Theory and practice of a TEMPUS Joint European Project

Abstract

The paper describes the implementation of a Trans European Mobility Programme for University Staff (TEMPUS) Project during 1992 to 1995 between the Manchester Metropolitan University, in the UK, the Institut de Formation des Maîtres, Grenoble, France, and the Siauliai Pedagogical Institute (SPI), Lithuania. The aim of the Project was the development of the special educational needs (SEN) element of teacher education courses at the SPI to enhance the integration of pupils with SEN into mainstream schools, and of those pupils with severe and sustained SEN into education. It discusses the necessary extension of the Project into associated areas of professional work, analyses the theoretical bases underlying the Project and demonstrates the cyclical development of theory and practice which was achieved.     

On the definition of empirical regularities by the JSM method for the automatic generation of hypotheses

In this paper, empirical regularities are defined that were discovered in fact bases using JSM reasoning. These regularities are subdivided into empirical laws and tendencies.     

Contrasting computer input devices for teaching children with severe learning difficulties to read

Many teachers make the assumption that CAL systems which use a touch screen are more effective for children with severe learning difficulties than those which use a concept keyboard. These two experiments look at which is more effective in helping these children to maintain a previously acquired sight vocabulary, and to learn new sight words. It was predicted that the touch screen would prove more effective because it places fewer information processing demands on pupils. Surprisingly, no difference was found between the two systems.     

The positive purpose of remediation: Getting to the core of higher education

Mike Rose argues that remediation, despite its negative reputation, is both a historically appropriate function of higher education and intimately interconnected with its foundational concerns.     

Marxist state theory and state autonomy theory: the case of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education

Abstract

In recent times, there have been a number of critiques of Marxist and neo‐Marxist analyses of the state and education policy. These have drawn on postmodernist, ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ and state autonomy perspectives. While the postmodernist and ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ approaches have attracted critical response, to date, the state autonomy perspective has, to our knowledge, gone unchallenged. To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper analyses one writer's attempt, via an historical case study, to uphold state autonomy theory by detailing the ongoing relationship between one quasi‐state agency and the practice of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education. We argue that there are serious conceptual weaknesses in this latest attempt to apply state autonomy theory to educational policy analysis. The arguments in the case study under consideration are seriously compromised by a basically flawed hypothesis, a misrepresentation of contemporary (neo‐) Marxist education policy analysis and by a failure to look at ‘the big picture’.     

Making Sense in Art Lessons

Meaning in the arts has been explained in terms of the ‘linguistic/cognitive’ metaphor, that is as a product of a framework of conventions, rules and symbols, of shared conceptualisations with a clearly defined ‘conceptual space’. Sense in a work of art is dependent upon this framework and only by conventionalising pupils into it will they be able to communicate meaning. The problem is that the arts take their audience beyond the framework, beyond the boundaries of sense. The question then becomes how the arts continue to have meaning, paradoxically, to continue to make sense even though they have exceeded its boundaries. The solution to this problem, it is argued, lies in the way that the arts appeal directly to our uniquely human ability to reflect on commonly experienced feelings and to consequently transcend particular frameworks of meaning. Rather than meaning being subject to frameworks within which experience and artistic intention are seen to be made possible, I argue that experience has an autonomous presence in art, a presence that enables meaning to be communicated with spontaneity and immediacy.