Imagining the Antiracist State: Representations of racism in Canadian history textbooks

This paper examines how knowledge about racism has been represented in high school Canadian history textbooks authorized by the Province of Ontario during the 1960s and after the year 2000. I argue that even though historical racisms have increasingly made their way into Canadian history textbooks as valid and important topics of study, the idea of racism continues to be understood largely within a prejudice/discrimination framework that reduces racism to irrational and individualized problems of thought, behaviour, and assumption. Moreover, through multiple techniques of containment, racism is imagined to exist within temporal and spatial locations, events, or incidents that are represented as either foreign to Canada or aberrations within Canada. The combined effect is to depict the space of Canada as one largely antithetical to racism.     

Counterintuitive effects of online feedback in middle school math: results from a randomized controlled trial in ASSISTments

This study compared the effects of three different feedback formats provided to sixth grade mathematics students within a web-based online learning platform, ASSISTments. A sample of 196 students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) text-based feedback; (2) image-based feedback; and (3) correctness only feedback. Regardless of condition, students solved a set of problems pertaining to the division of fractions by fractions. This mathematics content was representative of challenging sixth grade mathematics Common Core State Standard (6.NS.A.1). Students randomly assigned to receive text-based feedback (Condition A) or image-based feedback (Condition B) outperformed those randomly assigned to the correctness only group (Condition C). However, these differences were not statistically significant (F(2,108) = 1.394, p = .25). Results of this study also demonstrated a completion-bias. Students randomly assigned to Condition B were less likely to complete the problem set than those assigned to Conditions A and C. To conclude, we discuss the counterintuitive findings observed in this study and implications related to developing and implementing feedback in online learning environments for middle school mathematics.     

How policy impacts on practice and how practice does not impact on policy

The TLRP project reported on in this article attempts to understand how the Learning and Skills sector functions. It traces how education and training policy percolates down through many levels in the English system and how these levels interact, or fail to interact. The authors first focus upon how policy impacts upon the interests of three groups of learners: unemployed people in adult and community learning centres, adult employees in work‐based learning and younger learners on Level 1 and Level 2 courses in further education. They focus next upon how professionals in these three settings struggle to cope with two sets of pressures upon them: those exerted by government and a broader set of professional, institutional and local factors. They describe in particular how managers and tutors mediate national policy and translate it (and sometimes mistranslate it) into local plans and practices. Finally, the authors criticise the new government model of public service reform for failing to harness the knowledge, good will and energy of staff working in the sector, and for ignoring what constitutes the main finding of the research: the central importance of the relationship between tutor and students.     

School‐based Senior‐school Curriculum Studies for Preservice Teachers

Preservice teachers usually place very high value on those parts of their courses which are based in schools. We extended the school‐based component of the Graduate Diploma of Teaching (Secondary) course at Central Queensland University to include curriculum studies in Year 11 and 12 subjects. Questionnaires were administered to participants to explore their perceptions and reactions to this extension of school‐based studies. The findings suggest that school‐based development of the senior curriculum has significant advantages for school students, teachers and student teachers. However, the data also suggest that there is need for a professional‐development programme for teachers acting as mentors to preservice teachers.     

Adolescents at risk for violence

Interpersonal violence among youth is a growing problem in many communities and schools across the nation. The causes of violence are multiple and complex. This paper examines the extent and nature of interpersonal violence among youth as well as the individual and societal factors which contribute to youth violence. Adolescents are disproportionately represented as both victims and perpetrators of fatal and nonfatal assaultive violence. Homicide rates among young men in the United States are vastly greater than those of other Western industrialized nations. Persons age 12–24 years face the highest risk of nonfatal violent victimization of any segment of our society. Arrest rates for homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault peak among adolescents and young adults. Further, arrest rates for murder and other violent crimes have increased substantially among this age group since the mid-1980s. Effective prevention programs will require combinations of interventions aimed at multiple factors and delivered through many channels.     

Children''s Awareness of the Biological Implications of Kinship

Preschoolers' thinking about kinship was explored by means of a simple induction task. A target animal was described as possessing a property, and children were asked whether each of 2 other animals shares the property or not. When no information about kinship was given, children in Experiment 1 based their inductions of biological properties on physical similarity. However, when kinship relations were specified, children judged that dissimilar-looking kin share more biological properties than similar-looking but unrelated members of the same species. In Experiment 2, describing the similar animals as socially related did not change the basic pattern of inductions obtained in the first experiment. Moreover, subjects in Experiment 3 did not induce more acquired physical and psychological properties among families than among unrelated animals. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 illustrate one case where young children favor a nonperceptible relation (kinship) over a perceptible one (similarity) as a basis for judgment. The overall pattern of data suggest that young children distinguish to some extent between the biological and social domains.     

Towards a Language of Possibility: critical reflection and mentorship in initial teacher education

Abstract

This paper examines a programme which aimed at creating alternative school‐based experiences for postgraduate students following a 1‐year higher diploma of education course at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. The programme was premised on the belief that critical reflection is necessary for educational transformation, and that teacher educators increasingly will be expected to raise the quality of teaching in schools. The background to the Mentor Programme is described and the underlying rationale is discussed. Whilst the evidence from the study reflects mentor satisfaction at the quality and range of teaching skills developed by students during the programme, the investigators express disappointment at their lack of success in attaining critical reflection by their students. Students generally did not look critically, as they had been encouraged to do, at the institutional or societal context of their teaching. The discussion identifies three possible reasons for this, but concludes that any approach to teacher education which does not encourage teachers to reflect critically on their own educational views and on the nature of education as it is realised in the institutional setting of schools will be inherently flawed.     

Broadcasting

Jack Lyle's The People Look at Public Television: 1974 (Washington: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1975—$1.00, paper)

Ken Coleman's So You Want to be a Sportscaster (New York: Hawthron Books, 1973—$5.95)

Joseph Fletcher Littell (ed.) Coping with Television (Evanston, Ill.: McDougal, Littell, 1973— cost not given, paper)

Joseph Julian's This Was Radio: A Personal Memoir (New York: Viking, 1975—$8.85)

Dick Cavett and Christopher Porterfield's Cavett (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jevanovich, 1974—$8.95)     

Telecommunications and Cable

Ken Marsh's Independent Video (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974—$7.95, paper)

Richard H. Davis and Allen E. Edwards' Television: A Therapeutic Tool for the Aged (Publication and Media Projects, Andrus Gerontology Center, University Park, Los Angeles, Calif. 90007—$2.25, paper)

Irving W. Larson (ed.) EIA Electronics Multimedia Handbook (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1975—price not known, paper)

Kendall Webster Sessions' 2nd Class FCC Encyclopedia (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1975—$10.95/7.95)

Mary Louise Hollowell (ed.) Cable Handbook: 1975-1976—A Guide to Cable and New Communications Technologies (Communications Press, 1346 Connecticutt Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036—$7.35, including postage, paper)

Gilbert Gillespie's Public Access Cable Television in the United States and Canada (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1975—price not given, but likely around $12.00 or so)