Influence of Information Technologies on Kinesiology and Physical Education

The rapid advances made in information technologies over the past few years and the belief that technological change is neither additive nor subtractive to our state of affairs but that it generates total change, suggests that it is timely to consider the implications of these technologies for teaching, research, and professional activity. The task of trying to understand the future influence of information technologies is a challenging one because technology is shaped by an array of forces that includes tradition, politics, economic interests, history, philosophy, and competing technologies. The paper addresses the influence of technology under the following general topics: (a) Promise or peril? Two views on information technology; (b) The difficulty of accurately predicting the future role of information technology; (c) An overview of technological advances and some predictions; and (d) Aspects of special interest—virtual reality, Information Highway, thinking “better” with computers, and devaluation of the body.     

Listening to “The Voices of the Pages”and “Combining the Letters:” Spiritual Practices of Reading and Writing

This article seeks to show that the practices teachers and students engage in—reading, writing, reflection, conversation, teaching, learning—can be spiritually formative. The first part, “Listening to the Voices of the Pages,” explores the monastic approach to reading known as lectio divina, and my own efforts to transpose this ancient method of reading into a twenty-first-century classroom. The second part, “Combining the Letters,” explores the creative power of words to name and bring forth life, and my own efforts to encourage and inspire students to write.     

‘Becoming and being writers’: the experiences of doctoral students in writing groups

The use of writing groups to support students undertaking post-graduate research within universities has begun to receive attention from academic supervisors and doctoral researchers. Very little has been written by doctoral students themselves on the benefits of working within such writing groups. In this article, the experiences of working within a doctoral writing group at an Australian University are presented, primarily from the perspective of students. The authors identify two main benefits they have experienced through participating in a writing group using a ‘multi-voiced’ approach. First, they discuss the kind of learning that they achieved through working in a writing group. They do this with reference to key principles of peer learning and of peer review. Second, they focus on the ways the group worked as a community of discursive social practice. An overarching message for them in participating in the group and now writing this article is the shift in their thinking and experience of writing from seeing writing as an essentially private and implicit process to writing becoming a matter of public and shared work. These two notions are bound by the concept of identity building, drawing from the literature on communities of practice.     

Examining the complexities of measuring effectiveness of online counselling for young people using routine evaluation data

As mental health services for young people develop, the need for evaluation and audit to justify expenditure follows suit. Counselling is being provided in more and more schools and community settings across the country, and there is an increasing focus on evidence-based funding. Practice-based evidence has an important role to play in fulfilling this requirement, and there are calls for a single outcome measure to be utilised across services. The emerging frontier of online support is receiving steadily greater attention, but as yet it has had little attention with regards to its effectiveness. An existing routine evaluation and outcome measure (Young Person’s Clinical Outcome Measures in Routine Evaluation) was incorporated within other routine evaluation systems within an online support service for young people (Kooth). The findings have been examined, with a view to recommending most suitable evaluation tools for this medium. Initial data suggest that the online service, when compared with equivalent face-to-face data, attracts a wide range of needs and levels of distress, with a high proportion of complex needs presented. Such findings may also reflect the complex nature of the support needs for the client group in question. Capturing appropriately rich data using a range of qualitative and quantitative measures that account for the complex online environment and client group needs to be carefully considered.     

This 3 × 5 Civilization

In this information age, the world is fast becoming a global village. In this context, it is relevant to look at the educational vision of Rabindranath Tagore. He tried to realize his educational vision in his schools and Visva-Bharati University where the world makes its home in a single nest. Tagore's vision of international education can help to prevent misunderstanding and war, promote peace, foster multiculturalism, connect human beings, and celebrate their common heritage     

PHILOSOPHY

Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning. Department of Audio-Visual Instruction. National Education Association, Washington, D. C., 1960. 736 pp. $7.50.

Secondary Education for All: The English Approach by A. Harvey Passow, Professor of Education, Teachers' College, Columbia University. A Kappa Delta Pi publication, issued by Ohio State University Press, 164 West Nineteenth Avenue, Columbus, 10, Ohio. 290 pp. $1.75.

EDUCATION School Public Relations—Issues and Cases by James J. Jones and Irving W. Stout. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1960. 195 pp. $3.75.

The Psychology of Character Development by Robert F. Peck with Robert J. Havighurst and Ruth Cooper, Jesse Lilienthal, and Douglas More. New York: John Wiley &; Sons, Inc. 261 pp. $6.50.

The Teaching of Secondary Mathematics by Charles H. Butler and F. Lynwood Wren. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. 1960. 624 pp. $7.50.     

Being a ‘professional’ primary school teacher at the beginning of the 21st century: a comparative analysis of primary teacher professionalism in New Zealand and England

This article analyses findings from two studies conducted collaboratively across two educational settings, New Zealand and England, in 2001–2002. These studies examined the impact of national educational policy reforms on the nature of primary teachers’ work and sense of their own professionalism and compared these impacts across the two countries. Adopting a policy ethnography approach, using in‐depth interview data from samples of teachers in each country, it is argued that there have been discursive shifts in the meaning of the three key terms, autonomy, altruism and knowledge, embodied in the classical professionalism triangle. These shifts reflect policy‐makers’ moves from a ‘professional‐contextualist’ conception of teacher professionalism towards the ‘technocratic‐reductionist’ conception that accompanies neo‐liberal educational reforms in many countries. Teachers in both countries experienced increasing constraints on their autonomy as they became far more subject to ‘extrinsic’ accountability demands. Whether these demands were perceived as enhancing or diminishing teacher professionalism depended on the manner in which they were filtered through the profession’s defining quality, namely teachers’ altruistic concerns for the welfare of the children in their care.     

Disintegrate the unit!

Margaret Meek (1988) has described how children borrow ideas from literature through ‘unteachable’ lessons. In this article I explore how children's written work might be enhanced through ‘teachable’ lessons, where the teacher draws attention explicitly to aspects of literature and the literary devices used by authors, and where children explore and evaluate literature through group reading and discussion. The interrelationship between children's knowledge and understanding of literature and their writing development is examined. The way that critical reading and group discussion can develop children's metalanguage and metacognitive understanding is illustrated.