Classroom Interactions: Gender of Teacher,Gender of Student,and Classroom Subject

An observational study investigated the effects of gender of teacher, gender of student, and classroom subject (mathematics vs. English literature/language) on teacher–student interactions. A total of 597 high school students (294 males and 303 females) and 36 teachers (28 males and 8 females) were observed in either 18 mathematics classes or 18 literature/language classes. Students and teachers were predominately Caucasian, with the majority of students from a lower- or middle-class background. Observations were coded using the interactions for sex equity in classroom teaching (INTERSECT) observational instrument. It was found that female mathematics teachers, male literature/language teachers, and female literature/language teachers tended to interact somewhat more with male students than with female students. This tendency was not the result of male students having initiated more direct verbal interactions with teachers.     

What is it Like to Have an Unconscious Mental State?

Philosophical Studies - HOST is the theory that to be conscious of a mental state is totarget it with a higher-order state (a `HOS'), either an innerperception or a higher-order thought. Some...     

Editor's Comment

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

The Towers of Silence: creative and destructive issues for therapeutic teams dealing with sexual abuse

Intra-familial sexual abuse of children is a peculiarly potent area for subsequent inter-agency responses and interventions to become inappropriate, irrational, and damaging. A major component of the damaging responses by the inter-agency system is the mirroring processes which occur between that system and the family.
A case example is presented in some detail to illustrate the ways in which such mirroring processes also effect therapeutic teams dealing with such families. Some therapeutic techniques from an experiential base are described. It is argued that productive therapeutic work can only occur if the mirroring processes within the inter-agency system, and the therapeutic team system, are considered systemically.     

Woods on Ideals of Rationality in Dialogue

Woods' paper Ideals of Rationality in Dialogue raises six problems for dialogue theory. Woods is right about the seriousness of the problems, but one school of dialogue, that stemming from the work of Charles Hamblin, avoids each of Woods' problems by using commitment instead of belief and by using only immediate logical relations. This paper summarises the reasons Hamblin's school took this course, and explains how Woods' problems are thereby avoided.     

Reasoning and logic

Gilbert Harman, in Logic and Reasoning (Synthese 60 (1984), 107–127) describes an unsuccessful attempt ... to develop a theory which would give logic a special role in reasoning. Here reasoning is psychological, a procedure for revising one's beliefs. In the present paper, I construe reasoning sociologically, as a process of linguistic interaction; and show how both reasoning in the psychologistic sense and logic are related to that process.