Moral language and pedagogical experience

As educators are challenged to develop a moral vocabulary of teaching, such a language needs to be sensitive to the way that pedagogical relations are lived and experienced. This exploration into the meanings of care offers a phenomenological puzzle. It concerns the relation between, on the one hand, commonly accepted and professionally received meanings of the ethical concept of care as we find it in the parental, philosophical, and curriculum literature and, on the other hand, the lived experience of caring. The language of care in the field of commerce and in the helping professions tends to pass over these subtle and deeply-felt sensibilities. It seems that for many parents and teachers caring commonly means worrying. Caring is experienced as worrying responsibility. But this worry ('sorgen' in German) is often neglected for happier or more acceptable understandings of care. This should make us wonder about what happens when language turns professional and theoretical, when it becomes charged with meanings that in everyday life are not always recognizable, and when it becomes discharged of meanings that are existentially at its very centre.     

Evaluating Student Success in a Cohort-based Graduate Program for Criminal Justice Professionals

Previous studies have shown that additional education for criminal justice professionals can improve individual effectiveness. This higher level of education can facilitate better communication, problem-solving skills, and performance. The University of South Florida offers a unique cohort-style/weekend-based Master’s program (MACJA) that is designed specifically for these professionals. This program has graduated 180 students since 2006, all members of the criminal justice field. The current study aims to determine which student background factors are associated with a higher graduating GPA in the program. This project will also discuss the results of a follow-up survey of MACJA graduates assessing professional advancement following graduation, specifically targeting topics such as promotions, special awards or recognitions, teaching experience, and further education.     

Problems of Transferring Software

If we make a survey of the present state of the distribution of teaching media around the world, we can venture to say, after a first analysis, that ‘software is the least equally shared thing in this world’. This phenomenon generally remains unnoticed because not very obvious, for it is difficult to evaluate the capital of software, because the studies led for the past ten years in the educational field have brought to the fore the problems of how to deal with systems, of planning, mainly enhancing thereby the social and economical elements. The diagrams displaying the compared situations, as well as the markingout of the boundary between well-equipped and developing countries, have been established according to easily ‘measurable’ facts: the percentage of the national income devoted to education, the number of practising teachers, the equipments, the schooling rate, the school dropout rate, the growth rate.     

Mathematics Achievement of Children in China and the United States

First and fifth graders in Beijing and Chicago were given a battery of mathematics test. Whether tested with problems requiring solely computation or with ones requiring application of knowledge about mathematics, American children's performance was consistently inferior to that of Chinese children. Interviews with American children suggested that they like mathematics, believe they are doing well in mathematics, and do not perceive mathematics as a difficult subject. American children's poor performance appears to be attributable, in part, to low motivation for devoting more attention to mathematics. Low standards held by American parents for academic achievement and lower interest in teaching mathematics by American teachers appear to contribute to American children's poor performance.