Preparing gifted leaders for a futuristic society

Social studies teachers rely too heavily on textbooks which contain minimal problem solving or other high level cognitive tasks. This finding raises serious questions about the capacity of a social studies curriculum meeting the goals for a program for the gifted.     

Curricular orientations,experiences, and actions: Graduate students in science and mathematics fields work in urban high school classrooms

We examined curricular orientations that graduate students in science and mathematics fields held as they experienced urban high‐school science and mathematics classrooms. We analyzed how these educators (called Fellows) saw themselves, students, teachers, schools, education, and the sense they made of mathematics and science education in urban, challenging settings in the light of experiences they brought with them into the project and experiences they designed and engaged in as they worked in classrooms for 1 or 2 years. We used Schubert's (Schubert (1997) Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, Inc.) four curricular orientations—intellectual traditionalism, social behaviorism, experientialism, and critical reconstructionism—to analyze the Fellows' journals, and to explore ways in which the positions they portrayed relative to curriculum, instruction, assessment, social justice, discipline, student involvement, teacher's role, subject‐matter nature, etc., shaped and were shaped by who they were before and during their classroom work. Our qualitative analysis revealed various relationships including: experientialists engaged in more open‐ended projects, relevant to students, with explicit connections to everyday‐life experiences; social behaviorists paid more attention to designing “good” labs and activities that taught students appropriate content, led them through various steps, and modeled good science and mathematics; and critical reconstructionists hyped up student knowledge and awareness of science issues that affect students' lives, such as asthma and HIV epidemic. Categorizing orientations and identifying relationships between experiences, actions, and orientations may help us articulate and explicate goals, priorities, and commitments that we have, or ought to have, when we work in urban classrooms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 1–26, 2009     

FUNDAMENTAL DELIBERATIONS ON THE DETERMINATION OF EQUIVALENCES BASED ON THE AUSTRIAN EXPERIENCE

International university co‐operation which serves to Internationalize science and knowledge requires that students, teachers, and scientists be internationally mobile. For mobility to occur on a wide scale, it must be the object of inter‐university and international bilateral and multilateral agreements. The various sorts of agreement which have been negotiated and enacted since the 1950's have been very successful. Recognition and equivalence must be based on qualitative rather than on quantitative factors, and above all on trust Recognition procedures could be further perfected by such actions as the preparation of a set of harmonizable recommendations, on the determination of equivalences, greater co‐operation among the various European information networks on equivalence, and publication of a manual on recognized universities in Europe.     

The impact of AVID tutoring on developing a teacher identity Bradley Bowen,Stacy Duffield

ABSTRACT

There is extensive research demonstrating the benefit tutoring has on the tutee. However, minimal research exists about the impact tutoring has on the tutor, and particularly, how being a tutor influences pre-service teacher development during teacher preparation. Using qualitative measures, we documented the influence participating in the tutoring program, Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), has on a pre-service teacher’s development of their teacher identity, predominantly in the areas of pedagogical knowledge and practice. We revealed how the AVID tutoring program influenced the tutors’ development of their teacher identity, implications of the findings, and areas for future research and practice.     

Promoting student engagement in science: Interaction rituals and the pursuit of a community of practice

This study explores the relationship between interaction rituals, student engagement with science, and learning environments modeled on communities of practice based on an ethnographic study of an eighth grade urban magnet school classroom. It compares three interactional events in order to examine the classroom conditions and teacher practices that can foster successful interaction rituals (IRs), which are characterized by high levels of emotional energy, feelings of group membership, and sustained interest in the subject. Classroom conditions surrounding the emergence of successful IRs included mutual focus, familiar symbols and activity structures, the permissibility of some side‐talk, and opportunities for physical and emotional entrainment. Sustained interest in the topic beyond the duration of the IR and an increase in students' helping each other learn occurred more frequently when the mutual focus consisted of science‐related symbols, when there were low levels of risk for participants, when activities involved sufficient challenge and time, and when students were positioned as knowledgeable and competent in science. The results suggest that successful interaction rituals can foster student engagement with topics that may not have previously held interest and can contribute to students' support of peers' learning, thereby moving the classroom toward a community‐of‐practice model. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach     

Experimental work at Hellerup Seminarium,Denmark

Sloth, O. “Experimental work at Hellerup Seminarium, Denmark,” Revue ATEE Journal 3 (1980) 37‐42.

The author describes the approach of one Danish College of Education to a problem which is by now internationally known: in this age of integration into the normal class of all but the demonstrably and severely educationally subnormal or handicapped, how can we equip student teachers, during their initial training, to cope with these problems of Special Education. He outlines the attempt at Hellerup Seminarium, Copenhagen, to solve the problem by integrating and restructuring the compulsory pedagogic subjects and educational specialisms and so build up within the legal framework what he calls a Special Education Teacher Education (SPECTE).