Improving Professional Education Courses

Abstract

College and university teaching involves almost universally and hegemonically the large group lecture format. This ubiquitous learning and teaching space has, however, long been criticized for the production of passive learning in which the “sage on the stage” transmits, and students receive passively. This article reports on and evaluates a longitudinal multidisciplinary controlled experiment in which students were exposed to imagery and non-redundant text-narrative to assess the presence or absence of active learning principles. The trial found that students exposed to MML experienced 40–80% greater levels of active learning practices over those exposed to narrative and text. Given the physiological (cognitive) nature of MML predictions, the implications of the research impact upon all disciplines where lectures are a means of knowledge-sharing practices in Higher Education.     

Photography Albums/Collections

Ansel Adams, Images 1923-1974 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1974---$65 before January 1st, $75 afterwords; $275 for limited edition)

Arnold Newman's One Mind's Eye: The Portaits and Other Photographs of Arnold Newman (New York: David R. Godine, 1974---$27.50)

Ben Madow's Edward Weston: Fifty Years (New York: Aperture Press 1974---$40.00)

Robert Doty (ed.) Photography in America (New York: Random House, 1974---$25.00)

Milton Meltzer and Bernard Cole's The Eye of Conscience: Photographers and Social Change (Chicago: Follett, 1974--- $6.95)

Library of Photographers (New York: Grossman in cooperation with the International Fund for Concerned Photographers, Inc., 1974--- prices vary but books in both hard and soft cover)

Masters of Contemporary Photography (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974---$7.95/3.95 each volume)

Walter Herdeg's Photographic '74 (New York: Hastings House, 1974---$35.00)

Photography Year, 1974 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1974--- $11.95)

Roger Whitehorse's New York: Sunshine and Shadow--A Photographic Record of the City and its People from 1350 to 1915 (Yew York: Harper & Row, 1974---$12.50)

Ralph Stein's The Pin-Up: From 1052 to Now (New York: Playboy Press with Simon and Schuster, 1974---$17.95)     

Action learning in ActionAid Nepal: a case study

This article describes an example of how action learning was used as a framework for an organisational intervention to fundamentally change the organisational culture over a period of time. It also identifies our learning over that period of time and what worked well (and not so well) in an International Non-Governmental Organisation in Nepal.     

The social circumstances of illiteracy: Interpretation and exchange in a class-based society

Illiteracy, an extreme form of educational failure, is best understood in social structural terms, rather than as an individual psychological phenomenon. This structural interpretation of illiteracy is similar to critical institutional treatments of poverty, inadequate health care, and other persistent “social problems.” Instead of treating such problems as manifestations of remediable systemic imperfections, they are construed to be predictable consequences of the routine working of basic institutions in a class-based society. The institutionally determined social circumstances of illiteracy, moreover, are complemented by a context-specific logic that makes illiteracy a substantively “rational” achievment. In spite of its interpretable rationality, however, illiteracy retains the character of a self-inflicted wound that indexes a broad range of even more debilitating grievances.