The adulthood of Buddhahood: Buddhism,lifelong learning and the education of desire

This paper analyses Buddhism as a philosophy of education as opposed to a religion to offer an alternative model of lifelong education. The three trainings of Buddhism ‐‐ ethics, meditative stabilization and special wisdom ‐‐ are described and their implications for education are considered. The special case of Tantric Buddhism offers a further development in Buddhist discourse on the education of desire, a critical new area of educational inquiry required if we are seriously to address the current environmental crisis. The paper presents Octavio Paz's ideas concerning the differential development of Asian Buddhist culture and Western Protestant culture in terms of their relations to the signs ‘body’ and ‘non‐body’, and concludes with his Utopian vision of the future.     

Research Experiences of Staff within a Specialist UK Higher Education Institution: Challenges,opportunities and priorities

The study discussed here was based on a collective case approach involving a specialist UK higher education institution. Six individual interviews were carried out with a cross-sectional sample of the institution’s staff members. Additional information was gained through observations and examination of relevant documents. These data were interrogated with the purpose of exploring how the institution had made the transition from a teacher training college to a teaching-led higher education institution with a particular commitment to developing research capacity. This analysis yielded a number of key findings: first, the institution had experienced a cultural shift, with research forming a more noticeable profile; second, practitioner-oriented research was the dominant research endeavour; and third, there appeared to be an incomplete understanding of the potential of research to change a staff member’s career and teaching practice. The article concludes by giving consideration to the implications of the findings.     

School Fights: Resisting Oppression in the Classroom in Gloria Velásquez’s Latina/o Young Adult Novel <Emphasis Type="Italic">Juanita Fights the School Board</Emphasis>

There is a long history of discrimination and marginalization of Chicanas/Latinas in the classroom due to xenophobia, language barriers, citizenship status, oversexualization, and much more. Through an analysis of Gloria Velasquez’s (Juanita Fights the School Board, Piñata Books, Houston, 1995) I seek to demonstrate the ways in which Chicanas/Latinas have been resisting the oppressions they experience in the classroom by creating alternative ways of knowing. In Velasquez’s narrative, Juanita is expelled for fighting and must appear before the school board to make a case for why she should be allowed to return to school. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that the policies, teachers, and administrators of Roosevelt High School are biased against students of color. By way of Juanita Fights the School Board, I introduce my concept of “conocimiento narratives” as a way to read stories like these as having the potential for healing in the lives of Chicanas/Latinas. Juanita uses the knowledges imparted by her family, her communities, and her culture to challenge and transform the discrimination she experiences at school.     

The effect of the number of syllables on handwriting production

Four experiments examined whether motor programming in handwriting production can be modulated by the syllable structure of the word to be written. This study manipulated the number of syllables. The items, words and pseudo-words, had 2, 3 or 4 syllables. French adults copied them three times. We measured the latencies between the visual presentation and the first production (L1), the first and second production (L2), and the second and third production (L3). The results show an effect of the number of syllables in L1 for pseudo-words but not for words and on L2 and L3 for all the items (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiment 3 ruled out an interpretation of the latencies for pseudo-words in terms of reading time with a delayed copying task. Experiment 4 replicated the previous results and assessed the effect of varying the temporal interval between the second and third trials. The results of the four experiments confirm the role of the syllable in word writing. The number of syllables of a word modulates the time course of handwriting production.

The transition from a university college to a university: a United Kingdom study

Tertiary Education and Management - As a result of policy changes, nearly all university colleges in the UK have been redesignated as universities. This transition was studied in one such...     

Undergraduate Degree Awards in Teacher Education: constant standards in a changing context

In the past, assessment in higher education has been treated as a matter determined by, and confidential to, Boards of Examiners. In future, however, this may have to change in response to a number of changes in the context of higher education. The student population is more diverse and is taking an increasing control of the curriculum through the modularisation of courses. Student charters instil expectations that details of assessment procedures will be made explicit and published. Awards may increasingly be challenged. This paper examines a number of issues which will have to be debated more openly in the future. They include the statistics of aggregating component grades into degree classes, the widening range of skills covered by higher education courses and the most appropriate formats for summative reporting. The paper aims not to offer answers but to help to clarify some of the questions around which debate will be required.     

Kindergarten Children Discussing the Fairness of Probabilistic Games: The Creation of a Primary Discursive Community

In this paper we analyse the language used by kindergarten children and their teacher while they discuss the fairness of two games that involved the concept of chance. Their discussions show that the children are able to overcome their primary intuitions concerning the fairness of a game and to comprehend the important role of materials. The children mostly used counting strategies in order to justify their opinion; this reveals the establishment of a primary discursive community based on the premise that each opinion should be justified in order to be accepted by the other children and the teacher.

Handedness and the Development of Direction and Sequencing in Children's Drawings of People

The effect of age and handedness on directionality and sequence in drawing was studied in 389 right‐ and left‐handed children aged from 2 to 11 years. Preschool right‐handers were more likely to draw right to left and to produce circles in a clockwise direction. In contrast, preschool left handers drew left to right with anti‐clockwise circle production. By the age of 9 to 11 years right‐handers had switched to predominantly left to right drawing with anti‐clockwise circle production and left‐handers to right to left, drawing and clockwise circle production. Irrespective of handedness, preschool children tended to begin at the bottom of the drawing and work towards the top, whereas the older groups tended to draw from the top to the bottom. It is suggested that these rules of directionality and sequencing may influence how children respond to writing instruction.