Exploring young children's (mathematical) thinking: preservice teachers reflect on the use of the one-to-one interview

One-to-one interviewing is one of the most powerful ways of exploring young children's thinking. While there are a few studies which report the use of this pedagogic strategy by preservice teachers, more are needed. This paper describes an early childhood mathematics education assignment which preservice teachers in a teacher-education college in Ireland undertake with four- and five-year-old children. It presents an analysis of data from a selected sample of 58 preservice teachers' reflections on their dialogues with individual children. It describes how the preservice teachers engaged with the process of interviewing the children; how they reflected on their interactions with the children; their reflections on the children's engagement; and their reflections on young children's mathematics generally. Some dilemmas faced by the participants in the course of the interviewing are highlighted. Findings demonstrate the integrated nature of the knowledge that early childhood teachers need to teach early childhood mathematics effectively. The learning arising from this assignment relates to early childhood mathematics thinking, to the psycho-social nature of learning in early childhood and to pedagogy in early childhood education.     

Turning heads: The impact of political reform on the professional role,identity and recruitment of head teachers in Wales

This article considers the professional work, identity and recruitment of head teachers (HTs) in Wales. Drawing on the sociology of professions, the article illustrates how intensive educational policy reform post‐2011 has restricted HTs’ professional agency and re‐orientated the head teacher role towards organisational professionalism. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews (n=30) with both head and deputy head teachers, the article argues that issues with the recruitment and retention of HTs in Wales can, in part, be explained by the promotion of managerial and technicist approaches to professional practice. This role reconfiguration is the result of myriad and, at times, overlapping accountability mechanisms. The article illustrates how these changes to HT professional roles and identity are more intense within a small education system where HTs had, traditionally, enjoyed an elite professional status. To ameliorate these issues, the article proposes policy initiatives which the Welsh Government could introduce to foster the agency of HTs within a revised professional framework for educational leadership in Wales.     

Agency,sociomateriality, and configuration work

Social informatics research offers insights into the relationship between information technologies and social contexts. However, the material roles of information technologies, and their interplay with the agentic work of social actors, have not been addressed. Drawing on a field study of 37 mobile knowledge workers, we examine the dual material roles (enabling and constraining) played by information technologies in their work practices. We also investigate how these workers exert agency by fashioning multiple information technologies into a functioning digital assemblage. Although information technologies provide consequential affordances that enable mobilization of work across spaces and times, they simultaneously present design-driven, local, organizational, and temporal technological constraints that require mobile knowledge workers to engage in “configuration work” to make information technologies function effectively. Building on a sociomaterial perspective, we further discuss the interplay of information technologies and work practices enacted by mobile knowledge workers, in which both human and technological agency are materialized.     

Classroom Interaction and the Development of Empowerment

What is the practical pedagogic value of the zone of proximal development? How might we draw from the writings of Vygotsky and Leont’ev with regard to understanding the process of children and young people’s development as socialised intellectual beings? This article applies cultural-historical theory to classroom activity in order to reveal the potential for dynamic change in subjectivity, agency, cooperation and collaboration. After a detailed theoretical contextualisation which links primary sources and the cultural-historical tradition to learning and development through classroom activity, an incident in a lesson is discussed and situated in its wider narrative of practical experimentation, diagnosis and implementation.     

对旅行社的社会责任问题的探讨

企业作为社会的一员,需要承担起相应的社会责任。本文以旅行社这个特殊企业为对象,认为我国的旅行社存在严重的社会责任缺失现象,并从三个方面进行了具体阐述。在此基础上,分析了我国旅行社社会责任缺失的原因。最后,提出了我国旅行社的社会责任应有的内涵。     

当代官场小说中的政治伦理问题

20世纪90年代中后期兴起的当代官场小说,对社会转型时期中国社会中政治领域出现的政治伦理异化现象及其导致的严重后果作了生动的描写,对当代政治权力建构的正当性和权力基础的合法性问题进行了深入的探讨,给当代中国政治伦理的现代性重建提供了有益的参考.     

民俗学视域下《人生》文本细读

路遥的中篇小说《人生》蕴含着大量的民俗事象,通过解读文本,可以发现民间领袖在乡村的巨大威慑力,他们是族权与政权的结合;可以见到民俗乡约所形成的习俗惯制对俗民巨大的约束力以及俗民自觉恪守的虔诚;可以看到民俗禁忌被破坏后,俗民的恐慌与不安;同时还可欣赏到具有浓郁地方色彩的信天游民歌,品味纯正的陕北方言俗语从而感悟到作者浓厚的民间乡土情结。     

IBM's Chess Players: On AI and Its Supplements

This article investigates the ways in which the reporting of technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as occasions in which Occidental modernity's cultural antinomies are played out. It takes as its reference point the two chess tournaments (in 1996 and 1997) between the then world champion Gary Kasparov and the IBM dedicated chess computers Deep Blue and Deeper Blue and shows how these games of chess came to be seen as an arena where fundamental issues pertaining to human identity were contested. The article considers the dominant framing of these encounters in terms of a conflict between two opposed categories—“human” and “machine”—and argues the essential role of human agency, the human supplement, in the performances of machine intelligence.     

香港地区学生贷款:贷款机构的视角

根据政府对资本市场干预程度的不同 ,香港地区形成了三类教育贷款 ,即政府补贴性贷款、成本回收型教育贷款和盈利性教育贷款。这三类教育贷款在满足不同群体的教育需求上是互补的。香港入息教育款的成本回收率达 71 .4% ,这表明香港的教育贷款已形成了一个良好的资金发放与回收体系 ,1 %的贷款拖欠率亦表明香港已具备了完备的个人信用制度与金融网络体系     

蔡元培平民教育思想初探

作为近代著名的教育家，蔡元培在北京大学及任中华民国教育部长期间，开办平民夜校。提倡普及义务教育、男女同校，积极推动了中国近代平民教育事业的发展。其教育思想及实践，开创了近代中国普及教育的先河，具有重大的时代意义。