Mock Interdisciplinary Staffing: Educating for Interprofessional Collaboration

Training for interprofessional collaboration is important because professionals are increasingly required to work together in a coordinated and collaborative manner to meet the complex needs of clients. However, few published reports exist on interprofessional training for community counselors and marriage and family therapists. The authors discuss the use of a mock interdisciplinary staffing with students who are training to be counselors and marriage and family therapists. This method of instruction holds promise as an effective means of introducing students to a range of issues, including the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for interprofessional practice.     

The Technical University of Budapest/ University of Karlsruhe exchange programme

“The Technical University of Budapest and the University of Karlsruhe, guided by a common desire to promote mutual academic and cultural relations and convinced that cooperation in teaching and research will be mutually beneficial, have agreed to the following:

that both universities declare their desire to institute and promote academic and cultural cooperation; that the areas and structure and the means for cooperation shall be decided by mutual consent.”     

Developmental patterns of school students' motivational‐ and cognitive‐metacognitive competencies

This study examined the metacognitive developmental patterns of Hong Kong school students. Students rated their own metacognitive competencies by responding to an inventory of six motivational‐ and cognitive‐metacognitive subscales. Results showed that students' metacognitive competencies decreased with age—from primary 4 (age 9) to secondary 5 (age 17)—with a sharp decline noticeable at the primary/secondary school transition. Age had a more powerful effect than gender on students' perception of their metacognitive competencies. This decreasing pattern of Hong Kong students' metacognitive competencies is contrary to the developmental trends found in Western countries. However, the comparatively high academic performance of Hong Kong students also suggests some different recommendations about student learning.     

An Immanent Critique of Critical Pedagogy

In this essay, Quentin Wheeler‐Bell aims to reframe recent attempts to rethink the core principles of critical pedagogy. He argues that these attempts have been unsuccessful because they reproduce a deeper problem — specifically, an identity crisis — within critical pedagogy. The source of this problem, he contends, is that those working in this tradition have, over time, become more distant from and forgetful of its roots in critical theory; as a result, critical pedagogy is now in a state of dilution and fragmentation in which critical pedagogues are unable to bring the plurality of critical education approaches together theoretically around a set of shared principles. In order to address this problem and begin to reframe the core principles of critical pedagogy, Wheeler‐Bell first briefly sketches the debates around Max Horkheimer's classic essay “Critical Theory and Traditional Theory,” focusing on why critical theory grew into an interdisciplinary tradition situated between philosophy and social science. Then he explains why the recent attempts to rethink critical pedagogy rely upon a problematic, albeit dominant, narrative of the critical education tradition — a narrative that only tacitly recognizes a connection between critical education and critical theory. This dominant narrative contributes to the identity crisis within critical education because it supports a collective memory loss regarding the importance of both philosophy and social science to critical theory. Finally, Wheeler‐Bell attempts to develop a thin definition of critical education: one that connects critical education back to its roots in critical theory, while respecting the plurality of critical education approaches.