The Warren Cup: Highlighting Hidden Histories

Contemporary artists and art galleries have been more active than museums in representing gay and lesbian culture in public spaces in recent decades. However same‐sex relationships have a long history that is reflected in the collections of museums that have material from the classical world. The culture of ancient Greece and Rome was less inhibited about the representation of sexual acts than many nineteenth‐century museums would have liked. Objects with frank images of sexual acts were discreetly censored or hidden away in secret cabinets. This article draws on one object as a case study, a Roman silver cup dated to the early years of the first century AD acquired by the British Museum in 1999. The cup is decorated with beautifully realised scenes in relief decoration which show two pairs of males engaged in love‐making, each pair consisting of one older male and a youth. The object could never have been acquired or publicly displayed earlier in the twentieth century. The vessel known as the Warren Cup (after a previous owner) provides a provocative stimulus for debate about male‐to‐male lovemaking. Discussion of the meaning of the scenes, and the possible reasons why they were represented on such a high‐status object, generates more questions than answers. This uncertainty contributes to the power of this object to open up debate. This article will raise questions for educators and students to consider about the Cup, an object which society has only recently ceased to regard as pornographic or obscene.     

Being Subjective about Autistic Thinking and Learning to Learn

In this paper, we discuss the deviant pattern of the development of thinking in autism and outline our thesis that the problem with autistic memory is in developing a personal episodic memory, and that this difficulty arises because of a deficit in the development of an experiencing self, which we have termed (after Brewer, 1986) an ‘ego‐self. We discuss constraints which we suggest result in learnable thinking skills remaining domain specific: difficulties with (i) language, (ii) coding, storage and retrieval of information and (iii) the role of emotions. We discuss what ‘improving the thinking’ of individuals with autism would entail and draw implications regarding fundamental requirements and caveats of teaching thinking for all individuals.     

Contextual cues and depth of processing in short prose passages

Two experiments compared context and depth-of-processing strategies applied to the learning of short aurally presented prose passages. In the first study, contextual orientation led to significantly higher recall than a continue-paragraph condition, and both strategy groups performed significantly better than a nonstrategy control group. In the second experiment, continuing paragraphs was superior to generating contextual theme statements, with both strategies again superior to the controls. These results were discussed in terms of the ways in which processing demands effect memory for connected discourse.     

The Promise of Ecological Inquiry in Writing Research

Ecological inquiry (EI) in research of academic and workplace writing explores interactions between individuals and environments as these entities interpenetrate. This article provides a brief history from the past 3 decades of developments in writing theory. It then outlines the key tenets of EI, highlights how EI is compatible with other models, and presents new and interesting possibilities afforded by this type of inquiry.     

The Multiple Meanings of Play: Exploring Preservice Teachers' Beliefs About a Central Element of Early Childhood Education

This basic qualitative study explores preservice teachers' beliefs about what constitutes play. Research for this study focused on 7 preservice teachers enrolled in an early childhood through Grade 4 practicum course at a small private university in south central Texas. The findings of this study indicate that both on an individual and group level the 7 preservice teachers seemed to believe that play had multiple meanings. Even though commonalities existed among some of the attributes used by the preservice teachers to describe play, no two preservice teachers used the same combination of attributes to define play. Instead, based on the influences that had shaped their beliefs, they strung these attributes together in unique ways. Thus, for each of the preservice teachers, play seemed to have an individualized meaning consisting of multiple parts.     

Construct Validity of Self-Reported Metacognitive Learning Strategies

Despite their significant contributions to research on self-regulated learning, those favoring online and trace approaches have questioned the use of self-report to assess learners' use of learning strategies. An important rejoinder to such criticisms consists of examining the validity of self-report items. The present study was designed to assess the validity of items to assess 9th-grade students' use of planning, monitoring, and regulation when studying math. To establish response process evidence of construct validity, cognitive interviews were coded to determine whether students' interpretations of the items were consistent with their intended meaning and whether their response choices were congruent with those interpretations. Evidence supported the construct validity of monitoring and regulation items, but to a lesser degree those designed to assess planning. We discuss implications of the evidence for the self-report assessment of learners' use of metacognitive strategies.