. In the analysis of the video data, students' discourse functions during the game were analysed with content analytic methods for studying the nature of their interaction. An effort was made to analyse the data on both group and individual levels, and therefore the participants' prior social ties and experience in gaming were studied as well. The results showed that the students' main discourse functions in their conversation were Question, Content Statement, Instruction or Order and Response. It was found that individual students, especially those with prior knowledge of gaming or prior social ties, can have a major impact on the social interaction and the outcome of collaboration. It can be concluded that the eScape game allowed the students to engage in true and constructive collaborative activity, and in the future multiplayer games could be used, for example, to promote group cohesion and development, when employed in a pedagogically meaningful manner.     

Revisiting Vico's Pedagogy of Invention: The Intellectual Entrepreneurship Pre-Graduate School Internship

Debates regarding higher education's relevance and responsiveness to societal exigencies have in the past three decades resulted in the development of programs with leitmotifs such as “service learning,” “problem-based learning,” and “civic engagement” (e.g., “Scholarship on Teaching and Learning,” McNair Scholars, etc.). A recurring theme in these enterprises has been the emphasis on honing students’ capacity for criticism. And while this faculty is valuable, it may be ultimately insufficient for students’ active and productive problem-solving and concrete engagement. Heuristically employing Giambattista Vico's rhetorical pedagogy, this essay investigates a programmatic effort to respond to this overly critical orientation. I explicate a formal parallel between the criticism launched, on one hand, by the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Pre-Graduate School Internship at the University of Texas at Austin against public research universities, specifically the elimination or reduction of structural and instructional ambiguity and prioritizing of criticism, and, on the other hand, by Vico against Cartesian skepticism, specifically the critical teaching methods generated therein. I thus articulate a model of invention as taught through practice, and advocate a pedagogy based on this revitalized invention, demonstrating its utility in students’ realities.     

Play and Literacy: A Collaborative Action Research Project in Preschool

The article describes a collaborative action research in a preschool in Reykjavik. The participants were two preschool teachers who collaborated with researchers at the University of Iceland. The project was set up as a professional development course for the teachers. Emphasis was placed on continuity in children's education, integration of play and learning, and the connection between play and emerging literacy. Data were gathered using video recordings, photos, interviews, observations, notes from meetings, documents, and diaries. The findings indicate that participation in this action research empowered the preschool teachers and influenced their practices and ideas. They became more aware of the value of play in children's learning. They did not, however, change their former practices in which they worked on literacy during specific, well-defined periods: their beliefs and practices in this regard seemed to be constrained by traditions in which play and learning are separate entities.     

Sign language and the brain: a review

How are signed languages processed by the brain? This review briefly outlines some basic principles of brain structure and function and the methodological principles and techniques that have been used to investigate this question. We then summarize a number of different studies exploring brain activity associated with sign language processing especially as compared to speech processing. We focus on lateralization: is signed language lateralized to the left hemisphere (LH) of native signers, just as spoken language is lateralized to the LH of native speakers, or could sign processing involve the right hemisphere to a greater extent than speech processing? Experiments that have addressed this question are described, and some problems in obtaining a clear answer are outlined.