Curriculum as an instrument of change with particular reference to the social sciences

The social science curriculum of the future must prepare students to face rapidly changing circumstances in their world. The home and church seem to be unable to deal with those changes that are leading to a deterioration in human relationships and moral standards. The school seems to have the greatest potential for meeting the challenge and it is argued here that the most suitable setting in the school is the classroom with a wide range of ability and racial groups in it. The methodological principles stemming from the Taba Curriculum in Social Studies, supplemented and refined by those of Piaget and Kohlberg, offer possibilities for effecting positive social changes to meet the moral crisis at present facing Western society.

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Résumé Dans le futur, le programme d'études des sciences sociales devra préparer les élèves à faire face aux changements rapides de leur monde. La maison et l'église semblent incapables de s'occuper des transformations qui mènent à la déterioration des relations humaines et des valeurs morales. Il semble que l'école a le plus grand potentiel pour faire face à ce défi et l'auteur soutient que le meilleur milieu dans l'école c'est la salle de classe composée d'élèves qui ont des aptitudes variées et qui viennent de différents groupes raciaux. Les principles méthodologiques qui dérivent du programme scolaire dans les ciences sociales de Taba, augmenté de ceux de Piaget et Kohlberg, offrent des possibilités d'effectuer des changements sociaux positifs afin de faire face à la crise morale qui confronte à présent la société occidentale.

     

Curriculum online? Exploring the political and commercial construction of the UK digital learning marketplace

Government support for the production and consumption of educational software is now a key element of New Labour's education technology drive. At present much attention is being directed towards marketing ‘digital learning’ to an educational sector traditionally wary of technological innovation. In an effort to understand the social shaping of this current phase of policy‐making, the present paper examines the political and commercial discourses surrounding digital learning and associated initiatives such as Curriculum Online and the Digital Curriculum. After analysing a range of political and commercial texts produced from 2000 to 2005, the paper explores the dominant themes emerging from these discursive constructions—considering in particular the limitations of the often ambiguous yet structured ways in which digital learning is being shaped by its key actors.     

Pupil Speech during Morning News: the effects of reducing teacher questions and increasing pauses and praise

Classroom discourse patterns were examined in the morning news sessions of a primary school classroom. The effects of reducing teacher questions and increasing rates of teacher pauses, praise and directives were investigated. Child words spoken and child expansions were recorded, as well as class call‐outs and teacher control statements. Frequencies of child words spoken showed no significant changes across the phases of the study. However, reducing teacher questions and increasing teacher pauses significantly decreased child expansions, while reducing teacher questions and increasing teacher praise significantly increased child expansions. Replacing teacher questions with directives had no significant effect upon child expansions. Class call‐outs and teacher control statements showed no significant changes across the intervention phases. The results of this study suggest that, for this teacher and class, teacher questions may be decreased without adversely affecting either child utterances or class behaviour, and that replacing questions with praise may increase children's contributions — particularly in the form of verbal expansions — to morning news talks.     

Designing STEAM Education: Fostering Relationality through Design‐Led Disruption

A significant contention underpinning the commentary around STEM / STEAM is the evidence of discipline hierarchies, and inherent binary perspectives and/or biases that lend themselves to privileging one or more disciplines over another in an interdisciplinary education context. The current focus on increasing engagement with STEM in Australian schools provides opportunities to explore how the creative and liberal arts, and arts‐based approaches to teaching and learning are being adopted to significantly enhance teaching and learning outcomes in and for STEM education. This article examines how design for a STEAM education programme evolves and is adopted in an Australian context. Tasmania represents one of the most vibrant creative communities in Australia. At the same time it has one of the lowest levels of educational attainment. Entrenched teaching habits and disciplinary hierarchies often create significant barriers to the implementation of STEAM despite genuine goodwill and enthusiasm for STEAM among teachers and within schools. This article argues that, despite the contrasting dynamics extant in the Tasmanian educational context, it is here that some of the nation’s most curious and exciting examples of STEAM teaching and learning have emerged. It offers an example of an innovative learning project and proposes the means by which these disciplinary strands have been effectively entwined.     

A brief for individual merit in Michigan

Amicus Curiae

A brief for individual merit in Michigan Covington &; burling for the national association of scholars     

Subject English as citizenship education

This article is equal parts educational history and political philosophy. We aim to remind readers that subject English (SE) and indeed state education emerge from the contradictory impulses of classical liberalism, and that, more than simply resembling citizenship education, SE emerges in the first instance as a form of highly normativising citizenship education. We further argue that, following England's recent educational reforms initiated by former Education Secretary Michael Gove, SE continues to be framed in moral terms consistent with citizenship education—again, of a highly normativising sort. England's current educational policy generally, and specifically the framing of SE, employs the language of liberal possibility, while ultimately espousing an invidious exclusionary and assimilationist politics. The framing of SE, moreover, is one that misrepresents the supposedly ‘rich and varied literary heritage’ it is supposed to exemplify and promote. The current political landscape in which the study of literature takes place is one where a crisis of liberalism is manifest (in terms of populism, radicalisation or apathy). However, we do not believe the answer is to retreat into a sealed, hermetic canon that excludes the reality that England and English literature are fundamentally multicultural and polyethnic. SE will be the poorer for not fully acknowledging and embodying this, for not enabling students to imaginatively and critically engage with characters and experiences that reflect both the present and long-standing diversity of English society, as well as its present and long-standing inequalities.     

Reading the mass violence in Indonesia 1965–1966 as a form of primitive accumulation

Abstract

A human rights perspective is compromised in its ability to understand and respond to the mass violence that took place in Indonesia, largely against members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) from 1965–1966. In “Indonesia's Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965–66,” Hilmar Farid makes the point that a human rights standpoint is limited when capital or its various actors, are involved in propagating and/or perpetrating mass violence. In starting to fashion an alternative reading, Farid proposes Marx's notion of primitive accumulation. While Farid's position is suggestive, I contend that his analysis is marred by a number of theoretical weaknesses, which I attempt to sublate in this article. As such, I will offer an alternative reading of primitive accumulation perceived through a multi-dimensional local/global dialectic.     

The rating of perceived exertion predicts intermittent vertical jump demand and performance

The aims of this study were (a) to assess the ability of the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) to predict performance (i.e. number of vertical jumps performed to a fixed jump height) of an intermittent vertical jump exercise, and (b) to determine the ability of RPE to describe the physiological demand of such exercise. Eight healthy men performed intermittent vertical jumps with rest periods of 4, 5, and 6 s until fatigue. Heart rate and RPE were recorded every five jumps throughout the sessions. The number of vertical jumps performed was also recorded. Random coefficient growth curve analysis identified relationships between the number of vertical jumps and both RPE and heart rate for which there were similar slopes. In addition, there were no differences between individual slopes and the mean slope for either RPE or heart rate. Moreover, RPE and number of jumps were highly correlated throughout all sessions (r = 0.97-0.99; P < 0.001), as were RPE and heart rate (r = 0.93-0.97; P < 0.001). The findings suggest that RPE can both predict the performance of intermittent vertical jump exercise and describe the physiological demands of such exercise.