Educational Debate Research Articles

DECRETO nº 13.775, de 8 de outubro de 2020, que cria a Unidade Municipal de Educação Infantil Jorge Nassim Vieira Najjar

Diante de todas as contribuições do professor Jorge Nassin Vieira Najjar para a Rede Municipal de Educação de Niterói, é natural que nossa sincera homenagem e agradecimento a ele se manifestassem com seu nome sendo dado a uma de nossas unidades de educação.
 A presença marcante de Jorge na cidade de Niterói não se restringiu a sua brilhante passagem pela Faculdade de Educação da UFF. Além de ter formado e orientado inúmeros professores, pedagogos e gestores atuantes na Rede Municipal, Jorge desenvolveu uma relação próxima com nossas escolas e esteve sempre presente e atuante em nossas principais discussões educacionais, colaborando conosco também como Conselheiro Municipal de Educação.
 Sua luta pela gestão democrática e por uma educação pública de qualidade estarão sempre presentes, inspirando o fazer cotidiano da Rede Municipal de Educação de Niterói.

EL PAPEL DE LA OCDE EN LA DIFUSIÓN INTERNACIONAL DE POLÍTICAS EDUCATIVAS: EL CASO DE LA AUTONOMÍA ESCOLAR CON RENDICIÓN DE CUENTAS

La OCDE ha desempeñado un papel activo en la construcción y la difusión de la autonomía escolar con rendición de cuentas (SAWA por sus siglas en inglés) como un modelo internacional de política educativa. Como mostramos en este artículo, lo ha hecho activando tres mecanismos de gobernanza, a saber, la recolección de datos, la evaluación de las políticas educativas y la generación de ideas sobre políticas. La OCDE ha desempeñado un papel proactivo en la teorización de las políticas SAWA, adaptando este modelo a una amplia gama de problemas y enmarcándolo de manera suficientemente flexible para acomodar diferentes preferencias políticas. En gran medida, el potencial de la OCDE para promover el cambio educativo reside, por un lado, en su capacidad de articular creencias causales y creencias normativas en la generación de políticas y, por el otro, en su capacidad de abrir ventanas de oportunidad a través de las que introducir sus recomendaciones de políticas, como las políticas SAWA, en debates educativos nacionales.

Bilingual education, Aboriginal self-determination and Yolŋu control at Shepherdson College, 1972–1983

PurposeSelf-determination policies and the expansion of bilingual schooling across Australia's Northern Territory (NT) in the 1970s and 1980s provided opportunities for Aboriginal educators and communities to take control over schooling. This paper demonstrates how this occurred at Shepherdson College, a mission school turned government bilingual school, at Galiwin'ku on Elcho Island in North East, Arnhem Land, in the early years of the policies between 1972 and 1983. Yolŋu staff developed a syncretic vision for a Yolŋu-controlled space of education that prioritised Yolŋu knowledges and aimed to sustain Yolŋu existence.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses archival data as well as oral histories, focusing on those with a close involvement with Shepherdson College, to elucidate the development of a Yolŋu vision for schooling.FindingsMany Yolŋu school staff and their supporters, encouraged by promises of the era, pushed for greater Yolŋu control over staffing, curriculum, school spaces and governance. The budgetary and administrative control of the NT and federal governments acted to hinder possibilities. Yet despite these bureaucratic challenges, by the time of the shift towards neoliberal constraints in the early 1980s, Yolŋu educators and their supporters had envisioned and achieved, in a nascent way, a Yolŋu schooling system.Originality/valuePrevious scholarship on bilingual schooling has not closely examined the potent link between self-determination and bilingual schooling, largely focusing on pedagogical debates. Instead, this paper argues that Yolŋu embraced the “way in” offered by bilingual schooling to develop a new vision for community control through control of schooling.

Post COVID-19 youth work: A contribution to the Swedish social pedagogical debate

The coronavirus pandemic affects the whole world. This situation is a very challenging time for all humanity and social services no less. The present article explores how care and different forms of support can or should be offered to young people in the post-COVID-19 youth work. The objective of this paper is to reflect on how social work practitioners can adapt their daily clinical practice by focusing their interventions on the social pedagogical dimensions of social work. The article presents a generalised discussion of practice logics in social work and social pedagogy. Because of the meanings derived from knowledge on the importance of relationships between the helper and the help receiver, social practices in the post-COVID-19 world need to consider social pedagogical expertise in social work practice and the development of preventive assistance for young populations. This effort has been prepared as a part of the project “Social Professionals for Youth Education in the context of European Solidarity".

Early childhood: The new government agenda

Institutional care for young children, throughout the history of the world, Latin America and Brazil, presented several conceptions about their function. Most of these institutions were intended to serve only poor children. However, it is very recent the establishment of a national policy for Early Childhood, as a pedagogical, social investment, in maternal and child health, economic and educational, which considers children as subjects of rights and citizens in the process of development. Thus, this article intends to reconstitute the trajectory of the new legislation on Early Childhood, which obliges managers and professionals of education, social assistance, health, psychology, psychiatry throughout the country to adapt their activities to the norms established by law. That said, this study was based on scientific evidence; pedagogical and legal arguments disseminated in Brazil in the last three decades, especially since the Citizen Constitution of 1988, which promoted the evolution of early childhood legislation. In which it was possible to observe that only in 2006, with the creation of FUNDEB, funding for early childhood education was established; in 2016, the Legal Framework of Early Childhood was sanctioned. And in 2020, for the first time in history, childhood was mentioned and included in Annexes of thirteen Laws of the Multiannual Plans of Brazilian federated entities, to take effect from 2021 to 2023.

Sustaining What is Valuable: Contours of an Educational Language About Values

Abstract Making liberal democratic values meaningful to study in schools is a more complex issue than being a question of turning values into explicit educational goals (Schleicher) or of curing a motivational deficit (Critchley). Since values seem to play an important role in the practices and commitments of people's everyday lives, values are calling for a continual refinement of our words in relation to the world (Laverty). The purpose of this article is to offer contours of an educational language about values that acknowledges this refinement and the pedagogical work that teachers might do—by way of language—in order to sustain the living-on of what is valued and valuable to us as individuals and as societies. To this end, the article is divided into two parts. The first part takes the temperature of the current political and educational debates, offering thereby a sociopolitical background to the need of a renewed language about values. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy (Moi, Murdoch and Forsberg) and the idea that there is an intimate relationship between how we look at the world (attention) and the words we use in describing it (language). The second part of the article places the emergence of values in a particular time in history before suggesting a more existential vocabulary about values for the purpose of teaching values in schools.

Debates in physical education

The second edition of ‘Debates in Physical Education’ edited by Susan Capel and Richard Blair was published in 2020, 7 years after the first edition. Similar to the first, this second edition provi...

Introduction: The Changing Pedagogical Landscapes of History of Science and the “Two Cultures”

AbstractThis introduction to an Isis Focus section on pedagogy reflects on the changing institutional and political landscapes of the “two cultures” debate in education—both at the inception of the...

Is PISA more important to school reforms than educational research? The selective use of authoritative references in media and in parliamentary debates

ABSTRACT Two separate data searches underlie this analysis of how references to educational research and to PISA are used in the Swedish education debate. The data consist of 380 newspaper articles from the eight largest print media outlets in Sweden and 200 protocols from parliamentary debates (2000 to 2016) that made explicit reference to ‘PISA’ and/or to ‘educational research’. Based on a content analysis of this material, in which notions of policy borrowing and de-/legitimization are central, we describe the result as a selective use of PISA data and of educational research in the education debate. PISA is used to legitimize selective (party political) solutions that are oriented towards problems of teaching. The analysis also shows that politics and the media debate concerning education seems disinterested in educational research in a broader sense and that PISA seems to offer sufficient and ‘neutral’ authoritative knowledge and support for policy and reforms. We argue that PISA is the first way to obtain legitimate support for educational reforms. In so doing, the kinds of problems that these reforms aim to solve have been narrowed down to teaching- or practice-oriented problems.

The Educational Implications of Populism, Emotions and Digital Hate Speech: A Dialogue with Scholars from Canada, Chile, Spain, the UK, and the US

The recent rise of authoritarian populism, fueled by the spread of digital hate speech and the preeminence of emotions in the political arena, has not aroused much interest among educational researchers. In response to this gap in the literature, the authors of the present article aim to provide an overview of the educational implications of the recent wave of authoritarian populism by interviewing a group of experts on democratic citizenship education from various countries and backgrounds. The dialogue resulting from their responses helps to move forward the educational debate on how schools can deal with the emotions and hate speech that motivate support for authoritarian populisms.

A cross-sectional survey of attitudes towards education in implant dentistry in the undergraduate dental curriculum

BackgroundAn ongoing debate in dental education is whether implant dentistry, as a multidisciplinary domain, should be integrated into the undergraduate curriculum. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the perspectives of novices, clinical educators, and experienced dentists with regard to the importance of theoretical and practical implant dentistry teaching content in undergraduate dental education. The specific objective was to determine whether a consensus could be found concerning aspects of theoretical knowledge, implant position planning, implantation, prosthetic treatment procedures, postoperative care, and prerequisite experiences that should be provided in undergraduate dental education.ResultsA positive consensus existed in terms of theoretical education, assistance in surgical and prosthodontic procedures, implant planning and restoration in straightforward cases (i.e., posterior single crowns and bridges, overdentures on nonconnected implants), and postoperative care. A negative consensus existed for bone augmentation. Implantation was supported by novices (i.e., students and graduates). In addition, more experienced dentists were more likely to oppose implantation performed by undergraduates. The most preferred implantation method was implant insertion using a digitally fabricated drilling template, after surgical flap elevation.ConclusionsStudents and graduates preferred a comprehensive undergraduate education that included implant dentistry. Dentists working in private practice, and especially dentists working as university educators, were critical towards the integration of implant-related learning content into undergraduate education. The intention of medical education is to impart knowledge to students and to prepare them for life-long learning and continual professional development after graduation. Thus, an undergraduate dental curriculum that provides students a solid introduction and knowledge foundation in implant dentistry is recommended.

The Bias-Variance Tradeoff: How Data Science Can Inform Educational Debates

In addition to providing a set of techniques to analyze educational data, I claim that data science as a field can provide broader insights to education research. In particular, I show how the bias-variance tradeoff from machine learning can be formally generalized to be applicable to several prominent educational debates, including debates around learning theories (cognitivist vs. situativist and constructivist theories) and pedagogy (direct instruction vs. discovery learning). I then look to see how various data science techniques that have been proposed to navigate the bias-variance tradeoff can yield insights for productively navigating these educational debates going forward.

Managing Quantity or Quality? Students’ Voices for English Subject in the National Standardized Exam

The issue of quality is always a significant one and it will continue to be one of the predominant points of debate in education. Through a qualitative method, this study aimed to explore the experiences and the meaning that senior high school students faced in the national standardized exam for English subject. The data were collected by demographic background questionnaire and in-depth interviews with fifteen participants. The demographic data were analyzed descriptively, while the interviews were analyzed by within-case and cross-case analyses. The results of the data analysis revealed several themes such as cheating as bad consequences in the national standardized exam, it is like a yearly educational festival and formality, sharpening students memories, spending much money and time for English extra classes, dishonesty: spreading the key answer illegally, teachers more focus on the national exam, it is like a symbol of government power. Recommendations for taking some actions regarding the effect of the national standardized exam are offered.

Graduate teaching assistants: sharing epistemic agency with non-science majors in the biology laboratory

In teaching laboratories, scientific reasoning and argumentation are often taught in concert so students are provided opportunities to formulate a more nuanced understanding of science-as-practice and science as a social epistemology. Given recent calls to attend to the social aspects of science, we used Critical Contextual Empiricism, a social epistemology of science, as a framework for examining what features of a scientific community emerge in the introductory biology lab. In a case study of six graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), we explored how GTAs encouraged epistemic agency that encouraged their student’s efforts at knowledge construction in a community by collecting multiple data sources (e.g. audio recordings, students written work, focus group interviews) over a four-week sequence. Data analysis strategies were inductive, as a series of initial and focused coding were applied to select exchanges garnered from within the lab. Comparative analysis identified common occurrences across each respective case, which then revealed three overarching themes. We intended for GTAs to readily encourage epistemic agency to their students so insights regarding the social nature of knowledge production could be experienced and discussed. When epistemic shifts did occur, GTAs executed discursive moves targeting students’ experimental design practices (e.g. defining the dependent variable). Conversely, student’s efforts were also de-legitimized as GTAs provided specific directives to follow when challenges emerged for students. Finally, GTAs struggled to create a genuine community that modeled exemplary science-as-practice in the lab. Implications discuss how GTAs likely require more targeted support if community-driven learning is going to be successful in these uniquely challenging settings. Finally, working with non-science majors adds an additional layer of importance here given these lab-based experiences are limited and understanding the community’s role in generating scientific knowledge is a key component of being scientifically literate.

School District Responses to Cultural and Linguistic Change: Competing Discourses of Equity, Competition, and Community

ABSTRACT Framed by theories and methods from critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, this comparative case study of six Missouri school systems asked: How do school districts represent and address their changing communities? Discourses of equity, language, identity, and demographic change were examined across school system websites, mission statements, and policies. Analyses showed that all cases except for one White rural district highlighted the value of diversity through their mission statements, homepage photos, and hyperlinks to policies and resources for changing communities. However, four districts also presented deficit perspectives about racially, culturally, and linguistically minoritized students and highlighted neoliberal educational reform values of marketable competitiveness and accountability. Only one highlighted social equity and inclusivity. Deeper analyses focused on three cases demonstrate how competing discourses reflect ideological debates in education, which can shape community engagement and perceptions of students.

Cómo lograr que los niños argumenten

El objetivo de este capítulo es compartir dos experiencias de enseñanza de la argumentación en niños que cursan la escolaridad básica o primaria en colegios de Mendoza, Argentina, producto de tres investigaciones realizadas en la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. El interrogante: ¿pueden los niños argumentar? guió nuestras indagaciones. Dado que el libro en el que se inserta este capítulo está destinado a la enseñanza de la argumentación, mostraremos, en primer lugar, una breve síntesis de investigaciones latinoamericanas, seguida de una escueta referencia al marco conceptual para centrarnos en el propósito mencionado: cómo enseñar a producir textos argumentativos. Para ello se presentará la secuencia didáctica elaborada para su implementación en los cursos experimentales. Finalmente, presentaremos las conclusiones que nos permiten sostener que la competencia de los niños para argumentar se desarrolla desde etapas tempranas y que se puede acrecentar con la aplicación de secuencias didácticas diseñadas especialmente para este logro.

TRACING THE EFFECTS OF STUDENTS’ CENTERED TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES ON LEARNERS’ EDUCATIONAL GAINS: CASE OF PUBLIC SECTOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Applications of teachers’ pedagogical approaches for learners’ educational gains have been remained one of the educational debates since ago. Teachers transfer chunk of information among students through implementing techniques to strengthen teaching learning process. Relevance of ground-breaking instructional strategies put concrete effect on students’ entire academic success. Present quantitative research was conducted to explore the effect of teachers’ usage of students’ centered teachers’ pedagogical approaches on students’ educational gains. Researchers adopted ex-post-fact research design on sample of 800 respondents; 400 urban and 400 rural students randomly selected from public sector secondary schools of District Kasur Punjab-Province of Pakistan. Data were collected by administering self-constructed questionnaire mode of 5-point Likert type options. Validity of the instrument was confirmed from experts and Cronbach’s Alpha was applied to ensure instrument’s reliability scores; .864. Learners’ educational gains of science and arts students were obtained from gazette of Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Lahore. Results of independent sample t-test and regression analysis ascertained that teachers’ centered students’ pedagogical approaches effect 58% on learners’ educational gains whereas brainstorming 43%, inquiry 57%, problem solving 54% and cooperative technique effect 50% on learners’ educational gains. Science teachers were making more use of brainstorming, inquiry, problem solving, and cooperative teaching as compared to arts teachers. Study recommends that Govt. may train heads of the institutions on students’ centered teachers’ pedagogical approaches and bound them to implement with true spirit and vigor through teachers to overcome science and specially arts students’ declining level of educational gains; stakeholders’ cause for concern. Keywords: brainstorming, cooperative teaching, inquiry base, learners’ educational gains, problem solving.

Attitude of the Students, Teachers and Educational Administrators for Incorporating Human Rights Education in Secondary School Curriculum

After the World War-II, human rights education has become an increasingly visible feature of the educational policies, debates and foundations at international level. Steps have been taken by various nations to incorporate human rights education in their school curriculum. In India, a few studies have been conducted in the context of incorporating human rights education in school curriculum in general and in secondary school curriculum in particular. In the present study, an attempt was made to study the attitude of the students, teachers and educational administrators for incorporating human rights education in secondary school curriculum. The study mainly focused to compare the attitude of the students, teachers and educational administrators for incorporating human rights education in secondary school curriculum, and to identify certain basic content areas of human rights education that may/should have a place in secondary school curriculum. The study was considered under descriptive survey-cum-content analysis research. The participants of the study included 640 students, 256 teachers and 88 educational administrators under secondary schools of Bihar, India. A self-developed attitude scale titled ‘Attitude scale for studying the attitude for incorporating human rights education in secondary school curriculum’ was used for collecting data from participants for the study. Both the quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis were employed for analyzing the collected data of the study. The study mainly revealed that among the entire sample studied, the students possessed better attitude than teachers and educational administrators for incorporating human rights education in secondary school curriculum. Further, the study helped to identify certain basic content areas of human rights education that may/should have a place in secondary school curriculum.

Science for all: The struggle to establish school science in EnglandE.Jenkins, 2019London, UCL Institute of Education Press £24.99 (paperback), 207 pp ISBN 978-1-78277-264-4

Science for all: The struggle to establish school science in EnglandE.Jenkins, 2019London, UCL Institute of Education Press £24.99 (paperback), 207 pp ISBN 978-1-78277-264-4

Contagious Humanism in Early Nineteenth-Century German-Language Press

This article explores the ways the emerging concept of humanism was circulated and defined in early nineteenth-century German-language press. By analyzing a digitized corpus of German-language newspapers and periodicals published between 1808 and 1850, this article looks into the ways the concept of humanism was employed in book reviews, news, political reports, and feuilleton texts. Newspapers and periodicals had a significant role in transmitting the concept of humanism from educational debates into general political language in the 1840s. Furthermore, in an era of growing social problems and political unrest, humanism became increasingly associated with moral sentiments. Accordingly, this article suggests that its new political meanings and emotional underpinnings made humanism culturally contagious, particularly immediately before and during the 1848/49 revolutions.