Unpacking (white) privilege in a South African university classroom: A neglected element in multicultural educational contexts     

Sharlene Swartz  Emma Arogundade  Danya Davis 《Journal of moral education》2014,43(3):345-361

Multiculturalism currently aims for the political accommodation of difference instead of the subversion of the resulting privileges of difference. In the South African context such a distinction is especially important since the economic and symbolic subjugation of the majority of Black South Africans continues despite political transformation, and is exacerbated by an unwillingness to reflect on privilege and inequality. Drawing on Biko and Soudien’s critique of multiculturalism and vision for anti-racist education, this paper describes a classroom activity set for 164 nationally and culturally diverse second year sociology students at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. The activity tasked students to reflect on texts by Peggy McIntosh and Khaya Dlanga (one canonical, the other contextual) and reports on these students’ nuanced understandings of personal biography, experiences of privilege and self-reflexivity that connects personal experience to social structure and historical contexts. It concludes by offering modest implications for moral education in a multicultural university classroom.  相似文献   

The EvoDevoCI: A Concept Inventory for Gauging Students’ Understanding of Evolutionary Developmental Biology     

Kathryn E. Perez  Anna Hiatt  Gregory K. Davis  Caleb Trujillo  Donald P. French  Mark Terry  Rebecca M. Price 《CBE life sciences education》2013,12(4):665-675

The American Association for the Advancement of Science 2011 report Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education encourages the teaching of developmental biology as an important part of teaching evolution. Recently, however, we found that biology majors often lack the developmental knowledge needed to understand evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo-devo.” To assist in efforts to improve evo-devo instruction among undergraduate biology majors, we designed a concept inventory (CI) for evolutionary developmental biology, the EvoDevoCI. The CI measures student understanding of six core evo-devo concepts using four scenarios and 11 multiple-choice items, all inspired by authentic scientific examples. Distracters were designed to represent the common conceptual difficulties students have with each evo-devo concept. The tool was validated by experts and administered at four institutions to 1191 students during preliminary (n = 652) and final (n = 539) field trials. We used student responses to evaluate the readability, difficulty, discriminability, validity, and reliability of the EvoDevoCI, which included items ranging in difficulty from 0.22–0.55 and in discriminability from 0.19–0.38. Such measures suggest the EvoDevoCI is an effective tool for assessing student understanding of evo-devo concepts and the prevalence of associated common conceptual difficulties among both novice and advanced undergraduate biology majors.  相似文献   

Creativity and performativity policies in primary school cultures     

Geoff Troman  Bob Jeffrey  Andrea Raggl 《教育政策杂志》2013,28(5):549-572

Cultures of performativity in English primary schools refer to systems and relationships of: target‐setting; Ofsted inspections; school league tables constructed from pupil test scores; performance management; performance related pay; threshold assessment; and advanced skills teachers. Systems which demand that teachers ‘perform’ and in which individuals are made accountable. These policy measures, introduced to improve levels of achievement and increased international economic competitiveness, have, potentially, profound implications for the meaning and experience of primary teachers’ work; their identities; their commitment to teaching; and how they view their careers. At the same time as policies of performativity are being implemented there is now increasing advocacy for the adoption and advancement of ‘creativity’ policies within primary education. These major developments are being introduced in the context of a wide range of social/educational policies also aimed at the introduction of creativity initiatives into schools and teaching. This complex policy context has major implications for the implementation process and also primary teachers’ work and how they experience it. The ethnographic research reported in this article has been conducted over a school year in six English primary schools in order to analyse the effects of creativity and performativity policy initiatives at the implementation stage. The article concludes by arguing that in the schools of our research the drive to raise pupil test scores involves both performative and creative strategies and that this critical mediation goes beyond amelioration toward a more complex view of professional practice. Implementing creativity and performativity policies provided important contextual influencing factors on teacher commitment. These were: curriculum coverage and task completion; and providing psychic rewards of teaching.  相似文献   

Commercialising comparison: Pearson puts the TLC in soft capitalism     

Anna Hogan  Sam Sellar  Bob Lingard 《教育政策杂志》2013,28(3):243-258

Abstract

This paper provides a critical policy analysis of The Learning Curve (TLC) (2012), an initiative developed by the multinational edu-business, Pearson, in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit. TLC exemplifies the commercialising of comparison and the efforts of edu-businesses to strategically position themselves in education policy processes globally. In analysing TLC, our account seeks to proffer a critical analysis of this emerging policy genre, and the way it functions as part of the new ‘soft capitalism’. We analyse TLC in relation to Pearson’s new business strategy, which emphasises corporate social responsibility and accountability to consumers for the efficacy of its products and services. We argue that Pearson is now generating and appropriating various data to legitimise its products and services according to a ‘neo-social’ mode of accountability. Network ethnography is employed to document the global networks of both people and data associated with TLC and we reflect on the emergence of Pearson as a potential education policy actor.  相似文献   

Corporate federalism and the reform of teacher education in Australia     

Leo Bartlett  John Knight  Bob Lingard 《教育政策杂志》2013,28(1):91-95

Current Australian commitments to competency‐based teacher reforms have wide acceptance. The key to this has been the affirmative stance adopted by the peak education unions and by ‘progressive’ educationalists, the nominal guarantors of recent professional advances in teaching. Since Australian approaches to ‘competencies’ are part of a more general agenda of industrialization of education, what is clearly indicated are radical changes in the way that nominally independent/critical language of education is currently being interpreted and applied: this is now being used to support an overall restructuring in which substantive (professional) forms of teacher authority are being uncompromisingly targeted. The transformations identified in this paper as having special strategic significance involve the themes of ‘school as community’ and ‘critical practice’. These have been detached from their traditional (robustly anti‐industrial) reference points and redeployed to authorize a more active (because supposedly conflict‐free) regulatory role by newly empowered managers and to advance the claim that ‘the practical’, on its own, can now be revalorized to allow real scope for creative and contextualized interventions by teachers. A strictly managerialist/technicist perspective upon schooling is thus represented as occupying the highest moral and cognitive ground. Correspondingly ruled out is the case for any real measure of educational pluralism or leamercentredness, no matter the sociocultural complexities, thereby licensing the extension to the school site itself of direct (educationally unmediated) political controls over education. As its counterpoint to the new agenda, this paper stresses the need for a robust decision‐making role by educators at all levels of policy formation, and for learner‐centred interventions which are much more than technical, whatever the processes of revalorization supposedly at work.  相似文献   

Can We All Get Along?/¿Pueden Convivir Todas Las Razas?: The 15th Anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots and the Status of Urban Schooling     

Juan Carlos González  Donna M. Davis 《Educational Studies A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association》2013,49(3):208-212

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Ethnic Attitudes of Hungarian Students in Romania     

Bob Ives  Kathryn M. Obenchain  Eleni Oikonomidoy 《Educational Studies A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association》2013,49(4):331-346

Participants in this study were ethnic Hungarian secondary students attending high schools in Romania in which Hungarian was the primary language of instruction. Attitudes of participants toward ethnic and cultural groups were measured using a variation of the Bogardus (1933 Bogardus, Emory S. 1933. A Social Distance Scale. Sociology &; Social Research, 17: 265–271.  [Google Scholar]) Scale of Social Distance. Results were consistent with predictions based on Allport's intergroup contact theory. Students reported a wide range of tolerance levels for majority and minority ethnic groups with which they were likely to have contact in Romania. However, the students reported little difference in tolerance levels for groups that are not a recognized part of the Romanian cultural landscape, such as people of Hispanic origin, and Native Americans.  相似文献   

Curriculum forms: On the assumed shapes of knowing and knowledge     

Brent Davis  Dennis J. Sumara 《课程研究杂志》2013,45(6):821-845

Historically, the logico-rational mode of argumentation co-evolved with particular mathematical systems and particular geometrically-informed manners of interpreting experience and perception. We examine some of the ways these geometries continue to shape the sensibilities, practices and structures of much of curriculum discourse, in spite of the well-developed critiques of their associated logics. We draw on fractal geometry, a new field of mathematical study, to illustrate the pervasiveness and the constraining tendencies of classical geometries. We develop the suggestion that fractal geometry is a mathematical analogue to such discourse fields as post-modernism, post-structuralism and ecological theory. We attempt to show how, through the visual metaphor of a fractal image, conventional theories of knowing and knowledge might be seen as not only compatible, but as nested in and suggestive of one another. We briefly examine how fractal geometry can complement and inform other emergent sensibilities in curriculum, in particular, those discussions critical of the linear structures associated with classical logic.  相似文献   

George Eliot and Education     

Jessie S. Davis 《The Educational forum》2013,77(2):201-206

In a Recent periodical President Hutchins of Chicago University I defined a classic as “a book that is contemporary in every age.” This definition implies that the ideas contained in such a classic have value for every generation, and it is with this in mind that the works of George Eliot seem to be worth studying today in an attempt to ascertain the views on education of some of the women novelists of the nineteenth century.  相似文献   

The Iowa Plan of Character Education Methods     

Jesse B. Davis 《Religious education (Chicago, Ill.)》2013,108(6):435-439

The material on the following pages is a digest of four Interim Reports made to the United States Senate by Senator Estes Kefauver (D., Tenn.,) Chairman of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, of the Committee on the Judiciary (Harley M. Kilgore, D., W. Va., and James O. Eastland, D., Miss., Chairmen). The reports were printed for the use of the latter committee, and originated in Senate Resolutions 62 and 173 of the first and second sessions of the 84th Congress. They were produced by the United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C, in 1955 and 1956. Because of their relative unavailability from that source, RELIGIOUS EDUCATION presents large portions of them here with the knowledge and consent of the Senate Committee's staff, of which Mr. James M. Bobo is General Counsel.

In any task of editing, the one who edits does so according to certain principles. The present selection has been made to include chiefly those points of fact not readily available to RELIGIOUS EDUCATION readers. The mentality of those testifying from the various mass media is also got across here by a representative selection of their views. Lastly, there has been an attempt to convey the conclusions and recommendations of the Senators, which seem so reasoned and tempered that a renewed confidence in our highest body of legislators should emerge as the necessary result.  相似文献