Greek Ethnic Schools in Australia in the Late 1990s: Selected Case Studies by Eugenia Arvanitis is now available from The Learner imprint.
This book is a detailed illustration of the broader socio-historical and educational milieu of the Greek ethnic schools in Australia in the late 1990s. It presents ethnic schools’ efforts to maintain and develop the Greek language and cultural heritage as well as to support Greek-Australian identity amongst second and third generation Greek-Australians. The detailed school profiles (case studies) presented in this book constitute part of a Ph.D. thesis (Arvanitis 2000) and provide a pedagogical framework of practice in dealing with diverse learning environments and diverse learner populations.
The need to refocus on the profile of ethnic schools has become apparent due to the profound impact of globalisation on education and, in particular, on ethnic schooling, which has forced educational agencies to reposition themselves. The new complexities of knowledge economy demand new thinking and contemporary skills and attributes as well as the capacity to deal with cultural diversity. Greek part-time ethnic schools, a remarkable marker of ethnicity in themselves, have played a pivotal role in the transmission and promotion of Greek culture and language. They have, at the same time, enhanced learners’ global/diasporic consciousness and sense of identity by urging them to reflect on bicultural learning communities of meaning, memory and belonging. Finally, they have recognised the diversity of voices, narratives and aspirations both within their own cultural group as well as that of their host community and Greece thus engaging in a powerful context of triangular relationships.
Overall Greek ethnic schools have promoted multicultural community building by strengthening different senses of belonging and consciousness in the context of Australian multicultural society. They act as dynamic learning organisations and agents of socio-cultural change, thus helping us reflect upon the complexities of contemporary societies and offering new conceptual frameworks to interpret culture and identity.
We are accepting submissions for the 2011 volume of The International Journal of Learning.
The International Journal of Learning sets out to foster inquiry, invite dialogue and build a body of knowledge on the nature and future of learning. In do doing, the journal provides a forum for any person with an interest in, and concern for, education at any of its levels and in any of its forms, from early childhood, to schools, to higher education and lifelong learning — and in any of its sites, from home to school to university to workplace.
The journal is relevant for academics, researchers, teachers, higher degree students, educators and educational managers and administrators.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines and timelines are available online.
By Patricia Cohen, in The New York Times
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.
To read more…
By Dale Singer in, St. Louis Beacon
What’s the best relationship between teachers and students? Love? Admiration? Respect?
What would you do if your class were deeply involved in a creative project, like a movie or a newspaper or a play, and the principal came along and said you had to get back to basics because standardized test time was coming up?
Those were the kinds of questions that teachers in Riverview Gardens faced over the summer when they wanted to get rehired for their jobs, after the district was taken over by a state-appointed board. For years, teachers around the country have been tested in the same way by the Haberman Star Teacher program, which tries to determine who is most likely to succeed in a school environment that seems to get tougher every year.
To read more…
Multiliteracies, Multimodality and Teacher Professional Learning by Anne Cloonan is now available from The Learner imprint.
In the midst of an epochal shift in the communications environment, rapid cultural change and transformations in knowledge, there is an urgent need for bold educational responses. While responsibility for educational resourcing belongs to the broader community, the extent and quality of pedagogical change ultimately rests with teachers. Student learning is dependent on teachers developing knowledge and pedagogical practices. Central to our educational response to the changed environment is teacher professional learning.
This scholarly book draws on research which investigated the impact on teachers of their engagement with the New London Group’s multiliteracies theory. Four Australian teachers of primary school students committed themselves to exploring multiliteracies theory and to putting their learning into practice in diverse classroom settings.
Anne Cloonan, then a literacy policy and project officer at a state Education Department, explores the context, processes and impact of film-driven participatory action research action learning, in which the teachers researched their learning and practice over a period of eight months. She describes new ways of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers to develop resources and policy advice while deepening their professionalism. She offers contextualised examples of teachers extending their print-based literacy pedagogies to incorporate multimodal literacy practices.
This book will be of interest to teachers, educational consultants, policy makers, and researchers concerned with: agentive collaborative teacher learning; innovative policy and resource development; enhancing teachers’ professionalism; and the operationalisation of multiliteracies theory.
We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Learner.
NEW LEARNING. The Learner publishes cutting edge ideas on teaching and learning—ideas which point to the emerging shape of a new world of learning. These are some of the things of interest and concern for The Learner:
- the blurred institutional boundaries between the family, work and formal education
- early childhood learning, once the domain of the family, and now a site of formal learning
- literacy, literacies, multiliteracies
- learning in and out of school: what children learn at home, from their peers, from the media
- new educational workplaces: self-governing schools, customised curricula, knowledge and teaching markets
- just-in-time and just-enough learning—learning what you need to know when and where you need to know it
- lifelong and lifewide learning
- work integrated learning
- new learning technologies
- global and multicultural education
- new pedagogies that demand as well as grant greater value to the volition and subjectivity of the learner
… and this is only the beginning of the new world of learning unfolding before us, all of which is of critical concern to the authors and readers of The Learner.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Learning all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Learning, please email journals@thelearner.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
By Jonathan Alter, in Newsweek
A first-grade teacher in Vallejo, Calif., works with students. Schools across the country are struggling with deep budget cuts.
For more than 40 years, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the third-ranking member of the House, has been a fiery and highly effective legislator. Any history of how the country avoided another depression must include Obey, who shepherded the $787 billion Recovery Act through Congress last year with great skill (and no earmarks). He has been an inspiring antiwar liberal dating back to Vietnam and a rare man of conscience in Washington.
To read more…
The 2011 Learning Conference will take place at the University of Mauritius, Mauritius from 5-8 July. For more information please visit www.LearningConference.com
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2011/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2011/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the Conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2011 Learning Conference, see: http://thelearner.com/conference-2011/register/.
Themes
For more information on our themes, please click here.
By Diane Ravitch, in Education Week’s Blog Bridging Differences
Dear Deborah,
The evidence continues to accumulate that our “accountability” policies are a great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate.
Over the past several years, efforts to “hold teachers accountable” and “hold schools accountable” have produced perverse consequences. Instead of better education, we are getting cheating scandals, teaching to bad tests, a narrowed curriculum, lowered standards, and gaming of the system. Even if it produces higher test scores (of dubious validity), high-stakes accountability does not produce better education.
To read more…
A review from Chris Dede of Ubiquitous Learning, a volume edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
Modern day conceptions of ubiquitous learning build on an influential vision of ubiquitous computing published two decades earlier by Mark Weiser (1991) of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His article depicted a world of smart objects and intelligent contexts based on ubiquitous computing, a different way of conceptualizing the interface between computers, networks, and people. In Weiser’s vision, tiny computers are embedded into nearly every artifact and setting, networked so that they intercommunicate. For example, a tree could be tagged with information about its botanical characteristics; the tree might also offer to show an historic image of its context about the time it was planted or to describe the contribution it makes to reducing local pollution and greenhouse gases. People who wandered by could access this information on a wireless mobile device; based on a person’s response, the building adjacent to the tree might then offer some information. Current images of smart objects and intelligent contexts for learning include affordances not available twenty years earlier, such as Web 2.0 tools embedded in cyberinfrastructure (Dede, 2007) and augmented reality games (Klopfer, 2008).
To read more…
by Sam Dillon, in The New York Times
The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.
The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.
The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”
To read more…
By Stephen Brill, in The New York Times
Michael Mulgrew is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
To read more…
Picture Courtesy of Benjamin F. Carlson, in The Atlantic Wire
By Karoli, in Crooks and Liars
On May 19th, the Texas Board of Education will meet to approve the final Social Studies curriculum and textbook changes that caused such a stir back in March.
Since that meeting, even more changes have been proposed which, if adopted, promise to rewrite history for Texas schoolchildren to the conservative narrative. Uber-winger Don McLeroy’s proposals:
- Undermine the doctrine of separation of church and state. McLeroy wants to substitute an unintelligible standard asking students to “contrast the Founders’ intent relative to the wording of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause, with the popular term ‘Separation of church and state.’”
To read more…
Global Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific: Mobility, Migration, Security and Wellbeing of International Students, edited by Peter Kell and Gillian Vogl
Over 2.7m students study in a country other than their own. Most of those students come from the Asia-Pacific region and undertake study in universities in the developed world. This trend is predicted to grow exponentially but features many dilemmas. In the post-9/11 global environment, international students experience hostility and harassment as well as ambivalence about their value to the academy.
Some live an uncertain life of poverty and alienation. Many also struggle to come to terms with living and studying in a foreign land where there are concerns about international students eroding academic standards, having poor English language proficiency and being unable to “integrate” and contribute to their new communities. But some also seek to make new homes in their host countries.
To read more…
Improving Teaching and Learning through Assessment: A Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Approach by Betty McDonald is now available from The Learner imprint.
With a constant call for accountability, classroom facilitators are obligated to provide transparent assessment procedures and report results in a professional manner. Improving Teaching and Learning Through Assessment: A Problem-Based Learning Approach seeks to convey to the reader exactly what it says; a holistic approach to continuous assessment in order to improve learning.
This book seeks to present readers with a solid background about the various kinds of assessments available. Readers are taught to design a number of fit-for-purpose assessment instruments. Throughout the text, the primary methodology used is Problem-Based Learning (PBL) that seeks to hone in students several skills like creativity, critical thinking and innovativeness.
By Alan Greenblatt, on NPR
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
“Teacher effectiveness” has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children’s education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
“There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure,” says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. “Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective.”
To read more…
By James Shreeve in National Geographic
The ancient Egyptians thought so little of brain matter they made a practice of scooping it out through the nose of a dead leader before packing the skull with cloth before burial. They believed consciousness resided in the heart, a view shared by Aristotle and a legacy of medieval thinkers. Even when consensus for the locus of thought moved northward into the head, it was not the brain that was believed to be the sine qua non, but the empty spaces within it, called ventricles, where ephemeral spirits swirled about. As late as 1662, philosopher Henry More scoffed that the brain showed “no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet, or a bowl of curds.”
Around the same time, French philosopher René Descartes codified the separation of conscious thought from the physical flesh of the brain. Cartesian “dualism” exerted a powerful influence over Western science for centuries, and while dismissed by most neuroscientists today, still feeds the popular belief in mind as a magical, transcendent quality.
To read more…
From Abby Goodnough, in The New York Times
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
To read more…
From Annie Murphy Paul, in The New York Times
You’ve probably heard it at one time or another: Most of us use only 10 percent of our brains. More factoid than fact, a claim of unknown provenance and dubious accuracy, the idea sticks around because of the enduring appeal of its underlying premise. We’d all love to think that we’re in possession of tremendous untapped potential, of latent mental powers just waiting to be activated. It seems so convenient, like falling in love with the person you’re already married to, or whipping up dinner from what’s already in your kitchen. You don’t have to leave home, or even change out of your pajamas.
To read more…
From The Forum For Education and Democracy
Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way. - Ted Sizer
As individuals with decades of experience in improving public education at all levels, the Conveners of The Forum for Education and Democracy view the upcoming debates over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as offering the opportunity to finally get it right. After a decade of tinkering around the edges and avoiding the hard questions, the so-called No Child Left Behind version of ESEA has done little to improve schools. In fact, our schools look much like they did when the act was passed – and many think that NCLB hindered school improvement efforts that were going on prior to its passage.
To read more…
Today the International Conference on Learning Newsletter will be re-launched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Learning Community. The Learning Newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Learning Community.
If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to thelearner.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.
If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@thelearner.com
From Henry Rollins, in Vanity Fair
From a letter to Thomas Jefferson written by John Adams, January 23, 1825:
“Books that cannot bear examination certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws…. The substance and essence of Christianity as I understand it is eternal and unchangeable and will bear examination forever but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination and they ought to be separated.”
Perhaps the powers that be in Texas consider Thomas Jefferson an extraneous ingredient and will seek to extract our third president and other major figures in American history from their school’s textbooks. It seems that there will be a bit of revision in Texas, and I fear it will be big—as things often are in the Lone Star State.
To read more…
Congratulations to Siew Kheng Catherine Chua, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of in the area of literacy and education for their paper Futuristic Schools: “Little Red Dot” Strategies in a Globalised Economy
Abstract: The dynamic progress of globalisation has been reshaping the culture, politics and economy of countries. This knowledge-based and post-Fordist work environment requires the formation of new curriculum and pedagogical practices. In order for a country to survive economically in this environment, it is necessary to restructure its education policies and practices. At the political level, the government has to put in place national education policies that are able to create a workforce who can meet the global demands. At the national level, the education ministry has to ensure that these policies are well translated in schools. Basically, the on-going educational setting has to fulfil the economic objectives of a country.
This paper examines Singapore’s present education landscape and its pedagogical practices. It reviews the Singapore government’s interpretation of globalisation and examines its responses to the world globalised economy. Specifically, it looks at the strategies adopted by the government and its education ministry in the refining of its Ability-driven Education framework. It discusses Singapore’s 2008 education strategy FutureSchools@Singapore, which stresses the use of the most up-to-date information and communication technologies (ICT) in teaching and learning in Singapore schools.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
From Sam Dillon in The New York Times
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.
By announcing that he would send his education blueprint to Congress on Monday, President Obama returned to a campaign promise to repair the sprawling federal law, which affects each of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. His plan strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.
To read more…
From Spencer Michels in PBS Newshour
A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California’s Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he’s become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.
Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
To read more…
From The Huffington Post
Stephen Colbert interviews a Columbia professor regarding the banning of certain textbooks:
To read more…
From Russell Shorto, in The New York Times
Last month, a week before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.
Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.
To read more…
Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools by Prakash Singh is now available from The Learner imprint.
Better schools prepare better learners! Can anyone dispute this? Hence, innovative strategies in education are presented in this book with the primary purpose of developing better schools. Key areas covered in this book are:
- Organisational effectiveness
- Emotional intelligence
- Collegial leadership
- Fear of failure in education: Tobephobia
- Media-based learning
- Gifted learners
- High risk learners
- Self-regulated learning.
Novel strategies are presented that educators can employ to focus on and to improve practice. The issues discussed in this book are therefore typical issues that educators are faced with daily in their schools. It equips them with useful information to cope with the challenges of being teachers. Also, Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools gives educators the opportunity to introspect critically their professional integrity and status. Ultimately, no matter how much we do in our schools, our learners must be the beneficiaries of quality educational outcomes.
Cathryn Teasley was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference.
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.
Cathryn Teasley’s paper Postcolonial Learning in Neocolonial Times has been published as part of The International Journal of Learning.
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.
The latest issue of 