“防火护林熊”的新森林

森林大火往往给人类造成巨大损失,甚至危及居民的安全。各国对森林防火都非常重视。但有些森林火灾却完全是由自然因素导致的,可以说让人防不胜防,并且起火以后的火势也极难控制。1988年美国黄石公园森林大火就是典型的例子,当时,人们在大自然面前表现出来的扑火努力似乎显得有些渺小。     

Examining student-designed games through Suits' theory of games

This paper documents how a unit of student-designed games can create a more meaningful version of physical education (PE) for disengaged students, a version that enhances the educational legitimacy of the subject matter by affording it worth in and of itself rather than being justified for other, extrinsic or instrumental reasons. Furthermore, it seeks to develop new knowledge relating to the conduct of game instruction within PE, by using Suits' theory of games. Drawing on Suits' theory, we develop a conceptual model that is intended to represent the hierarchical processes that occur in gameplay through student-designed games. This model is then tested via examination of the experiences of a cohort of teachers and their year 10 students from a mixed secondary school in the greater London area. From our discussions with the students, it is argued that the key focus of the games that these students were used to playing was the need to ‘play the game well’. By contrast, we suggest that it is possible to provide more meaningful experiences to students if a more philosophically driven and less efficiency-driven approach to games is taken, following Suits' lead more closely. By exploring the loop between and around lusory means, lusory goals and constitutive rules (the aspects of Suits' theory that have been shown to represent student-designed games), students engage with a more meaningful games experience than simply playing the game well. This ‘new’ approach to games may offer counterbalance to the ideological tendencies now emphasized in countries and contexts that celebrate instrumental outcomes of performative PE and sport rather than affording worth in and of itself to the curriculum’s subject matter.     

Sharing Books and Learning Language: What do Latina Mothers and Their Young Children Do?

This study examined low-income, Spanish-speaking, immigrant Latina mothers' book sharing behaviors in relation to their children's vocabulary. Participants were 47 3-year-old children and their mothers. We addressed two research questions: (a) What interactive behaviors are evident when low-income immigrant Latina mothers and their 3-year-old children look at books together? (b) For these children and their mothers, which book-sharing behaviors are related to children's expressive language? Overall, our results indicated that mothers were involved in several kinds of interactions with the books. They enhanced their children's attention to the printed text, promoted interaction or conversation with their children about what was in the books, and somewhat less often, used more complex literacy strategies. Mothers who did these things most had children with the largest vocabularies even when mothers' vocabulary was taken into account. Implications for designing interventions for similar families are discussed.     

Why university lecturers enhance their teaching through the use of technology: a systematic review

The purpose of this systematic review is to add to current understanding of technology‐enhanced teaching through a process of synthesis and analysis of a collection of contemporary case studies set within university contexts. The justification to review case studies comes from Pinch and Bijker’s concept of the ‘social construction of technology’ as a way to structure the relationships between technological artefacts used in teaching and those social groups that shape their use. Basil Bernstein’s sociological theory of pedagogy provided the framework for the analysis of the case studies. His concepts of ‘classification’ which examines power relations between categories, such as agencies, agents, discourses and practices, and ‘framing’ which examines the control of instruction in relation to the selection, sequence, pacing and evaluation of learning and determines the relationship between teachers and students, were used as instruments for the analysis of the systematically chosen case studies.