Committed to learn: student engagement and care in higher education

Efforts to evaluate and improve student engagement have been pervasive in higher education over recent years. Critics argue, however, that troubling affinities are evident between student engagement efforts and a neoliberal agenda which emphasises accountability through performativity. Neoliberalism manifests in policies that focus on the economic benefit to individuals of higher education, rather than the broader social or intrinsic benefits. In this conceptual article, we draw on the work of Martin Heidegger and Nel Noddings in arguing that efforts aimed at promoting engagement and commitment to learn by students should include developing a capacity to care about others and things. Through the lens of care, our aim is to extend current notions of what engagement of students in their learning might look like. Challenging and supporting students entail encouraging them to take a stand on what they are learning and who they are becoming. This enriched conceptualisation has the potential to re-orient student engagement away from a narrow neoliberal agenda, while enabling students to realise the full benefits a higher education can provide.     

Information and Reliability for Percentile Ranks and Other Monotonic Transformations of the Number-Correct Score: Reply to De Gruijter

De Gruijter (1997) has claimed that May and Nicewander (1994) erred on two points that indicated that both reliability and information in the number-correct score could be reduced considerably by converting to percentile ranks. The points raised by De Gruijter are very well taken, and we are pleased to have an opportunity to respond.     

Embodying skilful performance: Co-constituting body and world in biotechnology

This article offers a philosophical-empirical account of embodied skilful performance in the practice of plant biotechnology. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and others, we elaborate how skilful performance emerges from and through reciprocal relations encompassing the body-in-the-world and the world-in-the-body. The contribution of this article lies in offering an account of skilful performance that is attentive to a perceiving, motile, feeling body entwined with world. In genetically modifying plants, scientists direct their senses of touch and vision to manipulating plant materials and matter, ‘reading’ subtle changes in tissue cultures, plantlets and so on. In rhythmic movements, they extend their bodies through skilful use of complex equipment, while calling on ‘intuition’ to guide their work. Skilful performance, then, relies on our lived body that is not merely a physical object among other objects, nor a passive instrument for the mind, but dynamic and inescapably entwined with people and things in a world in flux. Bringing to the fore how perceiving, motile, feeling bodies are implicated in skilful performance has significant implications for education and workplace training.     

Quadrupole ion traps

During the last two decades there has been tremendous progress in the technique of trapping and cooling ions using quadrupole ion traps. Using these trapping techniques one can have charged particles of a single species confined near the trap centre, which enables to carry out studies of these ions in a well-controlled environment. The long storage times of the ions, possible in these traps, results in the elimination of transit-time broadening making it possible to do precision spectroscopic measurements on these ions. Several important experiments with single electron or ion have been undertaken to address problems related to basic physics, such as the measurement of the electron radius, precision measurements of fundamental parameters and tests of the predictions of quantum mechanics.     

Sociocultural anchors for incorporating sustainability in youth movements: Comparison among secular,religious, and ultraorthodox movements

Abstract

In Israel, youth movements (YMs) comprise a main agent for nonformal education of youth and a youth-engagement framework in which civic engagement can be expanded to address environmental challenges. A major source of sociocultural diversity among YMs is their religious identity, based on the categorizations of secular, religious, and ultraorthodox. We compared, among these groups, the environmental literacy (EL) characteristics of “young-guides” and YM-leaders’ perspectives of sustainability in relation to their YM. Differences among groups were found in the young-guides’ EL: members of secular YMs demonstrated greater EL and openness to including pro-environmental activities within their YM. “Judaism as a platform for addressing sustainability” emerged as a major theme from leaders’ interviews. Implications for meaningful incorporation of sustainability and EE within the groups are discussed.