走向消费伦理——致金惠敏(2007年9月21日)

从评价性的角度考察消费文化,其价值有两方面的含义:首先是它与经济价值的创造有关;其二是它与一般价值问题的联系.这两个方面相互关联.消费需要靠生产来维持,而生产若是要维持挥霍性的消费,则可能带来严重的环境灾难,这同时也就是人类的灾难.在消费中提倡一种对自然、对地球家园的负责任的"消费伦理",换言之,唤醒消费者的责任意识,于是便提上了当今消费文化研究的议事日程.     

Experience and reality in religious education

A central task of religious education is to show how the puzzlements to human intelligence and the experiences that are associated with spirituality, are compelling in relation to our development as human beings. There are always more theories than objects or events to be explained, and while the spiritual ‘data’ that gives rise to our puzzlements and experience is elusive and meagre, the supply of literature, teaching, ritual and other forms of articulation is torrential. To understand the nature of religious education we need firstly to ask about the nature of spiritual experience itself at its broadest level and then to identify and co-ordinate the kinds of material that will sensitise pupils to this experience and help them to articulate it. This should provide a basis for evaluation of the material against the context of their own life experiences. In this respect religious education is no different in structure to other areas of the curriculum.     

Slow thinking and deep learning: Tversky and Kahneman's taxi cabs

This article is based on classroom application of a problem story constructed by Amos Tversky in the 1970s. His intention was to evaluate human beings' intuitions about statistical inference. The problem was revisited by his colleague, the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The aim of this article is to show how popular science textbooks can serve as a source for rich classroom activity, with a little care in the implementation by teachers. Kahneman describes the problem as ‘standard’ and answers using a fixed point number. I describe how I have encouraged my students to challenge the certainty of this assertion by identifying ambiguities that are left unexplained in the story. This way, I claim to stimulate individuals to indeed move towards Thinking, Fast and Slow, the title of Kahneman's book.     

Book editors in the social sciences and humanities: an analysis of publication and collaboration patterns of established researchers in Flanders

Book editors in the social sciences and humanities play an important role in their fields but little is known about their typical publication and collaboration patterns. To partially fill this gap, we compare Flemish editors and other researchers, in terms of career stage, productivity, publication types, publications with domestic and international collaboration as well as the number of (international or all) unique co‐authors, co‐editors and associated book chapter authors. The results show that editors are mostly established researchers, especially in the social sciences, produce more book chapters and monographs than do other researchers, and are more productive. Nevertheless, editors collaborate less than do other researchers, both in terms of publications and in number of co‐authors. Including book chapter authors in the editors' collaboration networks makes those networks substantially larger, demonstrating that editors do not mainly call upon authors from their existing collaboration network when choosing book chapter authors in the edited books. Finally, editors seem to co‐author with their book chapter authors slightly more often after the publication of the edited book than before.     

The Complementary roles of the Headteacher,the Mentor and the Advisory Teacher in Induction and School‐based Teacher Training

This article reports on the findings of a two year research project on the management of new teacher induction in five LEAs (Turner, 1992). Headteachers, mentors and newly qualified teachers in twelve schools were interviewed as were LEA officers, Inspectors and advisory teachers. The analysis showed the key roles of headteacher, mentor and advisory teacher to be different but complementary. The conclusions are drawn from a detailed analysis of some 180 interviews.     

News and views

This is a new section of the journal which will appear once a year, or more often if there is a clear demand for it. The intention is to provide a place for short (no more than 1000‐word) contributions from readers who would like to inform others of particular developments or issues, or who would like to present brief position statements on specific curricular themes.

We hope, particularly, that the local groups of the Curriculum Association, our overseas corresponding editors and members of our advisory board will use the opportunity this provides to draw colleagues’ attention to trends, developments and issues of which we ought to be aware at this time of rapid change. The need to stay in touch has never been greater.