Beyond Reflection: Perception,virtue, and teacher knowledge

In this article, I aim to vindicate the belief that many teachers have that their intuitions, insights, or perceptions are legitimate—and indispensible—guides for their teaching. Perceptions can constitute knowledge. This runs counter to some number of views that emphasize ‘reflective practice’ and teachers as ‘reflective practitioners.’ I do not deny that reflection can be important, but it is a derivative task, dependent on teachers being the ‘right sort of subject,’ having the ‘right orientation’ to their work, at the service of achieving that orientation. That orientation is a matter of virtue, where virtue is manifested in the capacity to read situations correctly for what is required to serve persons’ welfare, for them to do well. This entails that good teaching is more experienced-based than research-based. Ultimately, it is life experience that provides for teachers’ ability to see well.     

Parties as reflectors of the feminine sensibility: Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway counters James's the wings of the dove

This article examines the ways in which parties conceived by women writers elucidate the feminine sensibility and feminine concerns with communication. Communication occurs through the preparation of a context—the making of the party from the planning stage, through the purchasing and preparation of food, to its opening in an artfully ordered drawing‐room. It occurs through attention to relationships between partygoers spatially; through attention to people over objects; through attention to the individual hostesses’ attempts to shape the meaning of events internally, intrapersonally; and through an exchange of meaning between individuals through a system of symbols constellated around death. A comparison of Clarissa Dalloway's party in Virginia Woolf's novel with Milly Theale's in Henry James's The Wings of the Dove aptly conveys the differences between male/female reflections of the party and illuminates how death figures prominently in feminine imaginings of social gatherings. Death is the metaphor to communicate psychic fears occasioned in women by parties. Finally, the article suggests how women writers have altered the tradition of the party in literature, permitting it to reflect their felt and lived experience.     

Feedback Analysis of the Movement Mechanisms of Handwriting

To extend the feedback analysis of legibility in handwriting, a coordinate force transducer has been devised that makes possible the separate sensing of the right-left and near-far directions of writing motions and the converting of these movements to their electrical analogs. This method of transducing handwriting motions made possible systematic measurement of the effects of feedback displacement and delay of the visual feedback of writing movements and of analyzing the types of variation in legibility related to variable feedback factors. Results showed that differential directional defects and general disturbances in legibility and timing of writing movements occurred in relation to both visual feedback displacement and delay of writing motions. The findings give added support to the view that writing is not a form of discrete stimulus-response behavior or stimulus tracking, but consists of self-generated forms of response comparable to steering, in which accuracy, legibility, and learning are directly determined by feedback time factors and directional specificity of particular right-left and near-far coordinates of movement that dynamically control and project visual input in the writing act.     

Preliminary analysis to build an integrative conceptual network for biological education at university level

Existing university education in the natural sciences comes up against many difficulties. Therefore, it is of importance to look for the reasons for such difficulties as felt by teachers and students, in order to develop a basis for a new approach to education. As an important step in this direction, a working group of teachers and didactics specialists at the University Pierre et Marie Curie has attempted to analyse the content of biological knowledge in order to develop an integrative conceptual network for biological education at university level. The results of this analysis are outlined here.