The Process of Fostering Consultee Development During Instructional Consultation

This investigation examines how the process of instructional consultation (IC) supports consultees' problem-solving and fosters change in how the consultees understand pertinent work problems. The setting was a mid-Atlantic elementary school's Instructional Consultation Team, and the participants were 13 case manager consultants and 5 teacher consultees. A micro-ethnographic research approach was used and 4 primary sources of data collected: interviews, direct observations, consultation documents, and IC training documents. Analysis of the data uncovered 4 general themes related to the participants' problem-solving and evolving understanding of the work issues. In the discussion, the question of how IC is a constructive process that promotes consultees' development is considered.     

Getting Inside Knowledge: the application of Entwistle's model of surface/deep processing in producing open learning materials

The work carried out in this study is the result of an Open Learning in Business Education (OLBE) project from 1990‐1995, in which business education students training as teachers and lecturers were required to produce open learning materials on intercultural communications for use in the classroom. Distinctive stages, designed to maximise the effectiveness of this challenging learning task, were refined over the course of the project period. An analysis of student responses at the different stages enabled the authors to distinguish features of ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ learning (Entwistle), a construct widely recognised in the field of learning psychology and particularly well suited to the objective of evaluating and enhancing the quality of learning in the project. A particular sequence of learning modes which included a considerable degree of learner autonomy, combined with regular group discussions and feedback, were considered to have produced some impressive learning outcomes. However, subject matter involving culture is inherently difficult to grasp as it can only be understood in relative, rather than objective, terms. Thus, an established model of the dimensions of culture, recognised in the social sciences (Hofstede), was recently used to analyse further, from collated responses, the depth of student understanding of the concept of cultural variation on each of five dimensions. An overview of the general transition from surface to deep learning which was evident for most students during the progress of the project stages is provided in this paper. The authors believe that the progressive and varied format of the project with the strongly motivational open learning production task, encouraging students themselves to view knowledge and concepts from a learner's perspective, has a wide range of potential applications.     

Whitehead's Contribution to Ecological Thought: Some Unrealized Possibilities

The organizers of this conference have given me a difficult task: that of finding heretofore unfound implications of Whitehead's philosophy for environmental thought. The task is not difficult because implications of Whitehead's philosophy for environmental thought are hard to find. They are easy to find. The problem is that so many people have found them that finding something new to say is not easy.In what follows, however, some new implications are actually ferreted out. They fall under three headings: a) the interrelations between three ways of thinking about the environment: bioregionalism, land ethics, and the philosophy of organism; b) the implications of Whitehead's philosophy of organism for environmental aesthetics; and c) the implications of Whitehead's philosophy of organism for human communities (sustainable communities) viewed as interfused with living nature.     

Is having more prerequisite knowledge better for learning from productive failure?

A critical assumption made in Kapur’s (Instr Sci 40:651–672, 2012) productive failure design is that students have the necessary prerequisite knowledge resources to generate and explore solutions to problems before learning the targeted concept. Through two quasi-experimental studies, we interrogated this assumption in the context of learning a multilevel biological concept of monohybrid inheritance. In the first study, students were either provided or not provided with prerequisite micro-level knowledge prior to the generation phase. Findings suggested that students do not necessarily have adequate prior knowledge resources, especially those at the micro-level, to generate representations and solution methods for a multilevel concept such as monohybrid inheritance. The second study examined how this prerequisite knowledge provision influenced how much students learned from the subsequent instruction. Although the prerequisite knowledge provision helped students generate and explore the biological phenomenon at the micro- and macro-levels, the provision seemingly did not confer further learning advantage to these students. Instead, they had learning gains similar to those without the provision, and further reported lower lesson engagement and greater mental effort during the subsequent instruction.     

Socioeconomic Status– and Gender‐Based Differences in Students’ Perceptions of E‐Learning Systems

Many universities are pursuing increases in on‐line course offerings as a means of offsetting the rising costs of providing high‐quality educational opportunities and of better serving their student populations. However, enrollments in online courses are not always sufficient to cover their costs. One possible way of improving enrollments is through marketing campaigns targeted to specific demographic groups. In this study, we take a first look into how students’ perceptions of e‐learning systems, prior to their enrollment in an online course, vary across socioeconomic status and gender. Findings suggest that prior to taking an online course, working‐class students perceive e‐learning systems more positively than their middle‐class peers but that little difference exists between genders. Armed with this knowledge, universities may improve online course enrollments by marketing online courses specifically to working‐class students or through campaigns aimed at improving middle‐class students’ perceptions of e‐learning systems.     

Education and the Contested Meanings of ‘Global Citizenship’

This article examines the oftentaken-for-granted educational policy and curricular discourses of globalization and global citizenship within their larger cultural, political, and economically uneven histories and unequal consequences. Drawing upon evidence from recent scholarship on the implications for classroom pedagogy embodied inefforts to internationalize curricula in the North American university contexts, as well as specific related efforts in one Canadian context, the University of British Columbia,this article unpacks the contested meanings of global citizenship from above and below.The author analyzes three dominant curricular discourses of global citizenship. Far from weakening the Canadian state and building instances of transnational democratic educational communities, these dominant discourses may actually reinforce notions of Canadian gendered and racialized nation-building and nationalism. The article raises questions about what an alternative curricular and educational policy discourse from below premised upon efforts to decolonize curricula might look like. By way of provisional conclusion, the author discusses some promising examples of such an alternative,showing how they depend on seeing the relations between the local and global neither as fixed abstractions nor as a slogan system to be applied in absolutist racial, geographical,national, or culturally essentialist terms.