Heroes and villains: the insistence of the imaginary and the novice teacher’s need to believe

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman, as their powerful need to believe. The paper draws on psychoanalytic theory in order gain insights into this process, viewing the pre-service teachers’ accounts of their mentors as fantasies that serve a stabilising function in order to manage the intense emotional demands of schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with considerations of how teacher educators might ameliorate the ideality of novice teachers, reflecting the insistence of the imaginary, and hence enable them to benefit more from the practicum experience. We briefly suggest the use of tools that work within the symbolic register to exercise a mediating role in the context of these intense demands.     

Characterising the different blogging behaviours of students on an online distance learning course

Since the early years of the twenty‐first century there has been an increasing interest in using Web 2.0 technologies to support learning in Higher Education. However, previous research suggests that the integration of blogging into courses can be difficult and cites problems with issues such as student compliance. We adopt a learner‐centred perspective and explore students’ (rather than their educators’) understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education. We report on a study of UK Open University (OU) students on an online distance learning Masters course, that has enabled us to determine the issues that are important to these bloggers, and we describe five ways in which they appropriated blogging to suit their individual needs. We discuss the importance of making blogging activities flexible so that students can blog to meet their own needs whilst still attending to the requirements of their course.     

Learning to listen and listening to learn: one student’s experience of small group collaborative learning

The dialogic nature of small group collaborative learning requires verbal contributions from students to progress individual and group learning. Speaking can become privileged over listening as a collaborative act, and an imbalance in these values can become embedded in the classroom culture to the degree that the core value of listening can be invisible to students new to the learning contexts. The focus of this paper is a single case study of the experience of an international Asian-background student (Korean), learning in a Western (Australian) problem-based learning (PBL) physiotherapy context. Video data and interviews highlight his difficulty with learning to listen and listening to learn, and his privileging of speaking over listening. We question whether failure to signal the importance of listening is the result of the current shift in emphasis to learning through speaking, leading to a subsequent loss of attention to the role of listening in collaborative learning. Further, we question the cultural inclusivity of the PBL educational paradigm and recommend specific tutor training on scaffolding students?? listening skills in this dialogic learning context.     

中、澳、芬数学课程标准中内容分布的比较研究

以中国、澳大利亚维多利亚州、芬兰官方数学课程标准为研究对象,通过对三国数学课程标准的内容数量、结构框架、详略程度、要求程度、内容分布、内容变化方面进行比较发现:中国数学课程标准内容条目最多、最详细,其次是澳大利亚维州数量居中,芬兰最少、概括性强;三个国家数学课程标准中数与运算、几何内容都较其他内容所占比重更大、强调更多;中国数学课程标准在不同学段上所侧重的内容不同,呈动态变化趋势,而澳大利亚维州各学段各部分内容比重相当,随学段增长,不同内容所占比重无明显变化,芬兰不同学段内容设置不固定,内容所占比重也不固定,不受统一模式限制。     

The sublime objects of education policy: quality,equity and ideology

Quality and equity are touchstones of education policy in the twenty-first century in a range of global contexts. On the surface, this seems fitting: after all, who could object to more quality and greater equity in education? Yet what do we mean by quality and equity, and how are they related? This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to argue that not only are quality and equity far more complex than education policy formulations typically imply, but also that despite their elevated place in policy debates they remain elusive, serving as sublime objects that function as sites for the investment of desire, while simultaneously covering over and compensating for the ultimate impossibility of a complete and harmonious society. The paper argues that it is a result of their occupying this empty place, and through their holding out the (illusive) promise of enjoyment, rather than as a consequence of their specific or intrinsic content, that sublime objects such as equity and quality exert their particular ideological force.     

Increasing evaluation sensitivity to diversity

Many queries have multiple interpretations; they are ambiguous or underspecified. This is especially true in the context of Web search. To account for this, much recent research has focused on creating systems that produce diverse ranked lists. In order to validate these systems, several new evaluation measures have been created to quantify diversity. Ideally, diversity evaluation measures would distinguish between systems by the amount of diversity in the ranked lists they produce. Unfortunately, diversity is also a function of the collection over which the system is run and a system’s performance at ad-hoc retrieval. A ranked list built from a collection that does not cover multiple subtopics cannot be diversified; neither can a ranked list that contains no relevant documents. To ensure that we are assessing systems by their diversity, we develop (1) a family of evaluation measures that take into account the diversity of the collection and (2) a meta-evaluation measure that explicitly controls for performance. We demonstrate experimentally that our new measures can achieve substantial improvements in sensitivity to diversity without reducing discriminative power.     

To Hope or to Know: Coping with Uncertainty and Ambivalence in Women's Magazine Breast Cancer Articles

Breast cancer is one of the most feared diseases in contemporary Western society. Popular women's magazines are important sources of information about and orientation to the disease. The current study applies problematic integration theory in an interpretive analysis of all breast cancer articles appearing in five top-circulating women's magazines between 1997 and 2002. In so doing, the study illuminates two major challenges (uncertainty and ambivalence) and several imperfect approaches to coping constructed in this discourse (simplification, information-seeking/provision, affect management, trusting intuition, sustaining hope, and metaphoric reframing). These results have several clear and important practical implications and highlight a major and largely untried direction for future research.