Meeting the Challenge of Professional Development: Design and Evaluation of a Telecommunications Mediated Course in Science,Mathematics, and Technology Education

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Bade logon ki tarah: pregnant and poor in the city

Abstract

This paper shores up the overdetermined web of fear-desire-helplessness-aspiration that impinges on the birthing experiences of women at the economic periphery of urbanity, i.e. the urban poor, positioned at the borders of the urban and its outside, affluence and its lack. The urban poor (pregnant) woman, by dint of being physically located in the city remains unable to be part of the state healthcare network in rural areas; at the same time she is marked by an inability to purchase healthcare from high-end urban private providers. Consequently, she is positioned in an in-between space of access and care, aspirations and resistance, occasionally getting (even physically) trapped in a limbo between the hospital/institution and its outside. For this woman, the materiality of the hospital symbolises development-modernity; in accessing the hospital, the urban poor woman accesses an ontology that is “like the well-off people,” the “legitimate” claimants of the city. Between her dreams of approximating the space of urbanity and development, and an experience of being pushed back to the city's periphery—locationally and metaphorically, the urban poor woman gets inscribed by conflicting and counterpoised experiences of birthing, which is what this paper maps.     

Evolution of a teaching approach for beginning algebra

The article reports aspects of the evolution of a teaching approach over repeated trials for beginning symbolic algebra. The teaching approach emphasized the structural similarity between arithmetic and algebraic expressions and aimed at supporting students in making a transition from arithmetic to beginning algebra. The study was conducted with grade 6 students over 2 years. Thirty-one students were followed for a year, and data were analysed as they participated in the three trials conducted that year. Analysis of students’ written and interview responses as the approach evolved revealed the potential of the approach in creating meaning for symbolic transformations in the context of both arithmetic and algebra as well as making connections between arithmetic and symbolic algebra. Students by the end of the trials learnt to use their understanding of both procedures and a sense of structure of expressions to evaluate/simplify expressions and reason about equality/equivalence of expressions both in the arithmetic and the algebraic contexts.