Constructing education for sustainable development: the secondary school geography curriculum and initial teacher training

If education is a solution in working toward a sustainable future then initial teacher training (ITT) provides a strategic opportunity for ensuring that all teachers are able to teach for sustainability when they begin their teaching careers. This paper reports on a study of how four Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) student teachers planned and taught education for sustainable development (ESD) through geography during a school placement. It was carried out to provide exemplification of the nature of student teachers' planning and teaching about ESD in secondary schools in England and to identify ways of improving their PGCE course. The findings are based on interviews with student teachers after the school placement, as well documentary evidence. Policy‐driven changes in the provision of both ITT and school curricula and pedagogy in England are an important context for the study. The paper concludes by arguing that ITT faces considerable challenges if it is to be reoriented towards sustainability.     

The dimensionality and measurement of destructive instructor-leadership

ABSTRACT

The conceptualization of destructive leadership has received increasing attention in recent times. Accordingly, researchers have developed a theoretical model of destructive leadership that highlights two manifestations as follows: (1) leading followers towards goals that contradict the organization’s interests and (2) the use of harmful methods in leading followers. The two manifestations of destructive leadership point to the concept being multidimensional. However, researchers rarely investigate the dimensionality of destructive leadership when measuring the concept in general and in instructor–student relationships. Moreover, the most prominent measure of destructive leadership fails to capture its two manifestations adequately. To address the apparent mismatch between the theory and measurement of destructive instructor-leadership, we enhance an existing measure of destructive leadership. Using a sample of 174 students from the U.K., the findings indicated that the two manifestations of destructive instructor-leadership can be measured by 13 items, and was composed of three dimensions including, irresponsibility, victimization and callous communication. These findings along with limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

The Development of Clustering in Episodic Memory: A Cognitive-Modeling Approach

Younger children’s free recall from episodic memory is typically less organized than recall by older children. To investigate if and how repeated learning opportunities help children use organizational strategies that improve recall, the authors analyzed category clustering across four study-test cycles. Seven-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and young adults (N = 150) studied categorically related words for a free-recall task. The cognitive processes underlying recall and clustering were measured with a multinomial model. The modeling revealed that developmental differences emerged particularly in the rate of learning to encode words as categorical clusters. The learning curves showed a common pattern across age groups, indicating developmental invariance. Memory for individual items also contributed to developmental differences and was the only factor driving 7-year-olds’ moderate improvements in recall.     

The influence of instruction on verbatim and content text recall

This investigation focuses on text recall in eight‐ and nine‐year old children. The main focus was on whether two different sets of instructions had a differential influence: one set instructed students to focus on an orally presented text verbatim, and the other instructed students to focus on its content. A differential influence on verbatim and content recall might indicate separate storage of verbatim and gist information, and could provide evidence for two subprocesses of text processing – that is, for construction and integration. The instructions were administered either before or after hearing the text, and recall was tested again one week later. The results showed differential instruction effects on verbatim and content recall. These effects depended on the time of instruction. Verbatim instruction had an enhancing effect on verbatim recall, both when instructions were given before and when given after text presentation. Content instruction given after text presentation had a suppressing effect on verbatim recall, but involved no advantage for content recall. Content recall was not suppressed by verbatim instruction at any time of instruction. Thus, the processing of content seems to be less situated than the processing of verbatim information.     

Writing and knowledge: Effects and re-effects

Recent cognitive research on writing deals with various factors influencing writing (in the sense of textproduction). One of these factors is knowledge of a specific topic. The opposite effect of writing on knowledge, however, is rarely examined in research. Being interested in the relationships between knowledge and writing some of our results of a research project which has been conducted in the years 1987 to 1989, will be reported.     

Can we make sense of learning theory?

This article discusses a range of theoretical models of the learning process that have been published in recent years, and examines whether it is possible to relate them systematically to one another. Problems in such an enterprise include those of terminology; globe trotting; the development of separate schools of research that have proceeded largely independently, each with their own central concerns, perspectives, and methodology; and the problem of whether the various different activities popularly described by the word learning do in fact have anything much in common. Despite these difficulties, however, the article argues that the various major models each contain certain key concepts, not necessarily identical in each model, from which it is possible to produce a meta-model - a framework or cognitive map within which the individual models can be located and therefore better understood. The article ends by proposing one such meta-model, and suggesting some ways in which it might be used.     

MARKETING HIGHER EDUCATION: MYTHS AND PROBLEMS

The budgetary decentralization of higher education in the United Kingdom calls for individual institutions and units within them to take increasing responsibility for raising their own funds. The author, who argues that higher education institutions must derive an increasing proportion of their budgets from the marketing of their products goes on to explain how this can be done. To begin with, the nature of marketing and of market research must be well understood, and the legitimacy of the marketing process itself must be accepted by all the members of the university community. It is then necessary to do a marketing audit so as to establish what a given institution has to sell and what its outside environment wishes to buy. Flexibility on the part of the seller with regard to type, level, duration, and scheduling of courses is very important. It is also necessary to be able to persuade the potential buyer that he wants to have what the seller has to offer. At this point, however, the author cautions the reader as to the dangers of some seven market myths as applied to higher education and the dangers of oversell. He concludes that with prudence higher education can be marketed to the satisfaction of all concerned with results which avoid the “unhappy paradox” that the marketing of higher education is both essential and disastrous.     

Making the hidden curriculum visible: sustainability literacy in higher education

Despite strong political support for the development of sustainability literacy amongst the UK graduates, embedding sustainability in the higher education curriculum has met with widespread indifference, and in some cases, active resistance. However, opportunities exist beyond the formal curriculum for engaging students in learning about sustainability. Previous research has highlighted the potential of the university campus for experiential, place-based learning about and for sustainability. This has been conceptualised as the ‘informal’ curriculum, consisting of extra-curricular activities and student projects linking estates and operations to formal study. However, the impact of the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ (the implicit messages a university sends about sustainability through the institutional environment and values) has been overlooked as a potential influence on student learning and behaviour. This article reports on a small-scale research project which utilised a phenomenographic approach to explore students’ perceptions of the ‘hidden sustainability curriculum’ at a leading sustainability university. The findings suggest that helping students deconstruct the hidden campus curriculum may enhance aspects of sustainability literacy; developing students’ understanding about sustainability and creating solutions to sustainability issues, enabling evaluative dialogue around campus sustainability and also self-reflection, which could be transformative and translate into pro-environmental behaviour change. This research is transferable to other contexts.