Gaps in Mind: Problems in environmental knowledge-behaviour modelling research

For decades, researchers in the social sciences and in education have sought to understand and map the factors that lead people to move (or to fail to move) from environmental knowledge to 'pro-environmental behaviour'. In this article, we explore some conceptual, epistemological, methodological and practical 'gaps' that seem to reproduce themselves in successive instantiations of this quest. The purpose of this article is to help build the critical perspective that comes with problematizing the very project of knowledge-behaviour modelling, identifying the positivistic residues still present in the enterprise, and suggesting that modelling may be more useful in domains of greater scale. Focusing on the 'Mind Gap' model developed by Kollmus and Agyeman (2002), we discuss the 'gap' between contemporary educational research and knowledge-behaviour modelling research that is the cumulative effect of (1) the critical thinking - 'behaviour change' gap; (2) the 'reflective practitioner - 'researcher as authority' gap; (3) the two literatures gap; (4) the conscious - non-conscious gap (tied to reason and habit in moral agency); (5) the direct action - indirect action gap (tied to privatizing environmental morality); (6) the gender gap; and (7) the internal - external gap (tied to ignoring the complexity of moral agency and cultural identity).     

Learning Disabilities and the LRE Mandate: An Examination of National and State Trends

This study was conducted to examine changes in the identification rates and national and state placement practices for school age students with learning disabilities (LD) between 1990–1991 and 2008–2009. Findings revealed that while identification rates of students with LD declined by about 4 percent during this time, general education placements increased over 166 percent, pullout placements declined by more than 50 percent, while students educated in highly restrictive separate class and separate school settings declined by approximately 60 percent. Unlike earlier studies, most states made at least some progress toward educating students with LD in less restrictive settings. Much of the change in placement practices for students with LD occurred since 2000.     

The Evolution of Smokey Bear: Environmental Education About Wildfire for Youth

Many environmental education programs in the United States educate youth about the prevention of wildfire and its role in ecosystems. We reviewed 50 wildfire education programs for youth (WEY) in the U.S. through an Internet search and interviews with program providers. We investigated whether they reflect current wildfire science, environmental education (EE) instructional strategies, and place-based education (PBE) approaches. We found that while one-third of the programs focus exclusively on wildfire prevention, suppression, and safety topics, one-third focuses on fire ecology, management, and science, and one-third includes all these topics, mirroring evolving scientific approaches to wildfire. Also, while state and federal agencies design and disseminate much of the curricula used, 60% of WEY programs incorporate local social and ecological contexts, revealing the close relationship between WEY and PBE.     

Higher Educational Cost-Sharing,Dual-Track Tuition Fees,and Higher Educational Access: The East African Experience

Three universal demands characterize higher education globally: the demand for higher quality, for increased access, and for greater equity. In East Africa, where resources are highly constrained, no nation has been able to meet these demands on the basis of public expenditures alone. Instead countries have had to increase resources from nonpublic sources, including tuition fees. In countries with strong resistance to tuition fees and where the difficulty of taxation is combined with a daunting queue of competing public sector needs, a dual-track tuition policy is especially popular whereby the most capable applicants are financed from public resources and other qualified students are allowed admission on a fee-paying basis. This article studies dual-track policies in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. We find that although rewarding ability, the dual-track policies did little to offer opportunities for the poor.     

Analyzing prospective teachers’ images of scientists using positive,negative and stereotypical images of scientists

Background and purpose : This study details the use of a conceptual framework to analyze prospective teachers’ images of scientists to reveal their context-specific conceptions of scientists. The conceptual framework consists of context-specific conceptions related to positive, stereotypical and negative images of scientists as detailed in the literature on the images, role and work of scientists.

Sample, design and method : One hundred and ninety-six drawings of scientists, generated by prospective teachers, were analyzed using the Draw-A-Scientist-Test Checklist (DAST-C), a binary linear regression and the conceptual framework.

Results : The results of the binary linear regression analysis revealed a statistically significant difference for two DAST-C elements: ethnicity differences with regard to drawing a scientist who was Caucasian and gender differences for indications of danger. Analysis using the conceptual framework helped to categorize the same drawings into positive, stereotypical, negative and composite images of a scientist.

Conclusions : The conceptual framework revealed that drawings were focused on the physical appearance of the scientist, and to a lesser extent on the equipment, location and science-related practices that provided the context of a scientist’s role and work. Implications for teacher educators include the need to understand that there is a need to provide tools, like the conceptual framework used in this study, to help prospective teachers to confront and engage with their multidimensional perspectives of scientists in light of the current trends on perceiving and valuing scientists. In addition, teacher educators need to use the conceptual framework, which yields qualitative perspectives about drawings, together with the DAST-C, which yields quantitative measure for drawings, to help prospective teachers to gain a holistic outlook on their drawings of scientists.     

What Account of Science Shall We Give? A Case Study of Scientists Teaching First-year University Subjects

This article presents a case study of four academic scientists. These academics teach in the first year of a Bachelor of Science degree at a large research-focused Australian university that has demanded and supported a greater focus on undergraduate learning. Taken as a whole, the accounts of science that the first-year academics in this case study gave, and which they are presenting to their students, challenge the images of science and scientists typically presented in school science curricula. Using Roberts' heuristic of Vision 1 and Vision 2 for the broad purposes of learning science, we consider various accounts given of science by these academic scientists and consider how science might appear to a student who takes all four of their subjects.     

Bringing action research to the curriculum development process

As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students – Jorge, Adriana, and Jason – over the course of one year in an 11th-grade English class at River High School, a struggling American school subject to intervention for failing to meet the federal No Child Left Behind requirements. I ask several questions: what role does email play in my relationships with students; what does email reveal about the ideological content of my communication with students; and how could I use email transformatively? When I studied these email exchanges, I found that while email has the potential to transform literacy instruction, it can also perpetuate a poor student/teacher relationship and reproduce neoliberal narratives that narrowly imagine students as test-takers, workers, and consumers.     

Ministry of Labour female training programmes between the wars: 1919-39

British Somaliland, a protectorate from which Christian missionaries were excluded, opened its first government‐run school in 1938. The intention of the new director of education, Randall Ellison, was to use written Somali in preference to Arabic. This drew intense criticism from local religious leaders, and had to be abandoned. Accused of being a missionary in disguise, Ellison’s work led to a riot in the town of Burao in 1939 in which three people were killed. Although the school at Berbera functioned for just two terms, the opposition it aroused forms a link in an anti‐Western chain of events that stretches from the 1899–1920 revolt of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdille Hassan up to the Al‐Qaeda‐linked killing of two British teachers in 2003. This paper is based on Ellison’s letters to his family and on official and other sources.