A Visual Culture Art Education Curriculum for Early Childhood Teacher Education: Re‐Constructing the Family Album

This article reflects on the reading and writing of an art education curriculum for teacher education centred on the biographical and social reconstruction of childhood. The foundations of this curriculum interconnect ideas from different fields like postmodern childhood studies, visual studies, and the performance of subjectivity and memory. This is an interpretative curriculum centred in narrating aesthetic encounters for imagining and producing alternative views of childhood. It stresses the relevance of biographic work in the formation of teaching identities, and constructs dialogues and connections between the private and public discourses of childhood. In this context the family album becomes a powerful resource for visual analysis, cultural critique, and subjective re‐construction.     

The Classroom Practice of a Prospective Secondary Biology Teacher and His Conceptions of the Nature of Science and of Teaching and Learning Science

We describe research carried out with a prospective secondary biology teacher, whom we shall call Miguel. The teacher’s conceptions of the nature of science and of learning and teaching science were analyzed and compared with his classroom practice when teaching science lessons. The data gathering procedures were interviews analyzed by means of cognitive maps and classroom observations. The results reflected Miguel’s relativist conceptions of the nature of science that were consistent with his constructivist orientation in learning and teaching. In the classroom, however, he followed a strategy of transmission of external knowledge based exclusively on teacher explanations, the students being regarded as mere passive receptors of that knowledge. Miguel’s classroom behavior was completely contrary to his conceptions, which were to reinforce the students’ alternative ideas through debate, and not by means of teacher explanation.     

Students with special educational needs and cooperative learning in the ordinary classroom: some learnings from teaching practice

This article presents the results of a study to determine the strategies used by teachers to include students with special educational needs in regular classrooms, primarily using Cooperative Learning strategies. It aims to identify the factors of inclusive learning in order to enhance the participation and learning of all students in the classroom and in their cooperative teams. A qualitative case study was carried out in the context of the teachers participating in a postgraduate course ‘expert in cooperative learning’ offered by the University of Alcalá (Spain), over a period of six years (2011–2017), involving the participation of 176 professional teachers. All the participants attended an annual university continuous training course on cooperative learning. Document analysis, in-depth interviews and a questionnaire designed ad hoc were used. The conclusions include the importance of cooperative work in facilitating inclusive education, with a variety of different strategies used to respond to all students' needs, and those with special educational needs in particular, and the coordination required between teachers and special educational needs specialists to implement those strategies.     

Irish student teachers’ beliefs about self,learning and teaching: a longitudinal study

This paper explores the beliefs about self-as-teacher, learning and teaching of preservice elementary teachers during a three-year undergraduate programme. Using a qualitative grounded theory analysis, the study examined the initial beliefs or personal theories of 27 preservice teachers during their first Semester. Longitudinal data were gathered from 7 of these students over the three-year duration of their teacher education programme through iterative interviews and reflective journal analysis. The findings demonstrate expansion in preservice teachers’ understandings of the teacher’s role, the value of reflective practice, the differential needs of learners and approaches to pedagogy. Findings point to lacunae in preservice teachers’ capacity for critical reflective practice and demonstrate how classroom management concerns can cause preservice teachers to adopt more cautious and traditional pedagogical approaches, despite their espoused commitment to child-centred principles.     

Comparing Automatic and Manual Measures of Parent–Infant Conversational Turns: A Word of Caution

The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) records children’s language environment and provides an automatic estimate of adult–child conversational turn count (CTC). The present study compares LENA’s CTC estimate to manually coded CTC on a sample of 70 English-speaking infants recorded longitudinally at 6, 10, 14, 18, and 24 months of age. At each age, LENA’s CTC was significantly higher than manually coded CTC (all ps < .001, Cohen’s ds: 0.9–2.05), with the largest discrepancies between the two methods observed at younger ages. The Limits of Agreement Analyses confirm wide disagreements between the two methods, highlighting potential problems with automatic measurement of parent–infant verbal interaction. These findings suggest that future studies should validate LENA’s CTC estimates with manual coding.     

Towards Covid-19 Literacy

Covid-19 literacy, induced by the coronavirus disease (2019), is characterized as the understanding of Covid-19 as well as informed decisions based upon this understanding. This type of literacy is closely related to health literacy, scientific literacy, and scientific media literacy. It may be obvious to say that Covid-19 literacy is a key factor for governments to effectively manage the Covid-19 transition. However, lack of literature exists about Covid-19 literacy among university students. Therefore, the current study aimed to determine the Covid-19 literacy level among 4168 students from a Colombian university. The data were derived from students’ responses to a 25–item anonymous online self-reporting questionnaire. We found that 21–25-year age group, graduate students,?students enrolled prior to 2015, and medical students had a significantly higher mean score. Moreover, the Internet (86.8%) was the most popular source of information from which participants gained most information regarding Covid-19. Furthermore, 58.5% of the participants considered health workers as a source that can provide accurate information. Most importantly, the findings reveal the students’ knowledge about (1) the role of an eventual process of vaccination, (2) the test currently used as diagnostic for Covid-19, and (3) the fatality rate, three aspects of Covid-19 literacy that deserve more attention. The findings provide a useful basis for the formulation of policies and concrete actions in improving Covid-19 literacy.

     

Risk Society and Science Education

Science & Education - The current COVID-19 pandemic raises reflection on the new roles of science education in citizen education in a world characterized by civilization risks, derived from the...     

Institutional repository software platforms at undergraduate libraries in the United States

For primarily undergraduate institutions, institutional repositories can become effective tools for communicating and showcasing faculty and student research, facilitating open access initiatives, or supporting new scholarly communication practices. Choosing the right software platform is crucial to the success of a repository initiative. The literature suggests that there are only two or three software platforms heavily used in undergraduate libraries. This article aims to give a landscape of the repository platforms used in sixty-seven undergraduate libraries in the United States in late 2013; it also includes the results of a short survey about current institutional repository software platforms and users/administrators’ satisfaction.     

Depictions of Human Bodies in the Illustrations of Early Childhood Textbooks

In many Ibero-American countries children in the early childhood education (ECE) system have the opportunity to interact with textbooks on a regular basis. The powerful social function of textbooks in socializing children in primary and secondary school, and in legitimizing what counts as cultural norms and officially sanctioned values and knowledge, is clearly documented. However, the examination of ECE textbooks especially in the context of developing countries for messages about the social construction of the body is virtually nonexistent. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to examine, through a content analysis of the illustrations, the representation of the body across the different categories of gender, age, activity level, space and disability in eight Colombian ECE textbooks from the three major commercial publishing houses between 2009 and 2012. Our results show that these textbook authors and publishers have made an effort to promote equality between the genders. However, only four disabled people were portrayed in the illustrations and there was a lower proportion of older adults doing a limited range of gross motor activities. Likewise the results note that, although progress has been made in terms of the balance of gender representation in textbooks, these still reinforce and legitimize the status of the “able-body”, and contribute to consolidating a view of able-bodiedness as the dominant norm. Taking into account that beliefs and prejudices constitute barriers to education and social participation, these results suggest that the representation of children with disabilities in ECE textbooks at the earliest stages of education should be mandatory.