Cathryn Teasley is Adjunct Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña, Spain. Her work is focused on cross-cultural justice through education, and is reflected in publications such as Transnational perspectives in culture, policy, and education (Peter Lang, 2008), which she co-edited with Cameron McCarthy.
Abstract: By critically examining four broad dimensions of learning through the postcolonial lens, the aim with this study is to promote alternatives to today’s neoliberal variant on the technical-rational imaginary for learning. Such alternatives are meant to help learners of all ages, origins, and conditions, but especially those belonging to identity groups who regularly experience one or more forms of discrimination, inequality, and injustice, to identify neocolonial cultural and economic dynamics so that they might create a cross-cultural common ground from which to resist such oppression, as a means of empowering and perhaps even emancipating themselves from its damaging effects.
In the education portion of the State of the Union speech, Obama emphasized incentivizing success and reaffirmed his committment to community colleges. He also outlined a number of financial aid reforms, including a $10,000 tax credit and limits on the percentage of a worker’s income that must go towards repaying students loans. He set a goal of renewing ESEA, but some experts are skeptical that it can be accomplished this year given the amount of discord NCLB has generated.
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
The game isn’t exactly Halo or Assassin’s Creed. Instead, Space Fortress looks a lot like the very first arcade games, with geometric shapes subbing for spaceships and buildings. “The graphics stink,” admits Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who designed the game in the early 1980s. Gameplay is fairly complex, however: Players must shoot down a fortress with their ship while avoiding enemies, the bad guys look a lot like the good guys, and the ship has no brakes.
Over the years, researchers have used the game to study memory, motor control, and learning speed. The U.S. Air Force and the Israeli air force have even changed their training regimens based on how cadets fared as players. Recent studies have suggested that players appear to heavily utilize their striatum during gameplay. So Kramer and Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, decided to investigate whether the size of the striatum alone might be responsible for these abilities.
Dr. Denise Newfield’s paper, Pippa’s Song: Multimodality and Pedagogic Praxis, commemorates the contribution of Pippa Stein, professor of language education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 1981 to 2008.
Professor Stein was a much beloved and respected teacher, academic and researcher, a founder member of the Africa Research Network, a member of the international advisory committee of the Learning Conference, and of the editorial boards of numerous academic journals. Her untimely death in August 2008 is mourned by the international academic community.
It is my purpose today to pay tribute to her work in multimodal pedagogies and in democratic education by providing a critical assessment of it.
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Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.