Profiles of warm engagement and cold evaluation in multiple-document comprehension

We explored potential profiles of interest, attitudes, and source evaluation by performing cluster analysis in a sample of Norwegian upper-secondary students. Differences among the profile groups with regard to multiple-document use were examined. The profile groups were partly consistent with the default stances described by the cognitive-affective engagement model of multiple-source use (List & Alexander, 2017), resulting in critical analytic, evaluative, and disengaged profiles. However, the model’s assumption that interest and attitude constitute one affective engagement dimension was not confirmed. There were no statistically significant differences between the profile groups in the processing of a set of multiple documents; yet there was a tendency for students who adopted a critical analytic stance to engage in a more thorough text selection process. Those students also included more information units from the selected texts in their written products and integrated information units across the texts more frequently compared to the other profile groups.

Lesson Study: analytic stance and depth of noticing in post-lesson discussions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to shed light on teachers’ attention to student learning in post-lesson discussions in Lesson Study (LS) by exploring the depth and analytic stance of noticing (van Es, 2011) and by identifying interactions that may extend or narrow the levels of noticing. Design/methodology/approach The study has dug deeply into post-lesson discussions in the context of two different LS groups at a Norwegian lower secondary school. Findings The paper provides empirical insights about crucial elements of teachers’ learning processes pertaining to their professional noticing. Sharing of rich descriptions of evidence of student learning appeared to be a necessary foundation for the deepening of the teacher groups’ analytic approach. The study highlights the importance of teacher groups’ openness and attention to the collected data and a shared willingness to go deep into the interpretations. Interthinking and exploratory talk (Littleton and Mercer, 2013) are emphasised as important social interaction and talk modes to deepen the analytic stance and depth of noticing. Research limitations/implications Even though this is a small study, it brings to light important knowledge about how interactions in post-research lesson discussions in LS can influence teachers’ professional noticing. Practical implications An implication of the study is to design observation forms that capture student learning as tools for teachers’ professional noticing. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to investigate teachers’ learning processes in LS, including how interactions within a teacher group influence noticing.

De onderzoeker in een responsieve complexiteitsbenaderingVoor commentaar op eerdere versies van dit artikel dank ik Erica Baarends, Fijgje de Boer en Adri Smaling.

The position of the researcher in a responsive complexity approach Frits Simon Working from a complexity perspective within social sciences demands that the researcher has a different attitude. The complex responsive process approach as developed by Stacey c.s. puts forward ideas for this different attitude. A researcher needs to embody complexity instead of taking a distant, analytic stance. Stacey c.s. departs from a non-dualistic approach in which a researcher unavoidably takes part in a dynamic and unpredictable social world. There is no possibility to step out of this world, because the social world emerges through the many human interactions. Conducting research and taking up the perspective that Stacey c.s. offers means reflecting auto-ethnographically upon one’s experiences because research consists of actions in the social world with others. Therefore, the validation of the research will also have to take place responsively. Embodying complexity in doing research leads to accepting uncertainty, being modest and frank, acting ethically and being aware of the performative consequences of the research.

Between Imagination and Rigour: A Response to Farhad Dalal’s Article ‘The Analytic and the Relational: Inquiring into Practice’

The relational perspective of analysis is a way of looking at, practising, and understanding the whole of analysis—including psycho-analysis, group-analysis, and socio-analysis—rather than a specific school of psychoanalysis. Farhad Dalal’s excellent article describes the evolution of his thinking and practice, from a classical analytic stance to a relational conception of it. There are two ways of conceiving and practising psychoanalysis, which he calls ‘the analytic’ and ‘the relational’, derived from two contrasting conceptions of the world and of life. This generates a split between theory and practice in analysis. Some practitioners adhere to the classical view, but are actually relational in their practice; others have adopted relational theory, but maintain the detached scientific attitude of the classical Freudian analyst. Freud’s abandonment of the traumatic theory of neuroses had unconscious sources that determined the injunction for analysts not to be relational. Group analysis, on the other hand, has been relational from the beginning. S.H. Foulkes had a contradiction between his adherence to Freudian theory and the revolutionary aspects of his thinking and practice—what Dalal calls ‘radical Foulkes’. The hierarchical, detached, and emotionally closed off form of relating prescribed by classical analysis is anti-therapeutic. By contrast, the kind of therapeutic relation that Dalal strives to develop has connotations with engagement, reciprocity and mutuality, and may generate corrective emotional experiences. But human events are never fully explained or predictable, so that the corrective emotional experience is an occurrence, not a technique. The analyst works in a radical uncertainty and can only be guided by his intuition, which has then to be checked by rational critical analysis. This generates a dialectic tension between imagination and rigour, which must be kept and nursed, not solved. This corresponds to an analogical hermeneutic stance, which rejects both the dogmatic univocality of Modernism and the relativistic equivocality of Postmodernism. The analyst must respond with his whole being, and this being must be developed through a process of personality development, not training but formation (Bildung in German). This implies a particular epistemology, ontology, axiology, and ethics, a whole Weltanschauung and Lebensanschauung that includes the Golden Braid of thinking, feeling, and acting, on a basis of relating.

‘Disciplining witnesses’ in the teaching of physiotherapy: Some insights into the practical accomplishment of a science-based healthcare profession

Physiotherapy in the UK defines itself as a ‘science based healthcare profession’. Physiotherapy students must undertake at least one thousand hours of learning in live practice settings. Adopting an analytic stance shaped by interaction analysis and workplace studies, and drawing on observational data of placement settings, this paper examines some features of the means by which physiotherapy education is practically accomplished. The paper introduces and utilises a novel notational system for capturing movement and touch in ethnographic fieldwork notes. Our analysis draws upon ideas from Lynch and Macbeth’s (1998) study of elementary school science classes. We focus in particular on their notion of ‘disciplining witnesses’ to illustrate how science is enacted – and plays a privileged role – within the everyday accomplishment of practice-based physiotherapy education. We show how patients are disciplined to provide information on cue and to act as props for therapeutic demonstrations, while students are disciplined to co-produce standard interpretations of the science of physiotherapy. We conclude the paper with a brief discussion of the ways in which these insights offer a new perspective for physiotherapy practitioners and educators in understanding the nature of interactions entailed in their professional practice, and the role of patients within those interactions.

Israeli history curriculum and the conservative - liberal pendulum

At sixty-four Israel is still a comparatively young nation state, just passing from the 'developing' to the 'developed' phase. It has had five different history curricula for the Jewish 'Mamlakhti' (public non-religious) and the Arab sectors, which account for the majority of the students. For the first five decades the history curriculum did not ignite much controversy. The first curriculum was a rallying curriculum centered on the Jewish national movement and the establishment of Israel. In 1975 an 'academized' curriculum incorporated historical thinking goals – a move away from just an identification stance and towards an analytic stance. The mandatory baccalaureate examination, however, pushed for memorization and coverage. The fourth curriculum in 1993 integrated Jewish and world history with a slightly greater emphasis on world history, covered Israel's first three wars, and historical Jewish Diasporas and ethnicities. One textbook in the late nineties included cases of the deportation of Palestinian civilians during Israel's independence war. The decade since the turn of the millennia has been turbulent and inconsistent. New 'heritage' projects sponsored by right-wing Ministers of Education have alternated with curriculum emphasizing critical thinking, interpretation and multiple sources. The pendulum swung from expressive populist ethnocentricity to critical inquiry and diversity and back. New policies are haphazardly and partially enforced until a rival coalition reaches power and 'debates' curricula by publicizing the attempts to undo or alter them. Little attention was given to the ways teachers or students actually enacted and perceived the curriculum.