Contextualising Learning through the Participatory Construction of an Environmental Education Programme

Strengthening links between school and community is critical for improving people’s participation in environmental issues. However, Mexican education programmes are generally unrelated to rural students’ life experience and are planned without considering either teachers’ or students’ opinions. This article describes the participatory construction of a preparatory school environmental education (EE) programme in Ixtlan de Juarez, a Mexican indigenous community internationally recognised for sustainable forest management. The qualitative research methods used are based on the action research methodology. Results from interviews conducted with the preparatory school’s headmaster, the coordinator, and nine teachers provided the needed documentation of the school site for contextualising learning activities. Feedback during focus groups with six students, three teachers, five local communal authorities, and two researchers highlighted that all participants perceived the need for creating an educational programme focused on local forest management. The contents and activities of the programme were designed by the focus group’s participants. The programme has been continuously taught by teachers and forest workers since 2005 and was officially integrated with the preparatory school science curriculum in 2006. This participative educational experience has thus transformed the mandatory school curriculum in Ixtlan.     

Religious Beliefs: Their dynamics in two groups of life scientists

The assumption that scientific knowledge would bring an end to religious belief has challenged many scholars, particularly since such a belief persists even among those devoted to scientific activities. In this paper the occurrence and nature of religious belief in groups of life scientists working in the UK and Brazil is discussed in the context of their degree of training. Data obtained through one‐to‐one interviews went beyond mere yes/no answers to questions on belonging to a religion or believing in God. Categories were created to assess how open these scientists were with regard to the possibility of the supernatural. The results suggest that scientific training affected their religious belief and reduced the number of believers. Nevertheless there were scientists in both groups whose beliefs persisted.     

Matching Society Values: Students’ views of biotechnology

The rapid growth of biotechnology knowledge during the past decades has made it necessary to rethink the contents of the school curriculum and has provoked a consideration of the ethical and social issues related to the use of biotechnological applications. With the financial assistance of the European Union, the European Initiative for Biotechnology Education was set up to develop units for use in the member the countries, organize the translations of these between the many languages involved, organize in‐service courses for teachers, implement the materials in schools, as well as carrying out related research.

This paper gives some findings of Spanish researchers when identifying and exploring the different cultural contexts in which biotechnology teaching and learning is embedded, being mainly concerned with the emerging attitudes and values of the students regarding such issues. After gathering information through case studies during the implementation phase, a questionnaire was developed in an interactive way by teachers and researchers in various stages, based on what students said.

The results identify four main values: the “principle of the natural”, the “principle of the welfare”, the “principle of the technological solution” and the “principle of the individual decisions”. Their interaction and dichotomy are discussed, as well as the problems teachers face when having to deal with topics beyond those immediately related to science     

Reflecting on Scientists’ Activity Based on Science Fiction Stories Written by Secondary Students

In this article the authors resort to a qualitative analysis of the plot of science fiction stories about a group of scientists, written by two 11th‐grade Earth and Life Science students (aged 17), and to semi‐structured interviews, with the double purpose of diagnosing their conceptions of the nature of science (namely, as regards scientists’ activity), and discussing the potentialities of this methodology in terms of research and education in science. The adopted methodology proved particularly effective in diagnosing the students’ conceptions of scientists’ characteristics, scientific activity, and science–technology–society interactions. The limited content of certain conceptions and a certain lack of knowledge on the part of the students concerning the processes and the epistemology of science highlight the need to pay explicit attention in science classes to the nature of scientific activity. Some of the ideas brought up by the students clearly show the influence of stereotypes and catastrophic scenarios depicted in films, television programs, and books, revealing media’s limitations when divulging scientific and technological themes to the general public and stressing the need for the school to promote a critical debate about science and technology images conveyed by the media.     

The transformative power of Chicana/o Studies: social justice and education

This essay responds to Professor Aguirre’s article in this issue that explores through personal narrative the trials and tribulations of being a faculty member with an expertise in Chicana/o Studies. The author joins his exploration by introducing the structural disadvantages that Chicana/o Studies suffers as a field. She then expounds on what we have gained by developing a new field with an explicitly political focus that includes putting student interests at the center of its development while fighting for economic and social justice as an integral part of its intellectual agenda. Her conclusion explores the challenges that the field of Chicana/o Studies faces as we confront changing demographic and societal conditions.     

Mexican parents’ and teachers’ literacy perspectives and practices: construction of cultural capital

This article examines the relationships among the literacy practices engaged in by first-grade children and parents at home and the ways in which these practices are communicated, shaped, and fostered by teachers and administrators in two different sociocultural environments in urban Mexico. The differences observed between the home literacy experiences of children in a working-class and a middle-class community included transgenerational communication of assumptions regarding literacy and schooling, as well as attitudes associated with the parents’ own school experiences. Class-based expectations on the part of teachers not only shaped interactions with parents, but were also reflected in the way the national curriculum was delivered, with a greater emphasis on rote skills and traditional reading instruction in the working-class community. The authors argue that the school plays a role in the co-production of cultural capital in the home through its shaping of some of the literacy practices that children and families undertake.     

An analytical framework for analyzing student teachers’ verbal interaction in learning situations

This paper focuses on the study of student teachers’ verbal interaction in learning situations generated in a classroom corresponding to a mathematics methods course. In our work, we incorporate two ‘ways of seeing’ a group: as an entity or as a set composed of individualities. We present an analytical framework that considers two dimensions connected with these ways of seeing the group and four variables corresponding to these dimensions, through which the verbal interaction between student teachers in a group can be considered. As regards the first dimension, the variables included are specific language, cognitive processing, social processing; the second dimension considers the relational variable. We describe each of the different variables that form the framework, and how this framework allows us to analyse the verbal interaction in three groups of student teachers. We believe that building analytic frameworks that allow the study of verbal interaction in detail is worthwhile in the educational field due to their important role in the analysis of learning-teaching processes.     

The Influence of Teachers in the Operation of Basic Schools in Iceland1

The governance of basic schools (grades 1–10) in Iceland was transferred from state control to municipal control in 1995 with a new Basic School Act. This transfer was in line with the emphasis on school‐based management that was stressed in the Act. This policy was criticised by many, including teachers and their union representatives. Research indicates that basic principals are very pleased with their new working environment, but showed indication of dissatisfaction amongst teachers. Accordingly, it was of interest to investigate how this policy has influenced the working environment of basic school teachers: Has it facilitated increased autonomy of schools? Has it enhanced participative decision‐making and co‐operation amongst teachers? What kind of pressures and expectations has it generated from parents and municipal educational authorities? A questionnaire was sent to a sample of 750 teachers during the spring of 2005. The findings indicate that there seems to be a gap emerging between the perceived professional independence of schools and the professional independence of teachers. This study also indicates that the general teacher wants to be more involved in decision‐making in his/her school in areas such as development projects, in‐service planning and distribution of financial resources. The study also shows that external demands and pressures on teachers have increased considerably, particularly in urban areas.     

La crisis de la noción de estructura lógica: análisis experimental del estadio de las operaciones concretas

RESUMEN

La investigación descrita en este artículo se centra en las críticas al enfoque estructural piagetiano y su postulado logicista. En su lugar, se aboga por un enfoque procedural encaminado al descubrimiento de estrategias y procesos cognitivos involucrados en la realización de tareas. Los sujetos fueron 240 niños que asistían a clases de tercero y octavo de EGB. La discusión de los resultados se realiza en términos de procesamiento de la información, esbozándose además un modelo teórico-evolutivo para ese estadio, así como una argumentación crítica en torno al logicismo.     

Puntos de convergencia en la psicología histórico-cultural de lengua española: Una reflexión sobre los contenidos de esta monografía

Resumen

Se revisan en este artículo los avances en la conceptualización teórica, verificación empírica, en los problemas metodológicos y en el nivel de intervención y diseño, que se perfilan en las aportaciones españolas a la psicología histórico-cultural recogidas en esta monografía. Especialmente se resaltan: la redefinición del contexto externo de la representación y la comunicación; el sincretismo y los diversos procesos de mediación en la ZDP; las evidencias empíricas a favor del desarrollo cultural de las funciones superiores; los problemas metodológicos de aplicación de la ZDP para el diagnóstico y el diseño; y el diseño educativo desde una perspectiva de integración en sistemas culturales de actividad.