The False Paths, the Endless Labors, the Turns Now This Way and Now That: Participatory Action Research, Mutual Vulnerability, and the Politics of Inquiry

Participatory Action Research (PAR) and its many variants are rapidly gaining prominence as viable research tools and methodological alternatives to address histories of exploitation, surveillance, and social exclusion, deeply embedded in mainstream research. However, it is at this transgressive intersection of theory, action, expertise, power, and justice that a host of new challenges to the conduct of research in collaboration with and not just on, or for subordinated people, emerges. This article attempts to intimately describe the challenges of using PAR methods to revise Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness in the context of a parent organizing group and a youth research project, while taking seriously the speed bumps, multiple subjectivities, implicit racism, sexism, classism, and politics of knowledge production that are too often obscured behind published academic writing.

Maximising meaning: creating a learning environment for reading comprehension of informative texts from a Vygotskian perspective

Sociocultural theories based on the work of Vygotsky have been increasingly influential in educational sciences. Developmental education (DE) is a pedagogical approach based on Vygotskian theory that has inspired primary schools in the Netherlands to change the learning environment innovatively in a comprehensive way. In this article, we focus on the learning environment for reading comprehension of informative texts in upper-primary grade classrooms in DE. Our aim is to contribute to a more profound understanding of the characteristics of learning environments that are inspired by a Vygotskian approach and that are conducive to reading comprehension of informative texts. Five fourth-grade expert DE teachers participated in a multiple case study aimed at describing and analysing these characteristics for the domain of reading informative texts. Data were collected over a period of six to eight weeks for each teacher and consisted of videotaped interviews, classroom observations and documents. We conclude that DE learning environments are focused on maximising meaning from text for students. This is achieved by organising learning on the basis of emergent goals within students’ participation in sociocultural practices.     

Contextualiser la place du français et du malgache dans le système éducatif du Madagascar: une perspective historique

Abstract

Avant la colonisation de Madagascar par la France en 1896, la plupart des enfants malgaches scolarisés avaient fréquenté des écoles dirigées par des missions protestantes. La langue d’enseignement était la langue malgache, une langue écrite, développée avec l’aide de missionnaires britanniques à partir de 1820. Elle était celle du groupe clanico-politique dominant. La colonisation imposa la langue française. Le pouvoir colonial avait considéré la langue comme un instrument important dans la politique d’assimilation et la création d’élites qui pourraient servir son projet. Mais l’administration coloniale dans les pays colonisés influençait fortement l’exécution de la politique éducative. Madagascar est d’ailleurs un cas pertinent dans ce sens à cause de l’existence et le statut de la langue écrite Malgache. La politique assimilatrice dominante n’a pas empêché des désaccords au sein de l’administration coloniale sur la place de la langue malgache dans l’éducation. L’argument majeur était que cette langue renforcera le groupe ethnique Merina et alimentera davantage le nationalisme malgache au détriment de l’assimilation. Depuis l’Indépendance en 1960, la politique linguistique a évolué selon les régimes politiques. Les perspectives théoriques dans le domaine de la “literacy” (des aptitudes à lire et à écrire vu comme une pratique sociale) décrivent celle-ci comme une pratique sociale et un instrument de pouvoir. Sa diffusion générale a été associée avec un développement démocratique, mais aussi avec l’oppression. L’article montre comment la politique des langues d’enseignement à Madagascar s’est basée sur des arguments politique et pédagogique dans des contextes différents.     

Learning and the development of social identities in the subjects Care and Technology

This article discusses the way in which social identities structure the learning processes of students in two subjects in the Dutch secondary school curriculum—Care and Technology. It analyses interviews with 23 students and their teachers with a view to explaining the disappointing results in these subjects in terms of breaking through gender and class‐related preferences and learning outcomes. The subjects Care and Technology refer to social practices with which groups of students identify in different ways. On the other hand, students also appear to make active use of these subjects in their identity development. The authors argue for explicitly combining the notion that learning is peripheral participation in social practices with analyses of the power relationships that structure those practices. Also, the question should be addressed of how the relative autonomy of the school can be used for organizing learning experiences in such a way that the constraints of social position and identity are reduced, and the restrictive character of social identities is challenged.     

Les principales tendances de la sociologie de l'education en France

Sans résumé     

An evaluation of local teacher support strategies for the implementation of inquiry-based science education in French primary schools

This article presents the results of an evaluation of local teacher support strategies for implementing inquiry-based science education (IBSE) in French primary schools. The research objective was to determine which aspects of the French model of IBSE are implemented in class, and the efficiency of each teacher support strategy. Data were recovered through class observations. Findings confirm the need for long and continuous forms of teacher support, and expose the advantages and disadvantages of support delivered by pedagogues and support delivered by university science students. Writing in science class, which isa fundamental aspect of the French IBSE programme, is far from being implemented according to advocated practices.     

Does Facebook Use Predict College Students’ Social Capital? A Replication of Ellison,Steinfield, and Lampe’s (2007) Study Using the Original and More Recent Measures of Facebook Use and Social Capital

In 2007 Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe published an article on the positive association between Facebook use and social capital that started a decade of research on the social outcomes of social network site use. Although cited almost 9,000 times, it received critique on the conceptualization and operationalization of Facebook use and social capital. In this study we replicate Ellison et al.’s study with original and alternative measures of social capital and Facebook use, thereby shedding light on the robustness, stability, and ecological validity of the original findings. We found that Facebook intensity positively predicts the original social capital measures, lending support to the validity of the original findings. Its relationship with structural measures, however, was weak for bridging and absent for bonding social capital.