Reflective practice or poetic mindfulness: a role for social poetics in constructing and performing futures

Reflective Practice has been dominated for the last 25 years by an experiential school as typified by Kolb (1984. Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall). This paper suggests that there are significant problems with an approach to considering futures that is based on ‘knowledge’ of the past, identification of ongoing cause–effect relations and individual agency. Alternative, Social Constructionist premises are discussed and a ‘Social Poetics’ (Shotter, 1996. “Social Construction as social poetics: Oliver Sacks and the case of Dr P.” In Reconstructing the Psychological Subject, edited by B. Bayer and J. Shotter. London: Sage) is offered as a mindfulness that foregrounds moment-by-moment relations in which new realities are improvised. The use of different poetic forms to shape a poetic mindfulness is proposed and three advantages of such a practice are suggested. First, that a poetic mindfulness can interrupt limiting ‘thinking habits’. Secondly, it foregrounds the creativity of ongoing relations and, thirdly, it provides an alternative to simple cause–effect relations by foregrounding social improvisation.     

Deweyan Education and Democratic Ecologies

From a Deweyan perspective, the capacity to learn is enabled or restricted by the clutch of one's habits, which are established and maintained by the mutual eliciting of action and reaction between an organism and its environment. Relationships that constrict the capacity for organisms to interact and learn from each other are undemocratic so far as they curb the direction and suppleness by which mutual growth can occur. Dewey saw that education and democracy were therefore inseparable pursuits. However, he developed a conceptual orientation that prevented entry for other species. This article seeks to open a Deweyan approach to considering ecological communities politically and pedagogically. Ecosystems, like human societies, form and develop through complex learning interactions. This has been recognized for centuries by local and indigenous groups, and more recently by modern science in differently operating biological processes, from the Baldwin effect, to niche constructionism, and epigenetic inheritance. As Dewey continuously noted, the immediate encounter is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to ensure growthful, democratic environments, because patterns of behavior, thinking, and affect are channeled by the structural contexts within which encounters occur. It is therefore necessary that educators focus on the experimental reconstruction of infrastructure, buildings, institutions, technologies, and other material structures that habituate us to normalize miseducative and undemocratic relationships with our own and with other species.     

Tests of English Language as significant thresholds for college-bound Chinese and the washback of test-preparation

Tests of English language mark significantly high thresholds for all college-bound students in the People’s Republic of China. Many Chinese students hope to seek their fortunes at universities in the United States, or other English speaking countries. These students spend long hours, year after year, in test-preparation centres in order to develop the testwiseness deemed necessary to increase their scores. This study critically explores what might be learned from involvement in test-preparation courses via an examination of the experience one of the authors had as she sought to balance a short-term focus on testwiseness with long-term language and literacy goals in a People’s Republic of China test-preparation centre. Discussion focuses on the nature of the washback and its potential impact on foreign language learners.