A Feeling for the Environment: Emotion Talk in/for the Pedagogy of Public Environmental Education

Emotions are important aspects in/for the pedagogy of environmental education (EE). However, the literature on the relationship between emotions and EE has not explored how emotion talk furnishes teaching identity claims and mediates instruction in/about the environment. Therefore, the present study draws on two ethnographic case studies to investigate the rhetorical and situational use of emotion discursive categories in interviews and authentic EE learning situations. Our findings suggest that rather than just being an outcome of effective instructional models designed to instill an environmental consciousness in students, emotion discourses are means to help account for and concretely realize the pedagogy of EE.     

The work of lecturing in high school chemistry

Lecturing is an important aspect of the culture of science education. Perhaps because of the negative associations constructivist educators make with lecturing, little research has been done concerning the generally invisible aspects of the (embodied, lived) work that is required. Traditional research on science lectures focuses on ideas and (mental) concepts that somehow are “gotten across”; and it is interested in identifying verbal content and visual representations science teachers provide. The purpose of this study is to explicitly describe and theorize the living work of lecturing that produces in a societal arena everything from which students can learn. We use two case studies from the chemistry lectures in a tenth-grade Singapore classroom to exemplify the central role of the performative aspects of lecturing. We articulate and exemplify assertions that (a) corporeal performances differentiate and coordinate the contents of lecturing with its pitch, rhythm, and speech volume, and thereby orient students to specific discourse features of chemistry; and (b) corporeal performances differentiate and coordinate layers of talk with prosody, gestures, and body orientation, and thereby make analogies available to students. We conclude that what is visible in lectures (e.g., scientific discourse, analogies) is always the outcome of the (generally unattended to) corporeal labor including gestures, body orientation, and prosodic features (e.g., shifts in pitch) and that this outcome | labor pair constitutes an appropriate unit of understanding lecturing as societal phenomenon.     

Preservice Teachers' Development and Implementation of Science Performance Assessment Tasks

Preservice teachers in a science methods course were provided instruction on performance assessment, then guided through a design and implementation process of performance assessment tasks. We assessed the effect of designing and implementing a performance assessment task on preservice teachers' understanding of standards-based assessment. The findings show that these preservice teachers improved in their understanding of assessment as a formative process as well as their science content understanding of the topic addressed in their designed task. We found that preservice teachers need to experiment with performance assessment tasks in an authentic context in order to understand the full potential and value of the task.     

Increased plasma zonulin in patients with sepsis

Introduction:

Zonulin is a eukaryotic protein structurally similar to Vibrio cholerae’s zonula occludens toxin. It plays an important role in the opening of small intestine tight junctions. The loss of gut wall integrity during sepsis might be pivotal and has been described in various experimental as well as human studies. Increased levels of zonulin could be demonstrated in diseases associated with increased intestinal inflammation, such as celiac disease and type 1 diabetes. We therefore investigated the role of plasma levels of zonulin in patients with sepsis as a non-invasive marker of gut wall integrity.

Materials and methods:

Plasma level of zonulin was measured in 25 patients with sepsis, severe sepsis or septic shock according to ACCP/SCCM criteria at the first day of diagnosed sepsis. 18 non-septic post-surgical ICU-patients and 20 healthy volunteers served as control. Plasma levels were determined by using commercially available ELISA kit. Data are given as median and interquartile range (IQR).

Results:

Significantly higher plasma concentration of zonulin were found in the sepsis group: 6.61 ng/mL (IQR 3.51–9.46), as compared to the to the post-surgical control group: 3.40 ng/mL (IQR 2.14–5.70) (P = 0.025), as well as to the healthy group: 3.55 ng/mL (IQR 3.14–4.14) (P = 0.008).

Conclusion:

We were able demonstrate elevated levels of plasma zonulin, a potential marker of intestinal permeability in septic patients. Increased zonulin may serve as an additional mechanism for the observed increased intestinal permeability during sepsis and SIRS.     

Positional identities in educational transitions: connecting contemporary and future trajectories among multiethnic girls

The aim of this article is to study how young people view themselves as learners within educational trajectories, as an alternative approach to today’s emphasis on performance and standardisation. We study different learner positionings in transitions from one level of schooling to another, using the analytic concepts of ‘positional identities’ and ‘figured worlds’. The ethnographic data were collected over a two-year period as part of a large-scale ethnographic study in a suburban area of Oslo with a large percentage of families with immigrant backgrounds. We focus on two girls (aged 15) who represent different educational trajectories and positional identities. Their case histories illustrate how positional identities in educational transitions are a complex web of formal and informal influences beyond school. The students experience different trajectories and changes in positional identities as learners when entering upper secondary school, which have implications for their future orientations.     

Differential Participation During Science Conversations: The Interaction of Focal Artifacts,Social Configurations,and Physical Arrangements

Recent conceptualizations of knowing and learning focus on the degree of participation in the practices of communities. Discursive practices are the most important and characteristic practices in many communities. This study was designed to investigate how the content and form of classroom discourse was influenced by different combinations of artifacts (e.g., overhead transparencies, physical models), social configurations, and physical arrangements. Over a 4-month period, we collected data (video-taped activities, interviews, ethnographic observations, artifacts, and photographs) in a Grade 6-7 science class studying a unit on simple machines. Four different activity structures differed in terms of the social configuration (whole class, small group) and the origin of the central, activity-organizing artifact (teacher designed, student designed). This study describes how different artifacts, social configurations, and physical arrangements led to different interactional spaces, participant roles, and levels of participation in classroom conversations and, concomitantly, to different discursive forms and content. The artifacts had important functions in maintaining and sequencing conversations. Depending on the situation and the role of participants, artifacts served as resources for students' sense making. Each of the different activity structures supported different dimensions of participating in conversations and, for this reason, we conclude that science educators teaching large classes should employ a mixture of these activity structures. Overall, students developed considerable competencies in discursive and materials practices related to simple machines.