The role of education in driving conflict and building peace: The case of Rwanda

This article considers the relationship between education, conflict, and peacebuilding in Rwanda. First, it examines the role that education played in the lead-up to the 1994 genocide, discussing whether and how the low levels of educational attainment, inequalities of access, curricular content, and teaching methods contributed to the conditions for violence. It then looks at approaches to rebuilding the education sector since 1994. Despite significant progress, for example in widening access and achieving gender parity at primary level, three significant challenges remain. First, educational opportunity continues to be unequal in the post-primary sector, with disparities of access between rich and poor, a severe lack of alternative and non-formal educational opportunities, and some ethnic dimensions to the disparities. Second, tensions remain over history teaching due to government attempts to impose a single “official” narrative of Rwanda’s history. Finally, teaching methods remain largely teacher-centred, with little open debate and teaching of critical thinking skills. The article cautions that, despite progress, some dimensions of Rwanda’s current education policy and practice may continue to exacerbate tensions. It concludes by outlining some future priorities and urges the Rwandan government and its international development partners to more rigorously assess the potential impact of education policies on fragile social relations, and to embrace opportunities for education to play a more central role in peacebuilding in Rwanda.     

Using Story to Help Student Understanding of Gas Behavior

Students tend to have a poor understanding of the concept of gas pressure. Usually, gas pressure is taught in terms of the various formulaic gas laws. The development of the concept of gas pressure according to the early Greeks did not include the concept of a vacuum. It was not for another 2000 years that Torricelli proposed that a vacuum can exist and that he was able to produce a vacuum above a column of mercury. However, the existence of a vacuum continued to be a contentious issue for at least another 100 years. During this time the behavior of gases was studied by Boyle, Amontons, Gay-Lussac, Daniel Bernouli, Charles, and Dalton. In the 19^th century gas behavior was revisited and studied from the molecular level through the work of Graham, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and van der Waal. The stories of conflicting theories and the development of the concept of gas pressure gives students an increased appreciation for the nature of science and helps them with conceptual understanding of the concept of gas pressure.     

Effects of pretraining on acquisition of novel configural discriminations in human predictive learning

In two experiments, participants acquired one of two target configural discriminations (a biconditional or negative patterning discrimination) in a predictive learning task. In Experiment 1, participants were pretrained with either a configural or an elemental discrimination; in Experiment 2, they were pretrained with a configural discrimination, an elemental discrimination, or a control discrimination that was not expected to bias them toward elemental or configural processing. In both experiments, acquisition of the target configural discriminations was faster after configural pretraining than after elemental pretraining. In addition, the negative patterning discrimination was acquired faster than the biconditional discrimination. Finally, the results of Experiment 2 were more consistent with the notion that elemental pretraining hindered acquisition of the target discriminations than with the notion that configural pretraining enhanced their acquisition. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Vocational Learning Outside Institutions: Online pedagogy and deschooling

This analysis of current developments in online learning for vocational education and training uses Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society as a frame. Illich argued that formal educational institutions are flawed; that a mix of compulsion, indoctrination, certification and education creates an authoritarian atmosphere. Key benefits of online learning include its flexibility and its capacity to support dialogue between learners. On the basis of the capabilities of online technologies, and current developments in education, the authors predict that vocational learning will be profoundly changed. Inevitably, these developments will also challenge established colleges and universities, including their current dominance in major areas of vocational education and training. Education will probably become more pluralistic and more international. This paper calls for an inclusive approach?which makes the elements of an online course available to informal learners and free to people who cannot afford course fees.     

Making functional units functional: The role of rhetorical structure in use of scholarly journal articles

Scholars are reading more journal articles than ever, so it is important that they focus on the relevant text within the articles they read. To support this goal, this study explores enhancements to a journal reading system by applying the idea of the functional unit, the smallest information unit with a distinct function within four major components of scholarly journal articles—Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. This study examined a set of functional units and their associations with scholarly journal article use tasks through literature analysis and validation surveys. Forty-one typical functional units were found in psychology journal articles, with varying relevance to five tasks requiring use of information in journal articles. The relationships among sets of functional units for particular tasks were also identified. A taxonomy was developed incorporating the relationships between functional units and information use tasks, which can be used to inform system design. Based on this taxonomy, a prototype journal reading environment signalling functional units was designed and implemented for testing.