Showing papers in "Interchange in 2003"

Constructivist Science Teaching: Intellectual and Strategic Teaching Acts

Abstract: This paper attempts to provide some productive starting points for discussion in the context of science teaching. Embedded in the current practice of methodologies such as “messing about,” hands-on, minds-on activities, science-technology-society related approaches, and inquiry-based learning, is often a sense of confusion and frustration. Such current methodologies in elementary science teaching are founded on constructivist learning theory. This paper attempts to pinpoint possible ways in which this child-centered, interactive learning theory can lead to confusion for students and teachers alike. It attempts to distinguish the necessary criteria for successful science teaching from much of today's practice in the elementary school science class. It does not attempt to draw conclusions on the reasons behind some of the practices.

Constructing Academic Community: Power, Relationality, Hospitality, and Conversation

Abstract: Academic community can be considered from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Exploring it from a philosophical point of view can incorporate other perspectives and identify basic common agencies that enable or diminish community. Using a philosophical organic perspective, I explore the four common agencies of power, relationality, hospitality, and conversation. I have primarily in mind the academic community that faculty create.

Constructing Ethical Representations From the Teacher's Pedagogical Practice: A Case of Prolonged Reflection

Abstract: This paper is delimited to an exploration of three representations from the field of pedagogical ethics. I focus on the ethics of background beliefs, guiding rules and principles, and dilemma managing together with their contested practices and premises. The aim is to interpret and translate teachers' understandings from the language they use, and to give concrete expressions to these interpretations by their daily actions. My goal is to present how these representations can help us to see and interpret pedagogical practices, and how these interpretations can help teachers better to understand their professional practice.

Racial Identity Theory and Peace Education: Tools for the Teacher In All of Us

Abstract: As people develop a meaningful understanding of racism, they also experience shifts in their appraisals of self and others as members of an unfairly stratified society. Consistent with the premises of Helms' (1995) racial identity theory, these shifts can be explained as transformational processes that have relevance to matters of morality and peace advancement. Individuals who operate at advanced levels of racial identity development overcome the confinements inherent in a racism Zeitgeist and in so doing, learn to accept themselves and others more authentically. This theory can prove crucial to peace promotion in children because it espouses to nurture the integration of self within the broader spectrum of humanity. Educators who transform their selves can also transform their educational practices by disrupting cycles of socialization that adversely influence children's identity formation. They can also contribute to the creation of new structures of socialization. In this paper, I describe this theory and how it applies to peace education.

Cultural Responsiveness of School Curriculum and Students' Failure in Turkey

Abstract: Education should develop the common values needed to enhance the unity and progress of a multi-ethnic, multicultural society. In order to enhance effective learning, students' varied backgrounds should be taken into consideration when designing a curriculum. Clearly, if the curriculum is dominated by the culture of an ethnic majority, and the existence of different ethnic and cultural groups are ignored, the students of non-majority origin perceive themselves to be distinct and may develop antagonistic attitudes toward education, which often lead to failure. In some parts of Turkey, especially the Eastern and Southeastern regions, the majority of the population is of different ethnic origin. Sahin and Gulmez (2000b) studied the efficiency of education and the factors affecting the success of students in both regions. They found that illiteracy in those regions was higher when compared with the other regions, that females received less education, and that secondary school students were less successful in nationwide examinations such as OSS (selection examinations for OYS) and OYS (student placement examinations for university entrance). Ethnic diversity alone is not as effective when maintained by cultural diversity. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the differences in cultural values of students with different ethnic backgrounds. Differences in curriculum and teaching materials were analyzed with regard to the perceptions of those students who identified themselves as ethnically different and not of Turkish origin. The results of this study indicate that the quality of the school curriculum and text books assessed were significantly different for those students identified to be not of Turkish origin and therefore appeared to be culturally unresponsive, a factor which may lead to the educational failure for many students of different ethnic origins.

Different Sources, Different Answers: Aspects on Women's Work in Sundsvall, Sweden, 1860–1893

Abstract: It is often hard to unravel the actual work of women in history. Generally few sources are able to give vital information on their occupational structure. What we know, though, is that a vast majority of women were engaged in domestic work. Servants frequently appear in quantitative data, such as parish registers, poll-taxes, or censuses. Nevertheless, these sources fail to cover what women really were doing in order to pay for their daily bread. But in what ways the occupation reported in the quantitative records disagreed from women's actual work is difficult to judge. Additionally, in many cases these records leave no occupational information on women at all. With the computerized parish registers of the Demographic Data Base at Umea University, Sweden, it is possible to link alternative information on individual women's work to the quantitative data and build on the picture of women's occupations. Consequently, whereas the parish registers enable us to deal with demographic issues concerning the marital, geographical, and social path of women in the past, the alternative sources formed by local newspapers, patient records, and business statistics offer further information on their life and working conditions. This paper reveals that alternative sources are better than the quantitative data at revealing the often multi-occupational and part-time work of urban women. Newspaper advertisements, announcements, and police reports, for instance, reveal the voices of the otherwise silent women workers and tell us about their urban context. The town and time in focus is Sundsvall in 1860–1893, a Swedish sawmill town situated about 400 kilometers north of Stockholm.

Reading Cultures, Christianization, and Secularization: Universalism and Particularism in the Swedish History of Literacy.

Abstract: In the organization and ideology of the Lutheran state churches, Tim Knudsen has identified the roots of universalism in the Nordic welfare states. This article applies a similar perspective to the aims and contents of early modern Nordic popular education. Historiographically, universalism was emphasized by Egil Johansson, who recognized the universal aim of Christian teaching as the prime mover of Swedish alphabetization. The present article tries to problematize this perspective by demonstrating the long-term divergence of Swedish bourgeois and popular print cultures, representing parallel processes of secularization and christianization, and by discussing particular meanings of parts of the alleged universal early modern reading culture, viz. reading as a vehicle of Swedishness in colonial America and religious identity in Northern Sweden, respectively. The elementary school is identified as a major instrument of homogenizing reading culture, and the article concludes by indicating universalism as a living legacy in Swedish educational policy.

Can There be Applied Philosophy Without Philosophy

Abstract: The paper is a critique of the dominant model of applied philosophy. As currently structured, courses in applied philosophy are a response of philosophy departments to administrative demands to increase enrollment units. In order to achieve this goal, the properly philosophical approach to matters of concrete social concern is dropped in favour of decontextualized, ahistorical, and uncritical applications of philosophical theories to immediate practical problems. Using the example of applied ethics, I argue that the key problem besetting current trends in applied philosophy is that they all fail to uncover the contradiction between given social regimes of value and the universal concepts which must be employed to legitimate those regimes. While it is an essential duty of philosophy to be relevant to the practical issues of the day, it must be relevant on philosophical terms. That is, the real application of philosophy to social problems is not the unthinking mapping of a particular philosophical theory onto a problem, but bringing to light the hidden value assumptions definitive of different societies, and shaking to the foundation their claims to legitimacy. I spell out this alternative approach to applied philosophy through an example drawn from my own teaching practice.

Some Reflections On Contemporary Canadian Catholic Education

Abstract: Increasingly, Canadian Catholic education is identified according to theological and denominational distinctiveness. In the past, however, Catholic education was grounded upon an unambiguous philosophy of education, one that recognized education and teaching as primarily philosophical activities. Today, there is a noticeable absence of an identifiable Catholic philosophy of education, an absence that is particularly conspicuous in the pluralist and multi-faith makeup of Canada. In such a context, relying upon theological distinctiveness is insufficient. What is unique about Catholic education? What are some of the reasons that have led to the abandoning of a distinctively Catholic philosophy of education? Can such an education defend itself without identifying its unique philosophical and pedagogical principles? These, among others, are some of questions and issues of this paper.

Literacy, Text, Practice, and Culture: Major Trends in the Umea History of Education Research Group, 1972-2002.

Abstract: This article presents some major research themes and findings of the leading Swedish research group in the field of literacy in history. The informal and encouraging leadership of Professor Egil Johansson was of vital importance to the creativity and productivity of the group. Prior to 1985, a few large projects on Swedish alphabetization were closely inter-related to the development of methods and resources. After 1985, research benefitted from the competence represented by the Demographic Data Base, the Swedish Archival Information, and the Research Archives. The thematic variety of the second period was promoted by the multi-disciplinary composition of the research group. Religious instruction was the primary focus of interest, and cross-cultural, multi-confessional, and comparative aspects were incorporated. The international orientation became a constitutive characteristic, contextualizing the Swedish Lutheran experience. Literacy skills, textual history, literacy practices, and print culture signify the general evolution of themes.

How did Illiterates Fare as Literacy Became Almost Universal? Evidence from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Liverpool

Abstract: A sample of marriage registers from the parish of Liverpool St. Nicholas Church in England between 1839–1927 is used to examine changing characteristics of grooms who signed with a mark over this period. The proportion of illiterate grooms in the parish fell from about a third to under 5%. Age at marriage and likelihood of being a widower rose markedly for illiterates over the period relative to literate grooms. The percentage of illiterate grooms marrying literate brides rose markedly as well; however, in contrast with national tendencies, there was less evidence of assortative mating by literacy or of any downward trend in this for the Liverpool sample. There was no evident rise in literacy requirements for employment in the transport sector which dominated the Liverpool economy throughout the period under consideration. This implied that even in the first three decades of the 20th century with signature ability almost universal, most illiterate grooms in Liverpool were not in unskilled occupations. However, illiterate grooms were increasingly less likely over time to be in skilled manual occupations.

Education as economic investment: Comments on tuition fee policy

Abstract: Student fees for university programmes in Canada have risen dramatically in recent years. This has been justified by the argument that such increases offer no economic disincentive to students seeking university admission. The present essay comments on that argument and finds several weaknesses in it. Fee increases may still be necessary, but this argument at least does not establish that they are innocuous.

Transformation of Patriarchal Regimes, Literacy, and Schooling

Abstract: Literacy has been among the most publicly contested domains in gender struggles; the way that history of literacy is gendered and interpreted makes a difference to the way reading and writing is thought of today. Broadly understood, gender signals a wide range of concerns with subjectivities, social relations, and historical dynamics. Literacy campaigns can be linked both to attempts to consolidate patriarchalism in early modern Europe and to complex struggles attending its 18th-century demise. In 19th-century England, both bourgeois and oppositional public spheres engendered patterns of solidarity, identity, gender polarization, and exclusion in which contested notions of individual and collective literacy played a key role. Elsewhere, schools were called upon to engender a proletariat or tame its radicalism, teach females how to read or change their reading habits, instruct children in writing or give them to understand that their mother tongue did not count as school knowledge.

Heraclitean Thinking: Implications for Philosophy of Education

Abstract: Heraclitus was the first presocratic Ionian thinker to describe the underlying nature of reality as a set of processes in flux and to affirm the constantly changing nature of the cosmos In this essay, I discuss four major doctrines of his thought which constitute the crux of the Heraclitean worldview I then expound some thoughts on the relevance and implications of Heraclitean thinking for philosophy of education

Are the Swedish Parish Examination Records A Unique Phenomenon

Abstract: This paper introduces the possibility of comparing Hungarian parish records to Swedish Parish Examination Records from an educational point of view. The focus is on a presentation of one particular document of a Hungarian Catholic priest in a small village from the early 19th century. The record keeps track of the reading and writing skills of parishioners. This pilot study aims to show that there might be similarities explored between the unique Swedish parish examination records of the Lutheran congregation and the Hungarian Catholic church archive sources, pointing out the common roots of the Christian teaching all across Europe.

Living the Transition--The Great Mortality Change through the Lives of the Country Doctors.

Abstract: This paper works alongside other studies claiming the need for further elaboration of the theory of the demographic transition. A number of perspectives on the transition, some of them related to gender, democracy, education, and labour has, according to Tim Dyson, been insufficiently researched by social scientists. The most recently introduced material from the Demographic Database, forms from the Statistical Committee, have been used to chart the demographic transition in the northern-most counties in Sweden during the years between 1800–1850. The hypothesis being that even in these pre-urban and pre-industrialized societies, opportunities to connect with other parts of Sweden could be congruent to a faster progress through the demographic transition. This would lead to lower crude death rates and infant mortality in the coastal parishes. This was true to a certain extent, but this methodologically tentative study also affirms previous research on infant mortality and the need for smallpox vaccination and midwives.

Funeral Processions, Street Urchins, Education, and Surveillance--The Relationship between Education, State Building, Vagrancy, and Cultural Change in Stockholm, Sweden in the Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century.

Abstract: A modernization of the educational system was an important priority for the government. Sweden emerged as a dominant military power during the 17th century. The new schools were then established in the midst of a social, political, and cultural transformation with fundamental effects on the school system. The new schools had difficulties freeing themselves from old traditions, depended on an old economic structure, and filled a role as a system of population control. The latter was also related to the organization of the early modern educational system as well as systems of supporting the poor by conspicuous — personal — distribution of money and presents, which during the course of the 17th century was to be replaced by institutionalized care of the poor and new systems of surveillance. An important aspect of the article is a discussion of the role of early modern education for the material well being of poor families of Stockholm.

In a Class of Their Own? Swedish Women School Teachers and the Fertility Transition in the Late Nineteenth Century.

Abstract: When Egil Johansson began his work in the parishes of northern Sweden, women's history, in common with the history of literacy, was in its infancy. Demographers did not ask questions of their sources specifically about gender relations. In the succeeding quarter century women's historians have begun to ask key questions about processes such as changing patterns of family formation, women's place in the building of educational institutions, and women's role in public and private life, using existing sources in innovative, sometimes critical, ways. This paper reports on a pilot study that focuses on the education of women in northern Sweden in the late 19th century in relation to their patterns of family formation, drawing from the Demographic Database computerized records, routinely generated education records, and local archives. This combination of sources, it argues, can enable links to be made between gender systems, their maintenance (or disruption) and demographic change. But those links require a wider interdisciplinary approach if theories of fertility decline are to be developed.

Eight Pedagogical Preambles on Dolly the Sheep

Abstract: This paper explores the assumptions underlying a commonplace school activity based on the mandated science curriculum: exploring the difference between natural and human made structures. Following a student's desire to use Dolly the Sheep as his example, a great array of contemporary and classical connections are explored.