Meeting the Global Challenge? Comparing Recent Initiatives in School Science and Technology

A comparison is made between two schemes in England and New Zealand--the technology colleges programme and the Science and Technology Teacher Fellowship scheme--designed to promote science and technology education in the two countries. Both schemes are placed within the context of recent developments in science and technology education in England and New Zealand and are evaluated as responses to the challenges posed for science and technology education by the forces of globalisation and the growing importance of the 'knowledge economy'.     

Fighting Boys and Fantasy Play: The construction of masculinity in the early years of school

Using a post-structural framework, the paper analyses the dynamics of the process by which little boys adopt a definition of masculinity as avoiding whatever is done by girls. It is argued that this is a response to the fact that the 'fighting boys' who resist the school's demands have appropriated the role of hero in the warrior narratives of little boys' fantasy games, casting the 'good boys' who conform to the requirements of the school as despised 'wimps' and 'sissies'. This leads the 'good boys' to adopt an alternative definition of masculinity as 'not female', and in many cases leads also to the scorn and rejection being redirected to girls as a group. It is suggested that teachers should intervene in this cycle by explicitly discussing the character of the hero in these warrior narratives and showing that it ought not to be equated with the classroom and playground behaviour of the 'fighting boys'.     

School Counseling: State Officials' Perceptions of Certification and Employment Trends

The purpose of this research was to assess the perceptions of officials of state departments of education regarding school counseling.     

Motor processing difficulties: guidance for teachers in mainstream classrooms

Difficulties in motor processing are often seen in children with specific literacy difficulties. Indeed many children with dyslexia may also have a diagnosis of dyspraxia. This article seeks to increase understanding of difficulties in motor processing and to provide practical advice to teachers to assist in identification of such difficulties. It will examine a range of presenting issues in the classroom, but with a primary focus on handwriting. Drawing on the experience of the authors and literature in this area, practical strategies are offered that may be implemented by teachers in mainstream classrooms.     

Personal Computers in Laboratory Teaching of Control

This paper reports on the incorporation of personal computers in the laboratory program at UMIST's Control Systems Centre. Laboratory practice is an integral component of all our control course. The laboratory facilities provide a mechanism for testing and verifying theoretical and design approaches. Incorporating computers in all phases of the laboratory program makes possible the use of current techniques in the analysis and design of realistic control systems. The control systems laboratory at UMIST has been developed with the goal of providing real world analysis and design experience in a laboratory setting. A collection of scale model experiments representing the major categories of industrial control problems has been constructed. These working models are coupled with a standard instrumentation interface and analogue and digital computers to implement control strategies. In all cases, great care has been taken to retain realism and allow the student to concentrate on control issues rather than configuration or programming problems. The primary objective of using personal computers in the control laboratory is to provide an on-line link between the student and the laboratory model. This provides direct ‘hands on’ experience of digital control ideas, interactive digital control experimentation and use of the computer as a multi-function virtual instrument. In addition, the computer is used off-line to simulate model performance as various control strategies are tried. At this point in time, each laboratory model station has been equipped with a personal computer containing A/D and D/A converters, hard and floppy disk, and a real-time clock. The computers are networked to provide access to printing and file storage facilities. Originally the software packages were written primarily in BASIC, and ran on BBC computers. These versions are however in the process of being replaced by PC-based packages written in C. Both the original BASIC and the C-successors have been developed to provide interactive, real-time control of the model using a choice of digital control algorithms. Using the keyboard as a control panel, the student can observe model performance, vary controller parameters, choose display characteristics and record parametric and graphical data. Future developments will expand the choice of available control algorithms and enhance the off-line analysis and design tools.     

Feminist Praxis and the Gaze in the Early Childhood Curriculum

ABSTRACT Traditional approaches to curriculum development in early childhood education derive from modernist developmental understandings of the child. The article argues that such understandings of the child can support patriarchal gender relations by skewing the teacher's gaze and that reconstructing the teacher's gaze is central to feminist pedagogical praxis in early childhood education. One early childhood teacher's struggle to reconstruct her gaze via feminist readings of the child is used to explore the possibilities and challenges of working for feminist reconstructions in the early childhood curriculum.