The pig-pet,pork or sacrifice?

Prior to early retirement, Arthur Arnold was Head of Community and Teaching Studies at Bradford College in the U. K. His book,Children, Animals and Books—The Historical and Social Significance of Animals in Children's Literature, is forthcoming (Croom Helm). He has also written novels for teenagers. Mr. Arnold's article in defense of the wolf appears inCLE, Summer, 1986.     

SEEK Web tutor: fostering a critical stance while exploring the causes of volcanic eruption

We investigated the impact of a Web tutor on college students’ critical stance and learning while exploring Web pages on science. Critical stance is an aspect of self-regulated learning that emphasizes the need to evaluate the truth and relevance of information as the learner engages in systematic inquiry to answer challenging questions. The Web tutor is called SEEK, an acronym for Source, Evidence, Explanation, and Knowledge. The SEEK Tutor was designed to promote a critical stance through several facilities in a computer environment: spoken hints on a mock Google™ search page, on-line ratings on the reliability of particular Web sites, and a structured note-taking facility that prompted them to reflect on the quality of particular Web sites. We conducted two experiments that trained students how to take a critical stance and that tracked their behavior while exploring Web pages on plate tectonics to research the causes of the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens. The SEEK Tutor did improve critical stance, as manifested in essays on the causes of the volcanic eruption, and did yield learning gains for some categories of information (compared with comparison conditions). However, many measures were unaffected by either the presence of the SEEK Tutor or by prior training on critical stance. We anticipate that robust improvements on critical stance and learning will require more training and/or some expert feedback and interactive scaffolding of critical stance in the context of specific examples. This work was conducted while Tenaha O’Reilly was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Memphis.     

Team-taught versus individually taught undergraduate education: a qualitative study of student experiences and preferences

Team teaching is becoming more common in undergraduate programmes of study although the relative merits to the more traditional individually taught courses have not been determined for best practice. For this study, 15 final-year undergraduate computer science students were interviewed to gain insight into their learning experiences. A thematic analysis of the interview data identified the perceived advantages and disadvantages of each mode of teaching. The advantages of individually taught courses included: consistency of content delivery and advice, familiarity with the lecturer’s teaching style and better continuity of the subject content. The disadvantage of individually taught modules included missing knowledge, compared to a team approach. Advantages of team-taught modules included: greater insight into a topic delivered by multiple team members. Disadvantages included: content overlap, conflicting messages relating to assessment, team members not taking ownership of their roles and responsibilities and a belief that overall team failure is worse than individual failure to deliver a module well. The results revealed that individually taught modules were generally preferred to team-taught modules. A set of best practice recommendations are proposed to address the challenges when delivering team-taught teaching and become more student focused.     

The Kalamazoo plan: Institutionalizing internships for liberal arts students

Reviewing the literature and attending conferences reveals a sad similarity in the practice of most career development programs. Most colleges provide counseling, testing, and a number of workshops. The problem is not with the information presented, but with the teaching-learning methodology used to communicate it. Most current approaches are didactic in nature and therefore incompatible with the very essence of career development. This article will describe the successful career internship program at Kalamazoo College, which combines career development and experiential learning with impressive results.     

The Large Context Problem (LCP) Approach

This article traces the development of a contextual approach to the teaching of science (physics) subsequently called the Large Context Problem (LCP) approach. This approach is based on the general observation that learning could be well motivated by a context with one unifying central idea capable of capturing the imagination of the students. The design and the placing of the LCP is followed by a detailed discussion of the contexts of inquiry (as we find it in Newtonian physics) that attempts to give the contextual activities found in the LCP a sound theoretical backing. However, the contextual base must also be informed by the findings of constructivist learning theories as well as the history of science. Moreover, thought experiments (TEs) are considered an important aspect of science (physics) teaching and three kinds of TEs are discussed. All these ideas are summarized for a quick overview in a table called “Levels of investigation for scientific inquiry.”     

Discovery learning: zombie,phoenix, or elephant?

Discovery learning continues to be a topic of heated debate. It has been called a zombie, and this special issue raises the question whether it may be a phoenix arising from the ashes to which the topic was burnt. However, in this commentary I propose it is more like an elephant—a huge topic approached by many people who address different aspects. What is needed in the discussion about discovery learning and related approaches, I argue, is sublation: the kind of lifting up from the one-dimensional discussion between two extremes (minimal guidance vs. direct instruction) that puts an end to the everlasting tug of war by integrating justified concerns from both opposite positions. I evaluate how the different contributions to the special issue help to sublate the discussion about discovery learning. In particular, the case study presented by Trninic illustrates how strong guidance and repetition may be needed for the discovery of something that cannot be told. I further suggest scaffolding, inferentialism, and design research as potential theoretical and methodological ways forward.     

Proposing an Operational Definition of Science Teacher Beliefs

Much research has shown that a science teacher’s beliefs are related to their teaching practice. This line of research has often defined “belief” epistemologically. That is, beliefs are often defined relative to other mental constructs, such as knowledge, dispositions, or attitudes. Left unspecified is the role beliefs play in cognition and how they come to influence science teachers’ classroom practice. As such, researchers and science teacher educators have relied on an (at times, implicit) assumption that there is a direct causal relationship between teachers’ beliefs and classroom practice. In this paper, we propose an operational, as opposed to epistemological, definition of belief. That is, we are explicit about the role a belief plays in science teachers’ cognition and how that leads to classroom practice. We define a belief as a mental representation that influences the practice of a teacher if and only if the belief is active in cognition. We then turn our attention to two limitations in the literature on that have arisen via previous definitions and assumptions regarding science teacher beliefs, showing how defining beliefs operationally helps think about these issues in new ways. The two limitations surround: (1) the difficulty in precisely delineating belief from knowledge; and (2) the interconnectedness of beliefs such that they draw meaning from one another. We then show how our definition of beliefs is congruent with other models of teacher cognition reported in the literature. Finally, we provide implications arising from this definition of belief for both science teacher educators and those who conduct research on the beliefs of both preservice and in-service science teachers.     

Yough,literacy and participation

The number of illiterates in the world continues to grow. Simultaneously, there are few if any literacy efforts in the world today that do not depend upon the energies and skills (and sometimes ideas) of young people. Youth's participation in the provision of literacy, in some industrialized as well as in many developing countries, is classified according to three patterns: the project pattern, the programme pattern, and the campaign pattern. The project pattern is not seen to hold out the prospect of enabling youth to make serious inroads into growing illiteracy. Conversely, the campaign pattern seemed largely exceptional. Suggestions are made to draw on elements of both the project and the campaign patterns to show ways of enrichting, systematizing and generalizing the programme pattern.

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Zusammenfassung Die Zahl der Analphabeten in der Welt wächst ständig. Gleichzeitig aber gibt es heutzutage wenig Alphabetisierungsbestrebungen, die nicht von den Kräften und Fähigkeiten — (und manchmal auch den Ideen)-junger Leute abhängen. Die Teilnahme Jugendlicher an Alphabetisierungsvorhaben werden in einigen Industrieländern ebensowie in zahlreichen Entwicklungsländern in drei Gruppen unterteilt: dem Projekt-, dem Programm- und dem Kampagnemuster. Das Projektmuster stellt nicht in Aussicht, daß Jugendliche die Möglichkeit haben, ernsthaften Fortschritt mit dem Problem des wachsenden Analphabetentums zu machen. Andererseits erscheint das Kampagnemuster zum größten Teil nicht wiederholbar. Es werden Vorschläge unterbreitet, Elemente sowohl aus dem Projekt-als auch aus dem Kampagnemuster einzubeziehen, um aufzuzeigen, wie das Programmuster bereichert, systematisiert und verallgemeinert werden kann.

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Résumé Le nombre d'analphabètes adultes ne cesse de croître dans le monde. En même temps, seuls peu d'efforts d'alphabétisation-peut-être aucun-ne dépendent pas, dans le monde d'aujourd'hui, de l'énergie et des compétences (et quelquefois des idées) des jeunes. Dans quelques pays industrialisés comme dans de nombreux pays en développement, la participation des jeunes à l'offre d'alphabétisation peut être classée selon trois modèles: lemodèle-projet, lemodèle-programme et lemodèle-campagne. Quelle que soit sa valeur symbolique, le modèle-projet n'offre pas la possibilité aux jenunes de faire de sérieuses incursions dans l'analphabétisme croissant. Inversement, le modèle-campagne semble être exceptionnel dans une large mesure. Il semble, cependant, possible de tirer des éléments des deux modèles — projet et campagne-pour suggérer des approches et des moyens d'enrichir, systématiser et généraliser le modèle-programme.

     

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF CHARACTER EDUCATION IN BRITISH EDUCATION POLICY

ABSTRACT:  Character education is a specific approach to morals or values education, which is consistently linked with citizenship education. But how is it possible for a heterogeneous society that disagrees about basic values to reach a consensus on what constitutes character education? This article explores how character education has returned to the agenda of British education policy, having been largely neglected since the 1960s in response to unsatisfactory attempts at character education going back to the nineteenth century. Between 1979 and 1997 Conservative governments attempted to reverse a perceived decline in moral standards, established State control of the schools curriculum, imposed on State schools the duty to provide for moral and other development, and established a National Forum which attempted to articulate a set of consensus values in education. Labour has extended these developments in the curriculum, introduced compulsory citizenship education, and its White Paper of September 2001 speaks of 'education with character'. The character and virtues Labour seeks to promote through schools are pragmatic and instrumental in intention, linked to raising pupil school performance, meeting the needs of the new economy, and promoting democratic participation. Otherwise the vision is pluralistic and evades explicit directives, and there is no explanation or analysis of its theoretical basis.
  The question of how agreement can be reached on what counts as character education may benefit from Sunstein's analysis of how law is possible in a heterogeneous society –'incompletely theorized agreements on particular cases' allow for common laws without agreement on fundamental principles. Many schools in fact operate in this way, but such a consensus is not entirely stable and runs the danger of teaching character education as a series of behaviour outcomes taught in a behaviourist fashion.