News and Islamist Radicalization Processes: Investigating Muslims’ Perceptions of Negative News Coverage of Islam

This study investigated how Muslims perceive negative news coverage of Islam and how these perceptions possibly contribute to radicalization processes. Utilizing qualitative interviews with former Islamists, Study 1 indicated that radicalized Muslims perceive a governmental infiltration of the media resulting in negative content. Analyses indicate that perceptual phenomena (hostile media, third person), negation, and anger play an important role in radicalization processes. We built on these findings in Study 2, utilizing a laboratory experiment in which Muslims were exposed to negative news content. Indeed, Muslims engaged in negation, perceived news as hostile, and perceived strong effects on non-Muslim Germans. These effects were stronger among Muslims with religious fundamentalist beliefs. Interestingly, negative news elicited anger, independent of such fundamentalist beliefs.     

(N)Olympia in Germany? An analysis of the referendum against Munich 2022

In November 2013, local citizens of Munich and the surrounding districts voted in a referendum against a city’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Since this is but one example of such a failed referendum—others being the ones in Poland, Switzerland and Austria—it is astonishing that it seems to become common practice to conduct public polls regarding the bid for a mega sport event. The city of Hamburg, for instance, will be the next German city to hold a referendum on its bid for the 2024 Olympic Games in November 2015. Against this backdrop, we introduce the ‘Arenatheoretical Model’ into mega event research and conduct a qualitative content analysis of the media coverage on the Munich referendum. Three nationwide German newspapers were analysed as the model suggests that this coverage has a profound influence on the public opinion in other parts of the country. The aim was to identify arguments brought forward to explain the outcome of the referendum. Besides a number of other issues, such as concerns regarding event legacy and regional matters, major findings stress the significance of a damaged brand image of international sport organisations and ‘their’ events. Based on these insights, a number of implications can be derived for other cities/nations and sport organisations that depend on a favourable public opinion in their efforts to stage a mega sport event.     

INCLUSION: Special or inclusive education: future trends

In this article, Lani Florian, Professor of Social and Educational Inclusion at the University of Aberdeen, examines the relationships between ‘special’ and ‘inclusive’ education. She looks at the notion of specialist knowledge among teachers and at the roles adopted by staff working with pupils with ‘additional’ or ‘special’ needs in mainstream settings. She explores the implications of the use of the concept of ‘special needs’– especially in relation to attempts to implement inclusion in practice – and she notes the tensions that arise from these relationships. She goes on to ask a series of questions: How do teachers respond to differences among their pupils? What knowledge do teachers need in order to respond more effectively to diversity in their classrooms? What are the roles of teacher education and ongoing professional development? How can teachers be better prepared to work in mixed groupings of pupils? In seeking answers to these questions, Lani Florian concludes that we should look at educational practices and undertake a thorough examination of how teachers work in their classrooms. She suggests that it is through an examination of ‘the things that teachers can do’ that we will begin to bring meaning to the concept of inclusion.     

Task-dependent construction of mental models as a basis for conceptual change

Learning can be seen as a task-oriented process which often requires the reorganization of existing knowledge, usually referred to as conceptual change. This paper describes a theoretical framework for the analysis of conceptual change that considers conceptual knowledge as a generative cognitive tool for the creation of more specific mental representations — propositional symbolic structures and analog mental models. According to this view, conceptual change is based on a task-oriented interaction between these different kinds of mental representations. The assumption is made that it is possible to foster conceptual change by presenting to students well-defined tasks that stimulate the construction of elaborated mental models as well as an intensive interaction between these models and the corresponding propositional representations. In order to test this assumption an empirical study was conducted, in which subjects had to express their prior knowledge about a complex subject matter from the field of geography (time differences on the earth), which contained various conceptual deficits. The subjects were then randomly assigned to different groups who received the same learning material but had to solve different learning tasks requiring differently structured mental models. Afterwards, the subjects were asked to express their knowledge about the subject matter again and were tested for understanding with a comprehension test. The results support the view that a task-oriented interaction between propositional structures and mental models can help learners to evaluate the consistency of their conceptual knowledge. Accordingly, conceptual deficits result in the formation of mental models with an inadequate structure. Such deficits can be detected if the respective model is used in a sufficiently variable way, whereas they can remain unnoticed if it is used in a limited manner.     

Inclusive pedagogy in action: getting it right for every child

A key assumption underpinning formative assessment strategies is that individual pupils must be fully involved in the process. While such engagement and attention on the individual is important, studies suggest that teachers do not always readily engage with formative assessment as a reciprocal process which involves pupils. Additionally, a focus on individual differences between pupils can be problematic if the work that is set for some is differentiated to such an extent that they are not able to participate in classroom activities with others. Inclusive pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning that attends to individual differences between pupils but avoids the marginalisation that can occur when pedagogical responses are designed only with individual needs in mind. Using participant observation and video footage from three classrooms that captured ‘learning moments’ identified by teachers and pupils, this study documents how the professional craft knowledge of teachers develops as they learn to use what their pupils have to say about learning in the context of whole class teaching. By concentrating on the findings from one site, this paper shows how teachers can use what they learn from listening to pupils’ self-assessments of their learning in ways that meet the standard of inclusive pedagogy.