“Mind the gap”: cultural revitalisation and educational change

The success or failure of a school reform can be measured by whether the reform has become an accepted, effective, and sustainable part of the school's culture. For example, as the National Middle School Association (2003 National Middle School Association. 2003. Research and resources in support of “This we Believe”, Westerville, OH: Author.  [Google Scholar]) argued, “new programs must become integral to the school culture” (p. 11) before a school can call itself a “middle” school. But how can a school monitor its progress, and at what point can a school claim that a new reform or new programme has become part of its culture? Wallace's revitalisation theory (1956), Hall and Hord's Processural Structure (1986) and Hall, Wallace, and Dossett's Concerns-Based Adoption Model (1973) are used to describe the cultural revitalisation taking place with the introduction of middle schooling into Australia and specifically within 3 Queensland middle schools. Results have highlighted gaps and tension points that need to be resolved before any widespread cultural transformation can be claimed.     

An Example of Large‐group Drama and Cross‐year Peer Assessment for Teaching Science in Higher Education

Undergraduate students pursuing a three‐year marine biology degree programme (n = 86) experienced a large‐group drama aimed at allowing them to explore how scientific research is funded and the associated links between science and society. In the drama, Year 1 students played the “general public” who decided which environmental research areas should be prioritised for funding, Year 2 students were the “scientists” who had to prepare research proposals which they hoped to get funded, and Year 3 students were the “research panel” who decided which proposals to fund with input from the priorities set by the “general public”. The drama, therefore, included an element of cross‐year peer assessment where Year 3 students evaluated the research proposals prepared by the Year 2 students. Questionnaires were distributed at the end of the activity to gather: (1) student perceptions on the cross‐year nature of the exercise, (2) the use of peer assessment, and (3) their overall views on the drama. The students valued the opportunity to interact with their peers from other years of the degree programme and most were comfortable with the use of cross‐year peer assessment. The majority of students felt that they had increased their knowledge of how research proposals are funded and the perceived benefits of the large‐group drama included increased critical thinking ability, confidence in presenting work to others, and enhanced communication skills. Only one student did not strongly advocate the use of this large‐group drama in subsequent years.     

Empowerment in Science Curriculum Development: A microdevelopmental approach

This study characterizes how learning and teaching differs as the responsibility for choosing curriculum goals and the strategies to reach those goals shifts between teacher and the students. Three different pedagogical approaches were used with 125 seventh‐grade and eighth‐grade students. All three curricula focus on electromagnetism, and were taught by two teachers in different schools over a two‐week period. When students had control over the strategies employed to reach goals, their engagement stayed high. All three curricula advanced student understanding to some degree; however, large and significant gains were seen only for the pedagogy in which teachers set the specific learning goals and students had control over how to achieve them. Microdevelopment, a principle by which short‐term learning recapitulates the stages seen in long‐term developmental growth, is found to be a useful framework for curriculum development and for analyzing changes in student understanding. In general, initial “tinkering” activities are best followed by attempts at representing phenomena, only then to be followed by abstract conceptualization. On balance, we find that students benefit most from freedom to control the procedures that they generate in response to well‐structured goals presented by the teacher.     

Len Barton,inclusion and critical disability studies: theorising disabled childhoods

Len Barton has pioneered the sociological study of education in the areas of disability studies and inclusive education. This paper addresses an argument developed by Len Barton that social exclusion, of which disablism is one element, (1) has many compounding forms of differing exclusions, (2) is not a natural but a socially constructed process, (3) has no single factor that can remove it and (4) is in constant need of conceptual analysis. Our paper aims to address each of these four challenging themes in relation to the contemporary societal position of disabled children, their families and key professionals that work around them, with a specific focus on schools. First, we explore the ways in which disabled childhoods are imbricated with other forms of exclusion. Second, we consider the ways in which ‘disability’, ‘impairment’ and ‘child’ are consistently being reproduced in particular and often contradictory ways by disability discourses. Third, we consider the need to work with numerous forms of educational intervention that address the exclusion of disabled children. Fourth, we conclude with an appeal to develop disability studies in ways that build on the shoulders of (social model) greats – such as Len Barton – whilst being receptive to other transformative perspectives from queer, feminist and postcolonial studies.     

Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis

INVENTION AS A SOCIAL ACT. By Karen Burke LeFevre. Foreword by Frank J. D'Angelo. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987; pp. xiv + 173. paper $8.50.

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON POETRY. By Gerald F. Else. Edited with Introduction and Notes by Peter Burian. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986; pp. xi‐221. $27.00.

HUMANIST POETICS: THOUGHT, RHETORIC, AND FICTION IN SIXTEENTH‐CENTURY ENGLAND. By Arthur F. Kinney. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986; pp. xiv + 529. $35.00.

ORATORS &; PHILOSOPHERS: A HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF LIBERAL EDUCATION. By Bruce A. Kimball. Foreword by Joseph L. Featherstone. New York: Columbia University, Teachers College Press, 1986; pp. xix + 293. $19.95.

THE AMERICAN NEWNESS: CULTURE AND POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EMERSON. By Irving Howe. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1986; pp. 1 + 99. $12.50.

DE LA METAPHYSIQUE A LA RHETORIQUE. Edited by Michel Meyer. Brussels: University of Brussels Press, 1986; pp. 1 + 208. Paper 1100 FB ($30).

INTRODUCTION TO RHETORICAL THEORY. By Gerard A. Hauser. New York: Harper &; Row, 1986; pp. xi + 209. paper $10.95.

ICONOLOGY: IMAGE, TEXT, IDEOLOGY. By W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; pp. x + 226. $20.00.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE UNITED STATES. By Thomas L. Tedford. Foreword by Franklyn S. Haiman. New York: Random House, 1985; pp. 416. paper $16.00. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985; xvii + 493. $29.95.

MURDER, COURTS, AND THE PRESS: ISSUES IN FREE PRESS/FAIR TRIAL. By Peter E. Kane. Foreword by Franklyn S. Haiman. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. pp. xiv + 96. $10.95; paper $6.95.

IMPACT: HOW THE PRESS AFFECTS FEDERAL POLICYMAKING. By Martin Linsky. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986; pp. xvii + 260. $19.95.

HOW THE PRESS AFFECTS FEDERAL POLICYMAKING: SIX CASE STUDIES. By Martin Linsky, Jonathan Moore, Wendy O'Donnell, and David Whitman. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986; pp. ix + 373. $25.00.

THE MEDIA ELITE. By S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter. Bethesda: Adler and Adler, 1986; pp. ix + 352. $19.95.

COMMUNICATIONS DEREGULATION: THE UNLEASHING OF AMERICA'S COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY. By Jeremy Tunstall. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986; pp. xi + 324. $24.95.

PROPAGANDA AND PERSUASION. By Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986; pp. 1 + 244. $25.00; paper $12.95.

MEANING AND MODERNITY: SOCIAL THEORY IN THE PRAGMATIC ATTITUDE. By Eugene Rochberg‐Halton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; pp. xiv + 299. $40.00; paper $14.95.     

Building Bridges for Those Under Bridges: A Lesson in Civility

Four questions are presented: What are the historical roots of motor development; How can motor development be characterized; How should motor development be conceptualized; and How should motor development be organized? A brief history presents the psychological roots of motor development and emphasizes the individual researchers who have created the area of motor development since the 1960s. Motor development is characterized as a composite of the researchers, knowledge, application of knowledge, systems for delivering knowledge, and graduate programs in motor development. Motor development should be a perspective rather than a structure or subdiscipline. All courses in human movement should be taught from a developmental perspective, research should be done within the appropriate subdiscipline, and some of that research should be developmental. Motor development will be best served if researchers align with scientists within the subdisciplines and share developmental information in cross-disciplinary groups.     

REALITIES,VISIONS, AND PROMISES OF A MULTICULTURAL FUTURE

Religious education has changed considerably over the 100 years of the Religious Education Association (REA); urgency has increased for human communities to honor diversity. The focus of this article is realities, visions, and promises of cultural diversity. The article includes an overview of REA's recent history, exemplifying its efforts and limitations in diversity. It then turns to five commentaries on a multicultural future, drawing on autobiographical analysis, religious and educational literature, and empirical study. Authors explicate and argue for: engaging in post-colonial analysis, de-centering assumptions, searching for a story to claim, taking time, and entering deep waters.     

Virtual history: a socially networked pedagogy of enlightenment

Background:?Twenty-first-century undergraduates often find eighteenth-century culture difficult to access and, influenced by popular assumptions about the period in current media theory, characterise the century as individualist, underestimating the cultural significance of social networking in literary and political history.

Purpose:?This study set out to teach the history of social networking as culturally significant in the production of literary texts during the eighteenth century as well as to demonstrate the intellectual and compositional potential of today's social networking technologies. A virtual reconstruction of eighteenth-century London in Second Life and a semester project requiring the student recreation of 3D social spaces like coffee houses and gardens tested the uses of social networking tools to teach research methods and build disciplinary knowledge.

Sources of evidence:?Evidence of student learning outcomes is provided by three undergraduate courses in eighteenth-century culture, with 68 students total, that participated in Second Life re-enactment assignments on Island 18 during the autumn of 2008 and spring of 2009. The results of the student projects as well as student-completed evaluations and self-reflective essays about their experiences using virtual reality to learn history are consulted. Theoretical evidence by scholars of new media, eighteenth-century history and education provides a background for the study's impetus and goals.

Main argument:?Virtual reality provides an opportunity for educators of eighteenth-century culture to teach students, through the reflective and critical use of the social networking tools Second Life makes available, the significance of social networking in the history of ideas of that period. We dismantle the generalisations of scholars working outside of the period who characterise the eighteenth century as a solely individualist era, during which singular genius defined the enlightenment and propose a more culturally viable model of social collaboration, supported by communication technologies not so different from twenty-first-century instant messaging, blogging, twittering and emailing.

Conclusions:?Contrary to the recent findings of humanities educators who claim that digital social networking tools are distracting undergraduates from more valuable academic writing, we find that a task-oriented semester project requiring the construction of 3D historical social spaces teaches investigative research skills, deterritorialises disciplinary knowledge and promotes revision as an ongoing process.     

Sympathy and Cosmopolitanism: Affective Limits in Cosmopolitan Reading

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, in order to contend that contemporary models of cosmopolitan reading rely on problematically normative definitions of the ‘human’. J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood, I propose, suggests an alternative model of cosmopolitan reading that neither equates sympathy with humanity, nor precludes those who ‘feel apart’ from participation in cosmopolitan community.     

Antibody-independent isolation of circulating tumor cells by continuous-flow dielectrophoresis

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are prognostic markers for the recurrence of cancer and may carry molecular information relevant to cancer diagnosis. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) has been proposed as a molecular marker-independent approach for isolating CTCs from blood and has been shown to be broadly applicable to different types of cancers. However, existing batch-mode microfluidic DEP methods have been unable to process 10 ml clinical blood specimens rapidly enough. To achieve the required processing rates of 10⁶ nucleated cells/min, we describe a continuous flow microfluidic processing chamber into which the peripheral blood mononuclear cell fraction of a clinical specimen is slowly injected, deionized by diffusion, and then subjected to a balance of DEP, sedimentation and hydrodynamic lift forces. These forces cause tumor cells to be transported close to the floor of the chamber, while blood cells are carried about three cell diameters above them. The tumor cells are isolated by skimming them from the bottom of the chamber while the blood cells flow to waste. The principles, design, and modeling of the continuous-flow system are presented. To illustrate operation of the technology, we demonstrate the isolation of circulating colon tumor cells from clinical specimens and verify the tumor origin of these cells by molecular analysis.