The Empirical Spectator and Gallery Education

This paper examines the onto‐epistemic status and understanding of contemporary material culture and of visual art, particularly in the context of gallery education. It does so through a case study of the response of 15 year‐old school students in the Czech Republic and in England to a recent photographic exhibition, I.N.R.I., created by artists Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly. It supports and develops further the proposition that the tradition grounded in the concept of a single ‘objective’ interpretation of a work of art has been significantly undermined by the paradigmatic change that has taken place in the last decades. In the course of this process the vocabulary of signification (e.g. doves, the royal blue, temptations of Christ, class struggle) inherited from the age of ideologies and grand narratives has been significantly weakened. In its place there emerged the vocabulary of signs born out of the language of high tech media. It takes the form of dynamically constituted units identifiable via daily exposure to techno processes, e.g. familiar from advertising and networking, at best mere fragments of traditional narratives. The recognition of reality is couched in terms of consumer units originating in objects (e.g. gadgetry) and object‐based practices filling (indeed constituting) the living place of today. This shift is particularly apparent among English young people, brought up in a more consumer‐oriented society, and to a lesser degree among Czechs. This is well in keeping with the concept of the post‐modern ‘empirical spectator’ developed in recent literature on art and material culture education.     

Undergraduate students as partners in new faculty orientation and academic development

Addressing both the increasingly complex process of becoming an educator at the tertiary level and the growing recognition of the importance of student engagement, student–faculty partnerships have emerged as one way of fundamentally rethinking academic development. Participant reflections suggest that the over-time, partnership approach to orientation and development presented in this article effectively supports new faculty as they develop their academic identities. The approach includes opportunities for dialogue and collaboration with students offered before new faculty arrive on campus, as part of orientation before classes begin, during the first semesters of teaching, and in subsequent semesters.     

Traveling with and through your backpack: a personal reflection on the infrastructure of science education

In this paper I respond to Ajay Sharma’s Portrait of a Science Teacher as a Bricoleur: A case study from India, by speaking to two aspects of the bricoleur: the subject and the discursive in relation to pedagogic perspective. I highlight that our subjectivities are negotiated based on the desires of the similar and competing discourses we are exposed to, and the political powers they hold in society. As (science) teachers we modify our practices based upon our own internal arbitrations with discourses. I agree with Sharma that as teachers we are discursively produced, however, I suggest that what is missing in the discussion of his paper is the historically socially constructed nature of science or science education itself. I advocate that science education is not neutral, objective or unproblematic. Building on Gill and Levidow’s (Anti-racist science teaching, 1987) critique, it is precisely because we are socially constructed by the dominant hegemonic science education discourse that we rarely articulate the underlying political or economic priorities of science; science’s appropriation of other cultural ways of knowing; the way science theory has been, or is used to justify the oppression of peoples for political gain; the central role science and technology play in the defensive, economic and political agendas of nations and multinational corporations who fund science; the historical, and contemporary role science plays in rationalizing an exploitative ideological perspective towards the more-than-human world and the natural environment; and finally, the alienating effect science has on students when used as a ranking and sorting mechanism by educational systems. Therefore, we need to do what Mr. Raghuvanshi could not imagine: we need to destabilize the foundations of science education by questioning inherent structural and ideological inequities.

Bottom: A Case Study Comparing Teaching Low Ability and Mixed Ability Year 9 English Classes

This article takes the form of a case study which compares two Year 9 English groups ‐ one mixed ability, one a low set ‐ and the different approaches used to prepare the pupils for their SATs. The focus of observation has been on the differing opportunities made available to a mixed ability set, contrasted with a bottom set, and identifies clear implications that lower set pupils are offered a significantly limited range of teaching strategies in the delivery of the National Curriculum. The article indicates that the benefits of selective setting in English are for adults rather than children, and argues that placement in a low set has a detrimental effect on pupils rather than providing an appropriate learning environment. Finally, the article draws attention to the long‐held anomaly that whilst setting continues to proliferate in the UK education system, there is no clear evidence that it has any positive impact on pupil performance.     

博洛尼亚宣言与德国职业技术教育师资培训新模式(二)

职业技术教育(TVET)师资培训的新模式博洛尼亚宣言对在TVET师资培训方面的学位结构新模式的开发产生了影响,导致德国大学各种各样TVET师资培训模式的出现。德国学术机构在一项对新学制实施的分析研究中揭示出了三类新的模式。本文将这些模式描述为:     

The challenge to professionals of using social media: teachers in England negotiating personal-professional identities

Social media are a group of technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which offer people chances to interact with one another in new ways. Teachers, like other members of society, do not all use social media. Some avoid, some experiment with and others embrace social media enthusiastically. As a means of communication available to everyone in modern society, social media is challenging teachers, as other professionals in society, to decide whether to engage with these tools and, if so, on what basis – as an individual (personally), or as a teacher (professionally). Although teachers are guided by schools and codes of practice, teachers as individuals are left to decide whether and how to explore social media for either their own or their students' learning. This paper analyses evidence from interviews with 12 teachers from England about their use of social media as to the challenges they experience in relation to using the media as professional teachers.. Teachers are in society’s spotlight in terms of examples of inappropriate use of social media but also under peer pressure to connect. This paper explores their agency in responding. The paper focuses on how teachers deal with tensions between their personal and professional use of social media. These tensions are not always perceived as negative and some teachers' accounts revealed a unity in their identities when using social media. The paper reflects on the implications of such teachers' identities in relation to the future of social media use in education.     

Self‐stigma and domains of well‐being in high school youth: Associations with self‐efficacy,self‐esteem,and self‐criticism

Self‐stigma is a phenomenon in which negative public stereotypes about mental illness are internalized and can undermine help‐seeking. Unfortunately, little is known about how self‐stigmatization relates to positive well‐being indicators among youth. A sample of 134 high school students completed established measures of self‐stigma, well‐being, self‐esteem, self‐efficacy, and self‐criticism. Analyses confirmed that self‐stigma was associated with overall well‐being and five well‐being subscales (autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations, and self‐acceptance); the strongest associations were with autonomy and positive relations with others. The majority of these associations still held when simultaneously controlling for self‐esteem, self‐efficacy, and self‐criticism. Taken together, findings point to the need for greater awareness of self‐stigma along with an explicit focus on the promotion of protective well‐being in prevention work and interventions designed to alleviate the tendency for young people to internalize stigma. Additionally, findings have theoretical implications for the “why try” model of self‐stigma.     

In a Class of Their Own? Swedish Women School Teachers and the Fertility Transition in the Late Nineteenth Century

When Egil Johansson began his work in the parishes of northern Sweden, women's history, in common with the history of literacy, was in its infancy. Demographers did not ask questions of their sources specifically about gender relations. In the succeeding quarter century women's historians have begun to ask key questions about processes such as changing patterns of family formation, women's place in the building of educational institutions, and women's role in public and private life, using existing sources in innovative, sometimes critical, ways. This paper reports on a pilot study that focuses on the education of women in northern Sweden in the late 19th century in relation to their patterns of family formation, drawing from the Demographic Database computerized records, routinely generated education records, and local archives. This combination of sources, it argues, can enable links to be made between gender systems, their maintenance (or disruption) and demographic change. But those links require a wider interdisciplinary approach if theories of fertility decline are to be developed.