Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.     

Counting at nursery school and at primary school: Toward an instrument for diagnostic assessment

For about ten years, new research data have led us to enlarge the Piagetian model of the learning of the concept of number. Research investigations of counting have especially emphasized the importance of some abilities related to the construction of the concept of number. We think these researches should more greatly influence the practice of assessment. But valid tests should be available for psychologists and teachers to appraise the child development of the mastery of counting. For this purpose, we developed a set of tasks on the base of a critical analysis of Gelman and Gallistel counting principles. In a first step of our research, we used these tasks in a large sample of children from the French-speaking community of Belgium. This sample was composed of pupils from the third year of the nursery school (N=439) and from the first year of the primary school (N=103). Some of our results are quite different from those of previous investigations. We observe that many 5-year-old children are far from mastering and to coordinating the counting principles. A significant percent of pupils in the first year of the primary school are in the same situation. The implications of these difficulties for the beginning of the learning of arithmetic are emphasized.     

Oases at the bottom of the ocean

In the early 1980s biologists were amazed, and sometimes sceptical, to be told of the existence of luxuriant fauna thriving at depths of between two and three thousand metres close to hot water springs. Frequently consisting of hitherto unknown species, these colonies are nothing less than oases, contrasting starkly with the deserts usually to be found at great depths. One of their features is a very short life cycle. But, most strikingly, they are the first discovery on our planet of living systems which survive without solar energy or photosynthesis.     

Multivariate predictive model for dyslexia diagnosis

Dyslexia is a specific disorder of language development that mainly affects reading. Etiological researches have led to multiple hypotheses which induced various diagnosis methods and rehabilitation treatments so that many different tests are used by practitioners to identify dyslexia symptoms. Our purpose is to determine a subset of the most efficient ones by integrating them into a multivariate predictive model. A set of screening tasks that are the most commonly used and representative of the different cognitive aspects of dyslexia was proposed to 78 children from elementary school (mean age = 9 years ± 7 months) exempt from identified reading difficulties and to 35 dyslexic children attending a specialized consultation for dyslexia. We proposed a multi-step procedure: within each category, we first selected the most representative tasks using principal component analysis and then we implemented logistic regression models on the preselected variables. Spelling and reading tasks were considered separately. The model with the best predictive performance includes eight variables from four categories of tasks and classifies correctly 94% of the children. The sensitivity (91%) and the specificity (95%) are both high. Forty minutes are necessary to complete the test.     

Passion in sport: on the quality of the coach-athlete relationship

Vallerand et al. (2003) developed a dualistic model of passion, wherein two types of passion are proposed: harmonious (HP) and obsessive (OP) passion that predict adaptive and less adaptive interpersonal outcomes, respectively. In the present research, we were interested in understanding the role of passion in the quality of coach-athlete relationships. Results of Study 1, conducted with athletes (N=157), revealed that HP positively predicts a high-quality coach-athlete relationship, whereas OP was largely unrelated to such relationships. Study 2 was conducted with coaches (N=106) and showed that only HP positively predicted the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Furthermore, these effects were fully mediated by positive emotions. Finally, the quality of the coach-athlete relationship positively predicted coaches' subjective well-being. Future research directions are discussed in light of the dualistic model of passion.     

Private Issues in Public Spaces: Regimes of Engagement at a Citizen Conference

Minerva - The ‘participatory turn’ in science and technology governance has resulted in the growth of initiatives designed to engage lay people in consultation and decision-making on...     

Les Capacités Cognitives Chez Les Adultes

International Review of Education -