Summary Street: Interactive Computer Support for Writing

Summary Street is educational software based on latent semantic analysis (LSA), a computer method for representing the content of texts. The classroom trial described here demonstrates the power of LSA to support an educational goal by providing automatic feedback on the content of students' summaries. Summary Street provides this feedback in an easy-to-grasp, graphic display that helps students to improve their writing across multiple cycles of writing and revision on their own before receiving a teacher's final evaluation. The software thus has the potential to provide students with extensive writing practice without increasing the teacher's workload. In classroom trials 6th-grade students not only wrote better summaries when receiving content-based feedback from Summary Street, but also spent more than twice as long engaged in the writing task. Specifically, their summaries were characterized by a more balanced coverage of the content than summaries composed without this feedback. Greater improvement in content scores was observed with texts that were difficult to summarize. Classroom implementation of Summary Street is discussed, including suggestions for instructional activities beyond summary writing.     

From Olaf to Omar: Pedagogy of Place at a Lutheran University

This article reflects on the range of environmental and institutional layers that support pedagogical composition and student learning at a Lutheran University affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in the Pacific Northwest. After reflection on layers that include geographic location, institutional affiliation and denominational affiliation, the author traces the way in which she incorporates these elements into the content and methods of assessment in a religion class on Islam.     

刍议综合性大学医学教育的发展方向

国际上一流的综合性大学都设有医学院,高水平的医学院也基本上都在综合性大学内。据此提出现阶段我国综合性大学医学教育应向研究型、国际化、现代化的方向发展,并就其发展对策提出了自己的看法。     

Embodied Pedagogy: The Body and Teaching Theology

This essay is a reflection on my own experience of teaching undergraduates in light of research on proxemics (social and personal space) and kinesics (body language). I discuss ways to structure classroom space to encourage interaction and discussion, using Edward Hall's distinctions between three types of space (fixed feature, semi‐fixed feature, and informal). I explain the importance of body language in verbal communication and describe how I use my own body to illustrate and reinforce what I say in class. I then offer strategies to incorporate students' bodies in the learning process. I conclude by arguing that embodied pedagogy calls us to look beyond the classroom and to acknowledge the importance of our bodies in all aspects of our lives.     

Pedagogy and educational democratization: The problem of alienation

Education is viewed as not merely a particular domain of social life. It is more a universal process than a mere learning of sciences and arts; it is richer than an individual's socialization. The educational democratization turns out to be a prerequisite of humanization of the entire social life. The orientation at the supreme humane values as a strategic direction of democratic evolution of education is opposed to the authoritarian tendencies as an antivalue of pedagogical relations.Being a significant step towards a genuinely humane society, democratization is unable, however, to resolve the fundamental problem of human formation: that of alienation. The opportunity to resolve it is dependent upon proper conditions for a free self-determination of a personality in culture.     

Performativity and Pedagogy: The Making of Educational Subjects

Building from J.L. Austin's concept of performative, this essay explores the production of subjectivity and of educational subjects by applying important work from Judith Butler on Foucault, Derrida, and as centrally illustrative, through an analysis of sex and gender. Given this analytical framework, the turn is then to queer performativity and the possibility of performative power in pedagogy. The last draws assistance from Valerie Walkerdine, Homi Bhabha and especially James Donald.     

The Public Policy Pedagogy of Corporate and Alternative News Media

This paper argues for seeing in-depth news coverage of political, social, and economic issues as “public policy pedagogy.” To develop my argument, I draw on Nancy Fraser’s democratic theory, which attends to social differences and does not assume that unity is a starting point or an end goal of public dialogue. Alongside the formation of “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser), alternative media outlets sometimes develop. There, members of alternative publics debate their interests and strategize about how to be heard in wider, mass-mediated public arenas. I address the normative implications of this non-unitary, multiple-publics model for news journalism, analyzing how current conventions in mainstream news journalism (e.g., “balance” defined as “airing two extremes”) can restrict public debate and impoverish the public policy pedagogy on offer. I illustrate my arguments with a case study of media coverage of the creation and implementation of a social justice curriculum in British Columbia, Canada.     

Pedagogy of Play

“Pedagogy of play” focuses on the educational value of this field of experience, by claiming that play characterizes the two fundamental guidelines which are at the basis of education; the spontaneous and natural direction on the one side, and the intentional one on the other side. It is commonly assumed that pedagogy of play concerns only the latter of the two above-mentioned aspects of education, that is to say the design and management of playing experiences and materials with clear educational goals; instead, this discipline critically analyzes the whole playing experience, therefore trying to grasp its potentialities, its material conditions, and its overall meanings in the making of the subject. Moving from some considerations about the discovery of play as an emblematic index of the “discovery of childhood” at the beginning of Modern Age (Ariès, 1960), the first part of this essay underlines three aspects: the first concerns the investment on play as an educational device (from Locke to Montessori, up to Children’s Museums), pointing out the shift from the classic principle of ludendo docere to the modern ludendo discere. The second aspect focuses on the retrieval of the natural dimension of play, which finds in Rousseau its main source; the third takes into consideration toys and their identity both as pedagogical devices and as media. In the second part of the essay, the focus is on free play and its educational value, which is here interpreted especially as the first field of experience for children’s “political education”. The final remarks include some speculations the relationship between play and daily life, suggesting the idea that “life-long playing” could be defined as a meaningful aspect of long-life education.     

The Interactive Origin of Iconicity

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba‐kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of (a) participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and (b) individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection (as opposed to by guided variation).     

Education for Critical Community and the Pedagogy of Asylum: Two Responses to the Crisis Of University Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education - The current heated debate on the deteriorating status of the university raises a range of pertinent questions, including: What role can the humanities play in...     

Interactive Drama: A Method for Experiential Multicultural Training

The authors present interactive drama as a medium to create learning about multicultural and diversity issues on the basis of cognitive‐experiential self‐theory. Results of exploratory qualitative research suggest 2 interactive dramas had an impact on awareness, understanding, and skills. Future research and benefits for counseling students and programs are discussed. Los autores presentan la drama interactiva como medio para crear conciencia de cuestiones multiculturales y de diversidad, basado en la teoria de personalidad cognosciva‐experimental. Los resultados de investigaciones cualitativas iniciales sugieren que dos dramas interactivas afectaron al conoscimiento, el entendimiento, y las habilidades. También se discuten avenidas para investigaciones futuras, y los beneficios para estudiantes y programas de consejo.     

Tacit Knowledge and Spiritual Pedagogy

Michael Polanyi recognized the relevance of his theory of tacit knowledge to all areas of human understanding, including the religious, spiritual and moral domains. Nonetheless, few if any efforts have attempted to extend his theory's implications into the formulation of a spiritual epistemology. This article examines the possible implications of the concept of tacit knowledge advanced by Polanyi for the development of a spiritual epistemology. Furthermore, due to the relation Polanyi described between a skill and the tacit element of understanding, there are additional implications drawn out in this article for the formulation of a corresponding spiritual pedagogy     

英文短文写作元认知、动机性因素与作文成绩之间关系的研究

随机选取大一、大二和大三学生共1043人为被试,采用协方差结构模型考察了非英语专业大学生英文写作元认知、自我效能、任务价值、成就目标、归N和英语作文成绩之间的关系。研究结果表明：（1）自我效能、任务价值、成就目标、归N两两相关且对英文写作元认知有直接影响,并通过英文写作元认知对英语作文成绩有间接影响;（2）英文写作元认知和自我效能对英语作文成绩有直接影响;（3）自我效能对英文写作元认知的影响力最大。