The Developing Bilingual Brain: What Parents and Teachers Should Know and Do

The field of neuroscience is now providing research findings about how the bilingual brain functions that can be used to promote richer and more successful dual-language development. This article summarizes recent research, then provides practical applications for parents and teachers of emergent bilinguals. Key understandings about how the brain processes first and subsequent languages are translated into ways to enrich instruction and family-based language and literacy experiences.     

Teaching ethos from the dumpster: Dive and food waste rhetoric

Courses: Rhetorical Criticism, Composition, Environmental Communication

Objectives: This unit activity, for which students view a documentary to identify and evaluate persuasive ethos and then create their own rhetorical messages for reducing food waste, serves as a platform for teaching both the critique and practice of rhetoric, as well as familiarizing students with the complexities of the global food system and food waste.     

US teachers' and school counsellors' strategies for handling school bullying incidents

A sample of 735 US teachers and school counsellors completed an online survey asking how likely they would be to use various strategies to respond to a hypothetical bullying incident. Analyses examined their use of five strategies: Ignoring the incident, Working with the bully, Working with the victim, Enlisting other adults, and Disciplining the bully. Differences in mean scores based on these strategies were found by gender of participant, the presence or absence of school anti‐bullying policies and programmes, and previous anti‐bullying training. Teachers and school counsellors differed on four of the five scale scores. Qualitative comment data add to the findings. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

‘To go boldly’: teaching science fiction to first-year engineering students in a South African context

This paper reflects on the teaching of science fiction texts to first-year engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand as part of a Critical Thinking course that uses literature as a vehicle through which to develop competence in critical literacy and communication. This course aims to equip engineering students, as future intermediaries between science and society, with the ability to fulfil this role in both the contemporary global world and South Africa more specifically through the imaginative inhabitation of divergent subject positions afforded by literary texts. Science fiction encourages students to engage imaginatively with various societal ideas, constructs and possibilities. One of the principles of the course is that reading facilitates empathic responses, challenging readers to inhabit unfamiliar subject positions. In this way, the teaching of science fiction aims to develop self-reflective and critical learning practices, wherein engineering students grapple with the ethical ramifications of extrapolated known science in a South African context.     

Questioning power structures and competitiveness in pedagogy insights from North American Indian and Philippine pedagogies

This paper begins with case studies of innovative approaches to the education of Aboriginal Canadian Peoples and Philippine Aboriginal Peoples. These illustrate that, in such situations, where more traditional approaches have little success, the power to design, implement and evaluate educational programs can beneficially be shared between teacher and learner. Learners co-operate with each other in deciding what they need to learn. They examine their own needs and issues and assess their learning in terms of their cultural, economic and community value systems. Leadership is shared with the teacher/facilitators and word, image, number, gesture and sound are all employed to acquire knowledge and to demonstrate what that knowledge means to the group. In this particular enterprise, popular theatre has a major role to play in democratizing the provision of education and in encouraging educational development in circumstances where other approaches have been ineffectual. In the latter part of the paper, a model of education implied by the case studies is constructed and examined to provide alternatives to the traditional views of epistemology, of ethics and of pedagogy based on a notion of democracy as a daily struggle.

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Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel beginnt mit Fallstudien über innovative Ansätze zur Bildung kanadischer und philippinischer Einheimischer. Diese Studien belegen, daß dort, wo traditionellere Ansätze wenig Erfolg zeigen, die Aufgaben der Planung, Implementierung und Evaluierung von Bildungsprogrammen zu gegenseitigem Nutzen unter Lehrern und Schülern aufgeteilt werden kann. Die Lernenden arbeiten bei der Entscheidung über ihren Lernbedarf zusammen. Sie bewerten ihre eigenen Bedürfnisse und Ergebnisse, entscheiden über die für sie wichtigen Themenbereiche und schätzen ihre Lernergebnisse in Form eigener kultureller, wirtschaftlicher und gemeinschaftlicher Wertsysteme ein. Schüler, Lehrer und Organisatoren teilen sich die Entscheidung über die Unterrichtsgestaltung; Worte, Bilder, Zahlen, Gesten und Töne werden dazu genutzt, Wissen zu erwerben und die Bedeutung dieser Kenntnisse für die Gruppe aufzuzeigen. Bei diesem speziellen Unternehmen spielt das Volkstheater eine wesentliche Rolle bei der Demokratisierung des Bildungsangebots und für den Anreiz zur Weiterentwicklung der Bildung in Bereichen, in denen andere Ansätze erfolglos blieben. Im Schlußteil wird ein durch die Fallstudien angeregtes Bildungsmodell entworfen und untersucht, um aufgrund täglichen Bemühens um eine Demokratie Alternativen zu traditionellen Ansichten über Epistemologie, Ethik und Pädagogik zu bieten.

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Résumé Le présent article commence par des études de cas d'approches novatrices de l'enseignement destiné aux peuples indigènes du Canada et des Philippines. Elles montrent que dans les situations où les approches plus traditionnelles ont moins de succès, le pouvoir de conception, d'exécution et d'évaluation des programmes d'éducation peut être avantageusement partagé entre enseignant et apprenant. Les apprenants coopèrent les uns avec les autres pour définir ce qu'ils doivent apprendre. Ils examinent leurs propres besoins et problèmes et évaluent leur apprentissage en fonction de leurs systèmes de valeurs culturelles, économiques et communautaires. La direction est assurée à la fois par les apprenants l'enseignant et les facilitateurs, et le mot, l'image, le nombre, le geste et le son sont tous mis à contribution pour acquérir les connaissances et pour expliquer ce qu'elles signifient pour le groupe en question. Dans cette entreprise particulière, le théâtre populaire a un rôle majeur à jouer dans la démocratisation de l'offre d'éducation et dans la promotion du développement de l'éducation là où d'autres approches n'ont pas réussi. Dans la dernière partie de l'article, on construit et on examine un modèle d'éducation à partir des études de cas pour offrir des solutions de rechange aux vues traditionnelles de l'épistémologie, de l'éthique et de la pédagogie fondées sur une notion de la démocratie vue en tant que lutte quotidienne.

     

Sports and the deaf child

The increasingly sedentary American lifestyle has resulted in a growing number of overweight and out-of-shape school-age children. Deaf children are not exempt from this trend, yet there is little evidence that public school programs for these children are doing anything to counter it. Much can be done to assist deaf students, not only in becoming more active movers but in gaining knowledge of opportunities and benefits associated with Deaf sport. The authors provide an argument for schools that expose deaf children to the role of sports in the Deaf community and for designing programs that will enable these children to become active participants in Deaf sport activities as athletes and organizers, or, later in life, when they no longer have the inclination or ability to compete, as spectators, with all the socialization benefits that form of involvement provides.     

Speech Perception and Production by Sequential Bilingual Children: A Longitudinal Study of Voice Onset Time Acquisition

The majority of bilingual speech research has focused on simultaneous bilinguals. Yet, in immigrant communities, children are often initially exposed to their family language (L1), before becoming gradually immersed in the host country's language (L2). This is typically referred to as sequential bilingualism. Using a longitudinal design, this study explored the perception and production of the English voicing contrast in 55 children (40 Sylheti‐English sequential bilinguals and 15 English monolinguals). Children were tested twice: when they were in nursery (52‐month‐olds) and 1 year later. Sequential bilinguals' perception and production of English plosives were initially driven by their experience with their L1, but after starting school, changed to match that of their monolingual peers.     

The development of trust in residential environmental education programs

Trust, a relational phenomenon that is an important building block of interpersonal relationships and within society, can also be an intermediary outcome of field-based environmental education programs. Trust creates a foundation for collaboration and decision-making, which are core to many ultimate outcomes of environmental education. Yet, understanding how trust develops among environmental education program participants is still nascent, partly because few methods exist for measuring trust in informal contexts, such as those that are common for many environmental education programs. Our study used social network analysis and qualitative data from focus groups, questionnaires, and participant observation to investigate the development of trust among residential environmental education program participants in two school groups, some of whom had initial familiarity with each other. Network data indicated differential increases in peer-to-peer trust among group members when measured at the individual level. Qualitative data from the focus groups highlighted salient dimensions of trust that were particularly relevant in this setting, including friendship, emotional and physical safety, and self-disclosure; reciprocal trust among peers and educators; and aspects of this immersive setting that fostered trust among the participants.     

Using Math Journals to Enhance Second Graders’ Communication of Mathematical Thinking

As an action research project, using mixed methodology, this study investigated how the use of math journals affected second grade students’ communication of mathematical thinking. For this study, math journal instruction was provided. The data gathering included pre- and post- math assessment, students’ math journals, interviews with the students, and teacher’s reflective journal. Findings of the study indicated that the use of math journals positively influenced the students’ communication of mathematical thinking and the use of math vocabulary. Additionally, math journals served as a communication tool between the students and teacher and an assessment tool for the teacher. The implications of this study regarding students’ writing ability and time constraints issues were also discussed.