The Anthropogenic ‘Greenhouse Effect’: Greek Prospective Primary Teachers’ Ideas About Causes, Consequences and Cures

This study explores the ideas of Greek prospective primary teachers about the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, particularly about its causes, consequences and cures. For this purpose, a survey was conducted: 265 prospective teachers completed a closed-form questionnaire. The results showed serious misconceptions in all areas (causes, consequences and cures). The most prominent misconception found by this survey is the conflation between the greenhouse effect and the ozone layer depletion, which is widely reported in the literature. There is also the notion that ??good things?? (like clean beaches) can help ameliorate the greenhouse effect, whereas ??bad things?? (like insecticides) can enhance it. One of the secondary results of the survey is that prospective teachers?? main source of information about the greenhouse effect is school. This calls for educational interventions to fight misconceptions at the source. Some suggestions are presented in this paper. The results of this study are compared with the results of two similar studies conducted in the UK and in Turkey.     

A competence-based industrial learning approach for factories of the future

Manufacturing industry can improve its competitiveness through innovation and technological excellence, and appropriate Industrial Learning can help to achieve this goal through allowing the manufacturing workforce to acquire new skills related to the advanced developments in information and communication technologies. This raises the need for new Industrial Learning tools and methods from the viewpoint of learning content, learning processes, and delivery mechanisms. In this paper, we present a generic competence-based approach for Industrial Learning developed in the framework of ActionPlanT project. The approach is composed of (i) an Industrial Learning model which serves to represent and understand competence-based learning, and (ii) a methodology which implements through a number of steps the Industrial Learning actions defined using the Industrial Learning model in industrial organisations. Both the model and the methodology are presented in details. A metrics-based method for evaluating the implementation of the learning actions defined using the approach is also described.     

Students’ Views and Attitudes Towards the Communication Code Used in Press Articles About Science

The present research was designed to investigate the reaction of secondary school students to the communication code that the press uses in science articles: it attempts to trace which communication techniques can be of potential use in science education. The sample of the research consists of 351 secondary school students. The research instrument is a questionnaire, which attempts to trace students’ preferences regarding newspaper science articles, to explore students’ attitudes towards the science articles published in the press and to investigate students’ reactions towards four newspaper science articles. These articles deal with different aspects of science and reflect different communication strategies. The results of the research reveal that secondary school students view the communication codes used in press science articles as being more interesting and comprehensible than those of their science textbooks. Predominantly, they do not select science articles that present their data in a scientific way (diagrams and abstract graphs). On the contrary, they do select science articles and passages in them, which use an emotional/‘poetic’ language with a lot of metaphors and analogies to introduce complex science concepts. It also seems that the narrative elements found in popularized science articles attract students’ interest and motivate them towards further reading.     

Preservice Teachers' Beliefs About Childhood: Challenges for a Participatory Early Childhood Education?

This study examines preservice teachers' beliefs about childhood in an attempt to see how they may support an active, participatory role for children in early childhood education (ECE). Three hundred sixteen early childhood preservice teachers described childhood characteristics and children's ability for decision-making in a written text. These texts were content analyzed and then quantified. Preservice teachers' beliefs about childhood were found to vary and some of their beliefs corresponded to existing scientific theories and typologies. Despite this variation, preservice teachers' beliefs had dominant ontological and epistemological presuppositions that highlighted childhood as a homogeneous period of human life, as a state of being, rather than as a dynamic and developing period of life. The majority of preservice teachers assigned children with an ability to make decisions but only under specific preconditions. We argue that these beliefs may act as obstacles for the enhancement of participatory processes in ECE due to their ontological and epistemological underpinnings. Implications of current findings in relation to teacher education are discussed.     

Bifurcations and catastrophes of a two-degrees-of-freedom nonlinear model simulating the buckling and postbuckling of rectangular plates

The nonlinear buckling and postbuckling behavior of rectangular plates in symmetric and antisymmetric modes is re-examined, in the context of Bifurcation and Catastrophe Theories, using a two-degrees-of-freedom model, which has been adopted for the same purpose in the pioneer literature. At first the perfect system is dealt with in detail, symbolically utilizing the exact as well as the approximate equilibrium equations, the latter being products of a universal unfolding of the original total potential energy function. Conditions for the existence of remote secondary bifurcations are fully assessed and the stability of critical states is determined, revealing sudden qualitative changes in the postbuckling response of the perfect system, which have been also reported for the actual continuous structural system—the rectangular plate—using the von Kárman equations. Thereafter, the imperfection sensitivity is dealt with, introducing symmetric as well as asymmetric imperfections, considered as individual or consecutive perturbations of the perfect system. It is found that symmetry breaking bifurcations give birth to complicated cusp singularities, which may lead to unexpected jumps from one to two-mode remote postbuckling behavior. Finally, considering the general case of random imperfections, higher order two-mode singularities are revealed, mainly of the double-cusp catastrophe type, which have been also discovered in the postbuckling response of rectangular plates, a fact validating the choice of the foregoing nonlinear simulation.     

World 2: On the Significance and Impossibility of Articulation

Abstract

This article rethinks the notion of articulation as formulated in the ‘studies‐discourse’: cultural studies, gender studies, science studies. I analyse the inner workings of the concept of articulation against the background of Luis Buñuel’s film Tristana. Using the language of Spanish cultural practices, Buñuel offers the negative story of an oppressive society. The film foregrounds the role of a primordial asymmetry between the sexes in obliging articulation. This is suggestive of how articulation is interwoven with, and undone by, a radical refusal which unveils the ongoing incommensurability and inevitable disparity between the world in which we dwell and a world which remains unvoiced in the ‘studies‐discourse’: World 2, an imperceptible world which questions the fantasy of an overall and limitless emancipation inherent in the mythology of liberalism.