Supporting Professionalism,Diversity, and Context Within a Collaborative Approach to Gifted Education

Educators concerned about gifted learners are moving toward an evidence-based perspective focusing on children with exceptionally advanced learning needs who require flexibly responsive educational attention. This article describes two system-wide implementation experiences, one in a mixed urban/rural public school board and the other in an urban board of affiliated parochial schools, designed to meet the educational needs of diversely competent students. The authors discuss the intersecting roles of consultants, teachers, administrators, and parents, and some creative applications they have implemented that illustrate a respect for (a) teachers' professionalism, (b) individual developmental diversity, and (c) context-specific opportunities and constraints. The authors discuss ways that this flexible collaborative approach to integrating consultative processes into board-wide practices addresses the diverse educational needs of gifted learners, and also encourages high-level outcomes in learners not formally identified as gifted.     

Learning environments at the margin: Case studies of disenfranchised youth doing science in an aquarium and an after-school program

In this article, we explore how two informal educational contexts—an aquarium and an after-school science program—enabled disenfranchised learners to adopt an identity as insiders to the world of science. We tell the stories of four youth, relating what doing science meant to them and how they positioned themselves in relation to science. We contribute to the extensive literature on the value of learning beyond the school walls, yet focus on ethnically and linguistically diverse youth from low-income backgrounds who have often been excluded from such settings. We suggest that such out-of-school settings are particularly important to youth who have few other opportunities to interact with and relate to science in positive ways.     

Constructing and understanding of place value in numerical notation

The purpose of this study was to investigate how children aged five to nine gradually build up an understanding of the characteristics of place-value inherent in the written number system. The task consisted in presenting collections of chips, asking children to produce the corresponding two-digit numerals, and then questioning them in a structured clinical interview about the possible numerical meaning (in terms of correspondence to a number of chips) of each of the digits in the numeral. Results show that the idea that parts of the notation must correspond to mutually exclusive parts of the collection is but slowly built up, and that subsequently it is fleshed out by the use of knowledge concerning oral numeration_— written numeration correspondences. Intuitions concerning «groups of ten» arise later. A fair proportion of eight-year-olds and all nine-years-olds saw the two-digits as corresponding to, on the one hand, a number of units, and on the other, a number of groups of units.     

Managing course design

Any complex activity, such as course design, which involves group work must be managed. In universities, where academics are not always familiar with managing, it is often unsystematic. A modest attention to management can help a project, and may pay dividends in the avoidance of waste, conflict, overruns of time or budget or other potential disasters. The author presents a comprehensive framework for the various aspects of managing that may be needed and offers an extended checklist.     

转达未知世界的信息:科幻作品的交际模式

科幻作品叙事最初使用两种传统的叙事形式:旅行叙事和历史叙事。按其物质规则,科幻作品也意识到科学发现在向这些传统发起挑战,并最终证明传统的叙事手法是不足的。科幻叙事向读者转达过去或将来未知世界的信息时,情况更是如此。某些科幻叙事,即使在与血肉之躯的读者相关的叙事受众极度错位的情况下,继续违背事实地依赖传统形式,对问题视而不见。而另一些科幻叙事,比如本文中所讨论的这些,两者均意识到了由于时空错位所产生的问题,显然在寻求开辟新的叙事模式来应对这些问题。科幻作品中的“新颖性”,通常是指主题与内容。主题与形式是不可分割的,但是我们也希望结合由科学产生的新的时空情境,说明科幻作品如何证明原有层次的高度创造性。     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.