A Lovely Building for Difficult Knowledge: The Architecture of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wodtke, Larissa

2015-01-01

One only needs to look at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) logo, with its abstract outline of the CMHR building, to see the way in which the museum's architecture has come to stand for the CMHR's immaterial meanings and content. The CMHR's architecture becomes a material intersection of discourses of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and…

Menopause on the Internet: building knowledge and community on-line.

PubMed

MacPherson, K I

1997-09-01

Computers are ubiquitous throughout the developed world. Diverse discourses address the pros and cons of using this technology in higher education. Nursing has extensively used informatics but has not, as yet, been involved to any extent in teaching on the Internet. I argue that nurse educators should use computer technology to present substantive and rigorous courses that deal with complex issues, using menopause as an example. A for-credit menopause course I taught via e-mail is used to illustrate the possibility of building knowledge and a sense of community on the Internet.

Knowledge at Work: Learning and Transferring Expert Reasoning through Storytelling

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hernandez-Serrano, Julian; Stefanou, Spiro E.

2009-01-01

There is plenty of evidence in many fields of knowledge that storytelling is a bona fide human activity for problem-solving. We believe that a storytelling model for problem-solving can be constructed to organize this discourse. To that end, we carried out a qualitative study using the Grounded Theory tradition to build such a model always mindful…

Using domain knowledge and domain-inspired discourse model for coreference resolution for clinical narratives

PubMed Central

Roth, Dan

2013-01-01

Objective This paper presents a coreference resolution system for clinical narratives. Coreference resolution aims at clustering all mentions in a single document to coherent entities. Materials and methods A knowledge-intensive approach for coreference resolution is employed. The domain knowledge used includes several domain-specific lists, a knowledge intensive mention parsing, and task informed discourse model. Mention parsing allows us to abstract over the surface form of the mention and represent each mention using a higher-level representation, which we call the mention's semantic representation (SR). SR reduces the mention to a standard form and hence provides better support for comparing and matching. Existing coreference resolution systems tend to ignore discourse aspects and rely heavily on lexical and structural cues in the text. The authors break from this tradition and present a discourse model for “person” type mentions in clinical narratives, which greatly simplifies the coreference resolution. Results This system was evaluated on four different datasets which were made available in the 2011 i2b2/VA coreference challenge. The unweighted average of F1 scores (over B-cubed, MUC and CEAF) varied from 84.2% to 88.1%. These experiments show that domain knowledge is effective for different mention types for all the datasets. Discussion Error analysis shows that most of the recall errors made by the system can be handled by further addition of domain knowledge. The precision errors, on the other hand, are more subtle and indicate the need to understand the relations in which mentions participate for building a robust coreference system. Conclusion This paper presents an approach that makes an extensive use of domain knowledge to significantly improve coreference resolution. The authors state that their system and the knowledge sources developed will be made publicly available. PMID:22781192

[Primary healthcare and the construction of meanings of oral health: a social constructionist interpretation of discourses of the elderly].

PubMed

Bulgarelli, Alexandre Favero; Pinto, Ione Carvalho; Lorenzi, Carla Guanaes; Villa, Teresa Cristina Scatena; Mestriner, Soraya Fernandes; Silva, Rosalina Carvalho da

2012-05-01

Dentistry currently reveals itself to be open to new ideas about the construction of meanings for oral health. This openness leads to the social production of health revealing the contextualization of the social and historical aspects of the sundry knowledge in the development of oral health for different communities. With this research, we seek to build meanings for oral health with a group of elderly people. With this objective in mind, we propose an approximation between discourses on oral health mentioned by the elderly and the Social Constructionist discourse. We interviewed 14 elderly people enrolled in a Family Health Unit in Ribeirão Preto, State of São Paulo, in the first semester of 2010, and identified two interpretative repertoires through Discourse Analysis, which showed the relationship between 1 - Lack of information and dental assistance in childhood, and 2 - Primary Health Care building the meaning of oral health. We concluded that Social Constructionism works epistemologically for the construction of meanings for oral health and that primary health is essential for appreciation and health care that enables the construction of meanings in oral health by the elderly that create conditions for self-care and healthy attitudes.

How to Build Schools Where Adults Learn

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fahey, Kevin; Ippolito, Jacy

2014-01-01

In the current, very complex, and even conflicted discourse about schools, one thing is clear: Schools need to be about student learning. Schools need to ensure that students are good readers, proficient writers, capable mathematicians, competent scientists, and knowledgeable historians. Students also need to learn to work together, be healthy, be…

Literary Scholars Processing Poetry and Constructing Arguments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Warren, James E.

2006-01-01

Previous studies of the professional discourse of literary studies have focused solely on published scholarly articles and have produced contradictory evidence regarding the knowledge-building function of literary argument. In this study, 9 English department faculty members use a "think-aloud" procedure to read four lyric poems and compose a…

Engaging in Vocabulary Learning in Science: The Promise of Multimodal Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Townsend, Dianna; Brock, Cynthia; Morrison, Jennifer D.

2018-01-01

To a science 'outsider', science language often appears unnecessarily technical and dense. However, scientific language is typically used with the goal of being concise and precise, which allows those who regularly participate in scientific discourse communities to learn from each other and build upon existing scientific knowledge. One essential…

Consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in Early Childhood Education: The Impact of Colonial Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Melinda G.

2015-01-01

In Australian early years education, consultation and partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are central to embedding Indigenous perspectives. Building sustained and reciprocal partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people supports access to local knowledges and perspectives to inform curriculum planning,…

Discourse as Medium of Knowledge: Transmission of Knowledge by Transmission of Discourse People Live

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hassen, Rukya

2015-01-01

This is a study on discourse as medium of knowledge. Informal education is a system of transmission of knowledge by transmission of discourse people live by. In the humanities and social sciences, the term discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; it…

Useful and Dangerous Discourse: Deconstructing Racialized Knowledge about African-American Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Keffrelyn D.; Brown, Anthony L.

2012-01-01

Drawing from Michel Foucault's notion of "useful" and "dangerous" discourse coupled with the theory of racial knowledge, this article examines how two common counter-discourses about African-American students operate and create racial knowledge in education practice. By "counter-discourse", the authors refer to knowledge, theories, and histories…

Colonial scientific-medical documentary films and the legitimization of an ideal state in post-war Spain.

PubMed

Tabernero, Carlos; Jiménez-Lucena, Isabel; Molero-Mesa, Jorge

2017-01-01

This paper explores the role of film and medical-health practices and discourses in the building and legitimating strategies of Franco's fascist regime in Spain. The analysis of five medical-colonial documentary films produced during the 1940s explores the relationship between mass media communication practices and techno-scientific knowledge production, circulation and management processes. These films portray a non-problematic colonial space where social order is articulated through scientific-medical practices and discourses that match the regime's need to consolidate and legitimize itself while asserting the inclusion-exclusion dynamics involved in the definition of social prototypes through processes of medicalization.

Distinguishing Knowledge-Sharing, Knowledge-Construction, and Knowledge-Creation Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Aalst, Jan

2009-01-01

The study reported here sought to obtain the clear articulation of asynchronous computer-mediated discourse needed for Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia's knowledge-creation model. Distinctions were set up between three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge creation. These were applied to the asynchronous…

English and the Knowledge Economy: A Critical Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collin, Ross

2014-01-01

This article focuses on knowledge economy discourse and considers the appeal of this discourse to English educators. Knowledge economy discourse is defined as a mode of thought and expression that assumes a broad-based economy driven by innovation will soon emerge in the USA. This discourse, it is argued, offers English teachers solutions to some…

A Discourse Based Approach to the Language Documentation of Local Ecological Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Odango, Emerson Lopez

2016-01-01

This paper proposes a discourse-based approach to the language documentation of local ecological knowledge (LEK). The knowledge, skills, beliefs, cultural worldviews, and ideologies that shape the way a community interacts with its environment can be examined through the discourse in which LEK emerges. 'Discourse-based' refers to two components:…

The SWAN biomedical discourse ontology.

PubMed

Ciccarese, Paolo; Wu, Elizabeth; Wong, Gwen; Ocana, Marco; Kinoshita, June; Ruttenberg, Alan; Clark, Tim

2008-10-01

Developing cures for highly complex diseases, such as neurodegenerative disorders, requires extensive interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange of biomedical information in context. Our ability to exchange such information across sub-specialties today is limited by the current scientific knowledge ecosystem's inability to properly contextualize and integrate data and discourse in machine-interpretable form. This inherently limits the productivity of research and the progress toward cures for devastating diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) is an interdisciplinary project to develop a practical, common, semantically structured, framework for biomedical discourse initially applied, but not limited, to significant problems in Alzheimer Disease (AD) research. The SWAN ontology has been developed in the context of building a series of applications for biomedical researchers, as well as in extensive discussions and collaborations with the larger bio-ontologies community. In this paper, we present and discuss the SWAN ontology of biomedical discourse. We ground its development theoretically, present its design approach, explain its main classes and their application, and show its relationship to other ongoing activities in biomedicine and bio-ontologies.

Integrating knowledge and control into hypermedia-based training environments: Experiments with HyperCLIPS

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hill, Randall W., Jr.

1990-01-01

The issues of knowledge representation and control in hypermedia-based training environments are discussed. The main objective is to integrate the flexible presentation capability of hypermedia with a knowledge-based approach to lesson discourse management. The instructional goals and their associated concepts are represented in a knowledge representation structure called a 'concept network'. Its functional usages are many: it is used to control the navigation through a presentation space, generate tests for student evaluation, and model the student. This architecture was implemented in HyperCLIPS, a hybrid system that creates a bridge between HyperCard, a popular hypertext-like system used for building user interfaces to data bases and other applications, and CLIPS, a highly portable government-owned expert system shell.

Discourse analysis: towards an understanding of its place in nursing.

PubMed

Crowe, Marie

2005-07-01

This paper describes how discourse analysis, and in particular critical discourse analysis, can be used in nursing research, and provides an example to illustrate the techniques involved. Discourse analysis has risen to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s in disciplines such as the social sciences, literary theory and cultural studies and is increasingly used in nursing. This paper investigates discourse analysis as a useful methodology for conducting nursing research. Effective clinical reasoning relies on employing several different kinds of knowledge and research that draw on different perspectives, methodologies and techniques to generate breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding of clinical practices and patients' experiences of those practices. The steps in a discourse analysis include: choosing the text, and identifying the explicit purpose of the text, the processes used for claiming authority connections to other discourses, construction of major concepts, processes of naming and categorizing, construction of subject positions, construction of reality and social relations and implications for the practice of nursing. The limitations of discourse analysis, its relationship to other qualitative approaches and questions for evaluating the rigour of research using discourse analysis are also explored. The example of discourse analysis shows how a text influences the practice of nursing by shaping knowledge, values and beliefs. Discourse analysis can make a contribution to the development of nursing knowledge by providing a research strategy to examine dominant discourses that influence nursing practice.

Taiwanese and Sri Lankan students' dimensions and discourses of professionalism.

PubMed

Monrouxe, Lynn V; Chandratilake, Madawa; Gosselin, Katherine; Rees, Charlotte E; Ho, Ming-Jung

2017-07-01

The definition of medical professionalism poses a challenge to global medical educators. This is especially pronounced in settings where professionalism frameworks developed in the west are transferred into different cultures. Building upon our previous study across Western contexts, we examine Taiwanese and Sri Lankan medical students' conceptualisations of professionalism in terms of what professionalism comprises (i.e. dimensions) and how it is linguistically framed (i.e. discourses). A qualitative group interview study was undertaken comprising 26 group interviews with 135 participants from one Taiwanese (n = 64; Years 4-7) and one Sri Lankan medical school (n = 71; Years 2-5). Through thematic framework analysis we examined the data for explicit dimensions of professionalism. Through discourse analysis we identified how participants constructed professionalism linguistically (discourses). Thirteen common dimensions across Taiwanese and Sri Lankan talk were identified, with the dimensions (contextual, integration and internalised self) being identified only in Sri Lankan data. Professionalism as knowledge and patient-centredness were dominant dimensions in Taiwan; in Sri Lanka, attributes of the individual and rules were dominant dimensions. Participants in both countries used four types of discourses previously identified in the literature. Individual and interpersonal discourses were dominant in Taiwanese talk; the collective discourse was dominant in Sri Lankan talk. Findings were compared with our previous data collected in Western contexts. Despite some overlap in the dimensions and discourses identified across both this and Western studies, Taiwanese and Sri Lankan students' dominant dimensions and discourses were distinct. We therefore encourage global medical educators to look beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to professionalism, and to recognise the significance of context and culture in conceptualisations of professionalism. © 2017 The Authors. Medical Education published by Association for the Study of Medical Education and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Revisiting the Authoritative-Dialogic Tension in Inquiry-Based Elementary Science Teacher Questioning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Van Booven, Christopher D.

2015-05-01

Building on the 'questioning-based discourse analytical' framework developed by Singapore-based science educator and discourse analyst, Christine Chin, this study investigated the extent to which fifth-grade science teachers' use of questions with either an authoritative or dialogic orientation differentially restricted or expanded the quality and complexity of student responses in the USA. The author analyzed approximately 10 hours of classroom discourse from elementary science classrooms organized around inquiry-based science curricula and texts. Teacher questions and feedback were classified according to their dialogic orientation and contextually inferred structural purpose, while student understanding was operationalized as a dynamic interaction between cognitive process, syntacto-semantic complexity, and science knowledge type. The results of this study closely mirror Chin's and other scholars' findings that the fixed nature of authoritatively oriented questioning can dramatically limit students' opportunities to demonstrate higher order scientific understanding, while dialogically oriented questions, by contrast, often grant students the discursive space to demonstrate a greater breadth and depth of both canonical and self-generated knowledge. However, certain teacher questioning sequences occupying the 'middle ground' between maximal authoritativeness and dialogicity revealed patterns of meaningful, if isolated, instances of higher order thinking. Implications for classroom practice are discussed along with recommendations for future research.

Discourse comprehension in L2: Making sense of what is not explicitly said.

PubMed

Foucart, Alice; Romero-Rivas, Carlos; Gort, Bernharda Lottie; Costa, Albert

2016-12-01

Using ERPs, we tested whether L2 speakers can integrate multiple sources of information (e.g., semantic, pragmatic information) during discourse comprehension. We presented native speakers and L2 speakers with three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related, or causally unrelated to its context; its interpretation therefore required simple or complex inferences. Native speakers revealed a gradual N400-like effect, larger in the causally unrelated condition than in the highly related condition, and falling in-between in the intermediately related condition, replicating previous results. In the crucial intermediately related condition, L2 speakers behaved like native speakers, however, showing extra processing in a later time-window. Overall, the results show that, when reading, L2 speakers are able to process information from the local context and prior information (e.g., world knowledge) to build global coherence, suggesting that they process different sources of information to make inferences online during discourse comprehension, like native speakers. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Politics of change: the discourses that inform organizational change and their capacity to silence.

PubMed

McMillan, Kim

2016-09-01

Changes in healthcare organizations are inevitable and occurring at unprecedented rates. Such changes greatly impact nurses and their work, yet these experiences are rarely explored. Organizational change discourses remain grounded in perspectives that explore and explain systems, often not the people within them. Change processes in healthcare organizations informed by such organizational discourses validate only certain perspectives and forms of knowledge. This fosters exclusionary practices, limiting the capacity of certain individuals or groups of individuals to effectively contribute to change discourses and processes. The reliance on mainstream organizational discourses in healthcare organizations has left little room for the exploration of diverse perspectives on the subject of organizational change, particularly those of nurses. Michel Foucault's work challenges dominant discourse and suggest that strong reliance's on specific discourses effectively disqualify certain forms of knowledge. Foucault's writings on disqualified knowledge and parrhesia (truth telling and frank speech) facilitate the critical exploration of discourses that inform change in healthcare organizations and nurses capacities to contribute to organizational discourses. This paper explores the capacity of nurses to speak their truths within rapidly and continuously changing healthcare organizations when such changes are often driven by discourses not derived from nursing knowledge or experience. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Writing for Science Literacy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chamberlin, Shannon Marie

Scientific literacy is the foundation on which both California's currently adopted science standards and the recommended new standards for science are based (CDE, 2000; NRC, 2011). The Writing for Science Literacy (WSL) curriculum focuses on a series of writing and discussion tasks aimed at increasing students' scientific literacy. These tasks are based on three teaching and learning constructs: thought and language, scaffolding, and meta-cognition. To this end, WSL is focused on incorporating several strategies from the Rhetorical Approach to Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking to engage students in activities designed to increase their scientific literacy; their ability to both identify an author's claim and evidence and to develop their own arguments based on a claim and evidence. Students participated in scaffolded activities designed to strengthen their written and oral discourse, hone their rhetorical skills and improve their meta-cognition. These activities required students to participate in both writing and discussion tasks to create meaning and build their science content knowledge. Students who participated in the WSL curriculum increased their written and oral fluency and were able to accurately write an evidence-based conclusion all while increasing their conceptual knowledge. This finding implies that a discourse rich curriculum can lead to an increase in scientific knowledge.

From art to applied science.

PubMed

Schatzberg, Eric

2012-09-01

Before "applied science" and "technology" became keywords, the concept of art was central to discourse about material culture and its connections to natural knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, a new discourse of applied science had replaced the older discourse of art. This older discourse of art, especially as presented in Enlightenment encyclopedias, addressed the relationship between art and science in depth. But during the nineteenth century the concept of fine art gradually displaced the broader meanings of "art," thus undermining the utility of the term for discourse on the relationship between knowledge and practice. This narrowed meaning of "art" obscured key aspects of the industrial world. In effect, middle-class agents of industrialism, including "men of science," used the rhetoric of "applied science" and, later, "technology" to cement the exclusion of artisanal knowledge from the discourse of industrial modernity.

Corporate Discourse and the Academy: A Polemic.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Webster, Gary

2003-01-01

Critical analysis of vocabulary, imagery, and rhetoric in business texts shows that higher education is adopting a free-market discourse depicting the academy in terms of a knowledge industry or revenue generator in which intellectual resources are "leveraged" and knowledge is a "commodity." This discourse is characterized as management centered,…

[The constitution of competences in mental health nursing education and practice].

PubMed

Lucchese, Roselma; Barros, Sônia

2009-03-01

This qualitative study had the purpose to increase the discussions about the constitution of competences in the education of nurses so that they can work in the mental healthcare area. to analyze the representations of the research subjects about mental healthcare competences. qualitative research. The nursing department in a public university in the state of São Paulo. Professors and healthcare nurses working in the same area. The mobilization of testimonies happened in focus groups, followed by discourse analysis. The building of competences and promotion of complex situations in the students' learning process were discussed, and the discourse analysis yielded the following empirical categories: The concept of competence, What is a complex situation, Which knowledge is necessary to manage complex situations in psychiatric nursing and mental healthcare, Competence: knowing how to manage a complex situation.

Construction of knowledge about teaching practice and educating students from diverse cultures in an online induction program

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bice, Lawrence Raymond

2005-11-01

Beginning teachers in both urban areas and geographically isolated rural areas often do not have access to a mentor teacher of the same content area or grade level in their school or district. This project is a study of learning in the on-line e-Mentoring for Student Success (eMSS) program, which provides induction for science and mathematics teachers in Montana and California. The study centered on a particular segment of eMSS called the Diversity Module. Two examinations were conducted: (1) Analysis of discourse by all participants in the Diversity Module, and (2) case study of five beginning teachers with diverse student populations. Analysis of learning by cases was conducted by examining discourse in the Diversity Module, private on-line discussions with their assigned mentors during a two-year period, and pre and post Diversity Module interviews and interviews of their mentors. Three frameworks were developed to aid understanding of findings: (1) discourse analysis, (2) competencies of multicultural teachers, and, (3) competencies of pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge. Cases developed their knowledge of teaching along a continuum of needs over two years of participation in the eMSS program. Initial needs expressed by mentees were in areas such as classroom management and general methods of instruction. Cases increased their knowledge in virtually all aspects of pedagogical knowledge, changing their expressed needs to pedagogical content knowledge concerns such as adapting and differentiating instruction for particular content and individual students, and building their repertoire of instructional representations. Through on-line discussion, teachers developed or advanced awareness of student culture and learning characteristics, and adapted their practice to foster a climate of student respect. Findings provided little evidence of adapting instruction for diverse student learning. Teachers who had a strong awareness of their own and their students' cultures advanced their understanding of multicultural teaching competencies further than those who did not. Interview results indicated that learning sometimes takes place in a non-visible manner. Growth in multicultural teaching knowledge, as well as several aspects of pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge, was clearly evident for participants who posted few messages, but read and actively reflected on thoughts of others.

Classroom Discourse: An Essential Component in Building a Classroom Community

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lloyd, Malinda Hoskins; Kolodziej, Nancy J.; Brashears, Kathy M.

2016-01-01

Based on findings from a recent qualitative study utilizing grounded theory methodology, in this essay, the authors focus on the building of community within the classroom by emphasizing classroom discourse as an essential component of instruction in exemplary teachers' classrooms. The authors then provide insights as to how to encourage and…

Do Runner Beans Really Make You Run Fast? Young Children Learning About Science-Related Food Concepts in Informal Settings

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cumming, Jenny

2003-08-01

Early years practitioners acknowledge that much learning takes place in a family context. Science educators, in particular, recognise the importance of children's prior knowledge, both as a foundation on which to build and as a possible source of misconceptions. However, little work has been done to discover what young children learn outside school. This study utilised parent diaries and questionnaires to elucidate the experiences of children aged four to seven which might contribute to their knowledge about the origin of food and its destiny after being eaten. The findings indicate that children learn more scientifically correct information with friends and family than teachers might realise. Awareness of children's informal knowledge can assist teachers when planning activities. As well as this, children's prior knowledge can be utilised in classroom discourse to promote understanding.

[Primary healthcare and the construction of meanings for oral health: a social constructionist interpretation of discourses by the elderly].

PubMed

Bulgarelli, Alexandre Favero; Lorenzi, Carla Guanáes; Silva, Rosalina Carvalho da; Mestriner, Soraya Fernandes; Villa, Teresa Cristina Scatena; Pinto, Ione Carvalho

2012-08-01

Dentistry is nowadays open to new ideas about the constructions of meanings for oral health. This openness tallies with the social production of health and shows the need to contextualize the social, historical and sundry knowledge in the development of oral health for different communities. The scope of this research is to build meanings for oral health with a group of elderly people. With this in mind, we propose an approximation between the discourses of the elderly on oral health and the Social Constructionist discourse. Thus, we interviewed 14 elderly people registered with a Family Health Unit in Ribeirão Preto in the State of São Paulo in the first semester of 2010. This enabled us to identify two Interpretative Repertoires with the use of Discourse Analysis, which showed the relationship between: 1 - Lack of dental information and assistance in childhood; and 2 - Primary Healthcare constructing meaning for oral health. We concluded that Social Constructionism assists epistemologically for the construction of meaning for oral health and that Primary Healthcare is essential for valuing healthcare for the construction of meaning for oral health on the part of the elderly by fostering conditions for self care and healthy attitudes.

Knowledge Equivalence Discourse in New Zealand Secondary School Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rata, Elizabeth; Taylor, Anita

2015-01-01

The theoretical inquiry undertaken in this paper examines the discourse of knowledge equivalence used to justify conflating academic and non-academic subjects in New Zealand secondary school science. The purpose is to open up a critical discussion of the discourse and its influence on curriculum and pedagogy. Using a conceptual methodology, we…

Mining for liquid gold: midwifery language and practices associated with early breastfeeding support.

PubMed

Burns, Elaine; Fenwick, Jenny; Sheehan, Athena; Schmied, Virginia

2013-01-01

Internationally, women give mixed reports regarding professional support during the early establishment of breastfeeding. Little is known about the components of midwifery language and the support practices, which assist or interfere with the early establishment of breastfeeding. In this study, critical discourse analysis has been used to describe the language and practices used by midwives when supporting breastfeeding women during the first week after birth. Participant observation at two geographically distant Australian health care settings facilitated the collection of 85 observed audio-recorded dyadic interactions between breastfeeding women and midwives during 2008-2009. Additionally, 23 interviews with women post discharge, 11 interviews with midwives and four focus groups (40 midwives) have also been analysed. Analysis revealed three discourses shaping the beliefs and practices of participating midwives. In the dominant discourse, labelled 'Mining for Liquid Gold', midwives held great reverence for breast milk as 'liquid gold' and prioritised breastfeeding as the mechanism for transfer of this superior nutrition. In the second discourse, labelled 'Not Rocket Science', midwives constructed breastfeeding as 'natural' or 'easy' and something which all women could do if sufficiently committed. The least well-represented discourse constructed breastfeeding as a relationship between mother and infant. In this minority discourse, women were considered to be knowledgeable about their needs and those of their infant. The language and practices of midwives in this approach facilitated communication and built confidence. These study findings suggest the need for models of midwifery care, which facilitate relationship building between mother and infant and mother and midwife. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Inquiry-Based Civil Discourse Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Linvill, Darren L.; Pyle, Andrew S.

2017-01-01

Course: Civil discourse, argumentation, debate, persuasion, political communication. Objectives: This unit activity will help students build an understanding of civil discourse and its function in society. Students will: (1) increase their capacity to examine arguments critically, (2) enhance their own ability to self-reflect critically, and (3)…

Discursive constructions of professional identity in policy and regulatory discourse.

PubMed

Fealy, Gerard; Hegarty, Josephine-Mary; McNamara, Martin; Casey, Mary; O'Leary, Denise; Kennedy, Catriona; O'Reilly, Pauline; O'Connell, Rhona; Brady, Anne-Marie; Nicholson, Emma

2018-05-23

To examine and describe disciplinary discourses conducted through professional policy and regulatory documents in nursing and midwifery in Ireland. A key tenet of discourse theory is that group identities are constructed in public discourses and these discursively-constructed identities become social realities. Professional identities can be extracted from both the explicit and latent content of discourse. Studies of nursing's disciplinary discourse have drawn attention to a dominant discourse that confers nursing with particular identities, which privilege the relational and affective aspects of nursing and in the process, marginalise scientific knowledge and the technical and body work of nursing. We used critical discourse analysis to analyse a purposive sample of nursing and midwifery regulatory and policy documents. We applied a four-part, sequential approach to analysing the selected texts. This involved identifying key words, phrases and statements that indicated dominant discourses that, in turn, revealed latent beliefs and assumptions. The focus of our analysis was on how the discourses construct professional identities. Our analysis indicated recurring narratives that appeared to confer nurses and midwives with three dominant identities: 'the knowledgeable practitioner', the 'interpersonal practitioner' and the 'accountable practitioner'. The discourse also carried assumptions about the form and content of disciplinary knowledge. Academic study of identity construction in discourse is important to disciplinary development by raising nurses' and midwives' consciousness, alerting them to the ways that their own discourse can shape their identities, influence public and political opinion and, in the process, shape public policy on their professions. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Science Teaching Reform through Professional Development: Teachers' Use of a Scientific Classroom Discourse Community Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lewis, Elizabeth B.; Baker, Dale R.; Helding, Brandon A.

2015-01-01

This report outlines a 2-year investigation into how secondary science teachers used professional development (PD) to build scientific classroom discourse communities (SCDCs). Observation data, teacher, student, and school demographic information were used to build a hierarchical linear model. The length of time that teachers received PD was the…

Western and Japanese Discourse Style in a Consensus-Building Task Discussion

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hirabayashi, Haruma; Long, Christopher

2011-01-01

The current study analyzes discourse style differences between western and Japanese interlocutors in a group consensus-building task discussion. Four discussants (American male, Japanese male, German female and Japanese female) first created a ranking of 5 life values and then participated in a group discussion to arrive at a common group ranking.…

Students' Ability in Using Discourse Markers to Build Coherence in Compositions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Patriana, Andhina W.; Rachmajanti, Sri; Mukminatien, Nur

2016-01-01

The study attempts to find out how Indonesian students apply Discourse Markers (DMs) to build coherence in English compositions. It employs a descriptive design, analyzing 52 target DMs and how they are used in 21 argumentative papers. The participants of the study were 21 Master's students majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT). The results…

ICT Capacity Building: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Rwandan Policies from Higher Education Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Byungura, Jean Claude; Hansson, Henrik; Masengesho, Kamuzinzi; Karunaratne, Thashmee

2016-01-01

With the development of technology in the 21st Century, education systems attempt to integrate technology-based tools to improve experiences in pedagogy and administration. It is becoming increasingly prominent to build human and ICT infrastructure capacities at universities from policy to implementation level. Using a critical discourse analysis,…

Design as a Social Practice: The Design of New Build Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Daniels, Harry; Tse, Hau Ming; Stables, Andrew; Cox, Sarah

2017-01-01

In this paper we present the findings of an investigation into the ways in which the discourses and practices of school design produce educational spaces which influence the discourses and practices of teaching and learning when the building is occupied. It expands notions of post occupancy evaluation (POE) research by exploring how the…

Discourse Patterns at Laboratory Practices and the Co-Construction of Knowledge by Applying SDIS-GSEQ

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carrillo, Edgardo Ruiz; González, José Luis Cruz; Martínez, Samuel Meraz; Sánchez, Luisa Bravo

2015-01-01

The purpose of this study is to analyze the discourse through IRE (Intervention-Response-Evaluation) in the co-construction of knowledge of Biology students during laboratory practices by applying the SDIS-GSEQ software to assess IRE discourse patterns developed during the same. The study group consisted of second semester students of the…

A role for virtue in unifying the 'knowledge' and 'caring' discourses in nursing theory.

PubMed

Bliss, Suzanne; Baltzly, Dirk; Bull, Rosalind; Dalton, Lisa; Jones, Jo

2017-10-01

A critical examination of contemporary nursing theory suggests that two distinct discourses coexist within this field. On the one hand, proponents of the 'knowledge discourse' argue that nurses should drop the 'virtue script' and focus on the scientific and technical aspects of their work. On the other hand, proponents of the 'caring discourse' promote a view of nursing that embodies humanistic qualities such as compassion, empathy and mutuality. In view of this, we suggest a way to reconcile both discourses despite the fact that they appear to be at odds theoretically and practically. To that end, we argue that nursing theory must give a prominent role to the Aristotelian conception of virtue, and we offer an account that includes both character and intellectual virtues. This account allows for a focus on moral competence but also accommodates the demands for discipline-specific knowledge. Our account incorporates the caring discourse by suggesting a way for individuals to cultivate the conditions within themselves that make 'caring in nursing' possible, while the knowledge discourse is accommodated via the acquisition of the intellectual virtues. The process for achieving both these ends is the same: an intention to consistently develop, hone and exercise certain character traits over time. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Scientific Versus Experiential Evidence: Discourse Analysis of the Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency Debate in a Multiple Sclerosis Forum.

PubMed

Koschack, Janka; Weibezahl, Lara; Friede, Tim; Himmel, Wolfgang; Makedonski, Philip; Grabowski, Jens

2015-07-01

The vascular hypothesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), called chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI), and its treatment (known as liberation therapy) was immediately rejected by experts but enthusiastically gripped by patients who shared their experiences with other patients worldwide by use of social media, such as patient online forums. Contradictions between scientific information and lay experiences may be a source of distress for MS patients, but we do not know how patients perceive and deal with these contradictions. We aimed to understand whether scientific and experiential knowledge were experienced as contradictory in MS patient online forums and, if so, how these contradictions were resolved and how patients tried to reconcile the CCSVI debate with their own illness history and experience. By using critical discourse analysis, we studied CCSVI-related posts in the patient online forum of the German MS Society in a chronological order from the first post mentioning CCSVI to the time point when saturation was reached. For that time period, a total of 117 CCSVI-related threads containing 1907 posts were identified. We analyzed the interaction and communication practices of and between individuals, looked for the relation between concrete subtopics to identify more abstract discourse strands, and tried to reveal discourse positions explaining how users took part in the CCSVI discussion. There was an emotionally charged debate about CCSVI which could be generalized to 2 discourse strands: (1) the "downfall of the professional knowledge providers" and (2) the "rise of the nonprofessional treasure trove of experience." The discourse strands indicated that the discussion moved away from the question whether scientific or experiential knowledge had more evidentiary value. Rather, the question whom to trust (ie, scientists, fellow sufferers, or no one at all) was of fundamental significance. Four discourse positions could be identified by arranging them into the dimensions "trust in evidence-based knowledge," "trust in experience-based knowledge," and "subjectivity" (ie, the emotional character of contributions manifested by the use of popular rhetoric that seemed to mask a deep personal involvement). By critical discourse analysis of the CCSVI discussion in a patient online forum, we reconstruct a lay discourse about the evidentiary value of knowledge. We detected evidence criteria in this lay discourse that are different from those in the expert discourse. But we should be cautious to interpret this dissociation as a sign of an intellectual incapability to understand scientific evidence or a naïve trust in experiential knowledge. Instead, it might be an indication of cognitive dissonance reduction to protect oneself against contradictory information.

Building a Discourse Community: Initial Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hodge, Lynn Liao; Walther, Ashley

2017-01-01

Although it is not a new idea, discourse continues to be a topic of discussion among teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in mathematics education. The National Council of Teachers (NCTM) and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM 2010) describe mathematics classrooms as discourse communities in which whole-class…

Social construction: vistas in clinical child and adolescent psychology.

PubMed

Gergen, Kenneth J; Lightfoot, Cynthia; Sydow, Lisa

2004-06-01

We explore here the potentials of a social constructionist orientation to knowledge for research and clinical practice. Dialogues on social construction emphasize the communal origins of knowledge. They stress the cultural basis of knowledge claims, the significance of language, the value saturation of all knowledge, and the significance of relationships as opposed to individuals. An initial illustration of constructionism in action centers on adolescent risk behavior. Such behavior is often constructed negatively within popular writings and the social science and thus ignores the meaning of such actions to the adolescents themselves. Discourse analysis indicates that for adolescents risky behavior serves important functions of enhancing group solidarity and establishing positive identity. A second illustration, exploring the implications of constructionism for therapy, places a strong emphasis on the therapist as a collaborator in the building of meaning. Traditional investments in diagnosis and treatment are replaced with the collaborative creation of new possibilities for action.

Taking Care, Bringing Life: A Post-structuralist Feminist Analysis of Maternal Discourses of Mothers and Dais in India.

PubMed

Agarwal, Vinita

2018-04-01

My post-structuralist feminist reading of the antenatal and birthing practices of women (N = 25) living in a basti in India makes visible how the meanings of maternal experiences constituted as our ways open discursive spaces for the mothers and dais as procreators to: challenge (i.e., question the authority of), co-opt (i.e., conditionally adopt), and judge (i.e., employ sanctioned criteria to regulate) competing knowledge production forms. In critiquing maternal knowledge as feminist discourse, the women's strategies contribute theoretically to an integrative construction of care by reclaiming displaced knowledge discourses and diversity in meaning production. Pragmatically, consciousness-raising collectives comprising the mothers and dais can cocreate narratives of our ways of maternal experiences articulated in public discourse to sustain equitability of knowledge traditions in migrant urban Third World contexts.

Counter-Discourses and Alternative Knowledge: Rural Chinese Female Students Accommodating and Resisting the Discourse of Quality ("Suzhi") at Higher Education Institutions in China

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Lifang

2016-01-01

This article, based on a qualitative research study with 66 rural female students attending five public universities and one public college in China, examines how these students negotiated the dominant discourse of quality (suzhi), which represents them as lacking in capacity and knowledge. Since the 1980s when China started implementing its…

Communicative Discourse in Second Language Classrooms: From Building Skills to Becoming Skillful

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suleiman, Mahmoud

2013-01-01

The dynamics of the communicative discourse is a natural process that requires an application of a wide range of skills and strategies. In particular, linguistic discourse and the interaction process have a huge impact on promoting literacy and academic skills in all students especially English language learners (ELLs). Using interactive…

When Elephants Fly: Differential Sensitivity of Right and Left Inferior Frontal Gyri to Discourse and World Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Menenti, Laura; Petersson, Karl Magnus; Scheeringa, Rene; Hagoort, Peter

2009-01-01

Both local discourse and world knowledge are known to influence sentence processing. We investigated how these two sources of information conspire in language comprehension. Two types of critical sentences, correct and world knowledge anomalies, were preceded by either a neutral or a local context. The latter made the world knowledge anomalies…

Negotiating Knowledge Contribution to Multiple Discourse Communities: A Doctoral Student of Computer Science Writing for Publication

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Li, Yongyan

2006-01-01

Despite the rich literature on disciplinary knowledge construction and multilingual scholars' academic literacy practices, little is known about how novice scholars are engaged in knowledge construction in negotiation with various target discourse communities. In this case study, with a focused analysis of a Chinese computer science doctoral…

An analysis of science conceptual knowledge in journals of students with disabilities and normally achieving students

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Grigg, Gail S.

Science education reforms of the last two decades have focused on raising the bar for ALL students which includes students with mild to moderate disabilities. Formative assessment can be used to assess the progress of these students to inquire, understand scientific concepts, reason scientifically, make decisions, and communicate effectively in science. The purpose of this study is to examine the use of science journals as a formative assessment in a guided inquiry unit of study for students with learning disabilities. Two normally achieving students (NA) and five students with learning disabilities (SLD) participated in a study of mammals that utilized journals to record the development of student knowledge through the course of study. Students were interviewed after the lessons were complete using the same prompts required in the journals. Themes were developed from the student writings and their verbal discourse using Grounded Theory. Journals and verbal discourse were rated following the themes of Knowledge Telling (KT) and Knowledge Transformation (KTR). Concept maps were developed for the Pre and Post test lessons (written and verbal discourses) by the raters in an attempt to further explain the knowledge that the students conveyed. The results of this study suggest that SLD are able to demonstrate knowledge about mammals better through verbal discourse than written discourse. While the NA students wrote more and used more technical discourse than did their SLD peers, the conceptual understanding of the topic by the SLD was no less inclusive than their NA peers when accessed verbally. The journals demonstrated limited conceptual growth for the SLD. Further, while lexical density is important to the development of knowledge in science, this study suggests the "conceptual density" may be another important indicator to examine.

Scientific Versus Experiential Evidence: Discourse Analysis of the Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency Debate in a Multiple Sclerosis Forum

PubMed Central

Weibezahl, Lara; Friede, Tim; Himmel, Wolfgang; Makedonski, Philip; Grabowski, Jens

2015-01-01

Background The vascular hypothesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), called chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI), and its treatment (known as liberation therapy) was immediately rejected by experts but enthusiastically gripped by patients who shared their experiences with other patients worldwide by use of social media, such as patient online forums. Contradictions between scientific information and lay experiences may be a source of distress for MS patients, but we do not know how patients perceive and deal with these contradictions. Objective We aimed to understand whether scientific and experiential knowledge were experienced as contradictory in MS patient online forums and, if so, how these contradictions were resolved and how patients tried to reconcile the CCSVI debate with their own illness history and experience. Methods By using critical discourse analysis, we studied CCSVI-related posts in the patient online forum of the German MS Society in a chronological order from the first post mentioning CCSVI to the time point when saturation was reached. For that time period, a total of 117 CCSVI-related threads containing 1907 posts were identified. We analyzed the interaction and communication practices of and between individuals, looked for the relation between concrete subtopics to identify more abstract discourse strands, and tried to reveal discourse positions explaining how users took part in the CCSVI discussion. Results There was an emotionally charged debate about CCSVI which could be generalized to 2 discourse strands: (1) the “downfall of the professional knowledge providers” and (2) the “rise of the nonprofessional treasure trove of experience.” The discourse strands indicated that the discussion moved away from the question whether scientific or experiential knowledge had more evidentiary value. Rather, the question whom to trust (ie, scientists, fellow sufferers, or no one at all) was of fundamental significance. Four discourse positions could be identified by arranging them into the dimensions “trust in evidence-based knowledge,” “trust in experience-based knowledge,” and “subjectivity” (ie, the emotional character of contributions manifested by the use of popular rhetoric that seemed to mask a deep personal involvement). Conclusions By critical discourse analysis of the CCSVI discussion in a patient online forum, we reconstruct a lay discourse about the evidentiary value of knowledge. We detected evidence criteria in this lay discourse that are different from those in the expert discourse. But we should be cautious to interpret this dissociation as a sign of an intellectual incapability to understand scientific evidence or a naïve trust in experiential knowledge. Instead, it might be an indication of cognitive dissonance reduction to protect oneself against contradictory information. PMID:26133525

Constructive Controversy as a Means of Teaching Citizens How to Engage in Political Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnson, David W.; Johnson, Roger T.

2014-01-01

Positive political discourse is the heart of democracy. The purposes of political discourse include making an effective decision about the course the society should take and building a moral bond among all members of the society. A responsibility of social sciences within a democratic society is to provide the theory, research, and normative…

The Relationship of Discourse and Topic Knowledge to Fifth Graders' Writing Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olinghouse, Natalie G.; Graham, Steve; Gillespie, Amy

2015-01-01

This study examined whether discourse and topic knowledge separately predicted the overall quality and the inclusion of basic genre elements in 5th grade students' stories, persuasive papers, and informational text once the other type of knowledge as well as topic interest, spelling, handwriting fluency, length of text, and gender were controlled.…

Transnational Discourses of Knowledge and Learning in Professional Work: Examples from Computer Engineering

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nerland, Monika

2010-01-01

Taking a Foucauldian framework as its point of departure, this paper discusses how transnational discourses of knowledge and learning operate in the profession of computer engineering and form a certain logic through which modes of being an engineer are regulated. Both the knowledge domain of computer engineering and its related labour market is…

Knowledge, language and subjectivities in a discourse community: Ideas we can learn from elementary children about science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kurth, Lori Ann

2000-10-01

In light of continuing poor performance by American students in school science, feminists and sociocultural researchers have demonstrated that we need to look beyond content to address the science needs of all school children. In this study I examined issues of discourse norms, knowledge, language and subjectivities (meaning personal and social observations and characteristics) in elementary science. Over a two-year period, I used an interpretive methodological approach to investigate science experiences in two first-second and second grade classrooms. I first established some of the norms and characteristics of the discourse communities through case studies of new students attempting to gain entry to whole class conversations. I then examined knowledge, a central focus of science education addressed by a variety of theoretical approaches. In these classrooms students co-constructed and built knowledge in their whole class science conversations sometimes following convergent (similar knowledge) and, at other times, divergent (differing knowledge) paths allowing for broader discourse. In both paths, there was gendered construction of knowledge in which same gender students elaborated the reasoning of previous speakers. In conjunction with these analyses, I examined what knowledge sources the students used in their science conversations. Students drew on a variety of informal and formal knowledge sources including personal experiences, other students, abstract logic and thought experiments, all of which were considered valid. In using sources from both in and out of school, students' knowledge bases were broader than traditional scientific content giving greater access and richness to their conversations. The next analysis focused on students' use of narrative and paradigmatic language forms in the whole class science conversations. Traditionally, only paradigmatic language forms have been used in science classrooms. The students in this study used both narrative and paradigmatic language by drawing on stories of personal experience as well as canonical scientific argument. As had the varied knowledge paths and sources, the use of both language forms contributed to a broader and richer scientific discourse. Finally, in studying students' written discourse through their journals, I found that students had expanded views of science as they incorporated many aspects of their subjective selves including self and human elements, thinking, emotions, etc. in their writing and drawing. The enactment of knowledge, language and subjectivities in these discourse communities was unique, rich and meaningful highlighting a broader, more accessible vision of science. I advocate that knowledge, language and subjectivities should be central concepts in the practices of science communities as demonstrated in these classrooms. In establishing and integrating these concepts, the use of alternative and traditional modes of expression should be supported as both necessary and complementary. Students and teachers must also jointly construct classroom discourse norms, talk and writing in specific ways in order to provide a safe, comfortable and meaningful learning environment. Many teachers, students and scientists would benefit from broader visions of science, which enrich scientific knowledge and practice and engage and value participants from many backgrounds.

Mirror, Mirror

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fuentes, Sarah Quebec

2015-01-01

NCTM's "Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All" (2014), outlines eight teaching practices for effective teaching and learning mathematics. One of them, facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse, states, "Effective teaching of mathematics facilitates discourse among students to build shared understanding of…

Online Scholarly Conversations in General Education Astronomy Courses

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, Qijie; Wong, Ka-Wah

2018-01-01

In general education astronomy courses, many students are struggling with understanding the foundational concepts and theories in astronomy. One of the possible reasons is that, due the large class size, many of the courses are taught using a lecture mode, where human interactions and active learning are limited (Freeman et al., 2014). To address this challenge, we have applied the knowledge building framework (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006) to design an online collaborative learning component, called Scholarly Conversations, to be integrated into a general education astronomy course at a public, comprehensive university.During Scholarly Conversations, students are treated as scholars to advance knowledge frontiers (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). The whole process involves the creation of new ideas and requires discourse and collective work for the advancement and creation of artifacts, such as theories and models (van Aalst, 2009). Based on the knowledge building principles (Scardamalia, 2002; Zhang, Scardamalia, Reeve, & Messina, 2009), several features have been built into Scholarly Conversations so that students are guided to deepen understanding of the astronomy concepts through three phases: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction and knowledge building, and reflections on learning growth (van Aalst, 2009; Cai, 2017). The online Scholarly Conversation is an extension of the lecture component of the general education astronomy course. It promotes student interactions and collaborative learning, and provides scaffolds for students to construct meanings of the essential concepts in astronomy through social learning and online technology. In this presentation, we will explain the specific design principles of the online Scholarly Conversation, and share the artifacts created to facilitate the online conversations in an general education astronomy course.Note: This project has been supported by the College of Education Research Grant Program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Scientist or science-stuffed? Discourses of science in North American medical education.

PubMed

Whitehead, Cynthia

2013-01-01

The dominance of biomedical science in medical education has been contested throughout the past century, with recurring calls for more social science and humanities content. The centrality of biomedicine is frequently traced back to Abraham Flexner's 1910 report, 'Medical Education in the United States and Canada'. However, Flexner advocated for a scientist-doctor, rather than a curriculum filled with science content. Examination of the discourses of science since Flexner allows us to explore the place of various knowledge forms in medical education. A Foucauldian critical discourse analysis was performed, examining the discourses of scientific medicine in Flexner's works and North American medical education articles in subsequent decades. Foucault's methodological principles were used to identify statements, keywords and metaphors that emerged in the development of the discourses of scientific medicine, with particular attention to recurring arguments and shifts in the meaning and use of terms. Flexner's scientist-doctor was an incisive thinker who drew upon multiple forms of knowledge. In the post-Flexner medical education reforms, the perception of science as a discursive object embedded in the curriculum became predominant over that of the scientist as the discursive subject who uses science. Science was then considered core curricular content and was discursively framed as impossibly vast. A parallel discourse, one of the insufficiency of biomedical science for the proper training of doctors, has existed over the past century, even as the humanities and social sciences have remained on the margins in medical school curricula. That discourses of scientific medicine have reinforced the centrality of biomedicine in medical education helps to explain the persistent marginalisation of other important knowledge domains. Medical educators need to be aware of the effects of these discourses on understandings of medical knowledge, particularly when contemplating curricular reform. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2013.

'I'm Not Being Offensive But…': Intersecting Discourses of Discrimination towards Muslim Children in School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Welply, Oakleigh

2018-01-01

This article examines forms of implicit discrimination towards Muslim children in children's discourses of Otherness. Findings in this paper draw on qualitative data exploring the discourses of 17 children from a Year 6 class in a culturally diverse primary school in the East of England. Building on Critical Race Theory and Critical Discourse…

The Dominant Obesity Discourse Versus Children's Conceptualizations of Health: A Comparison Through Dialogue and Drawings.

PubMed

Bhagat, Krishna; Howard, Donna E

2018-06-01

The emphasis on childhood obesity reduction has been attributed to the dominant obesity discourse. However, some researchers argue that this discourse may be ineffective and even harmful for children. From a post-structuralist perspective, the dominant obesity discourse has the power to shape children's subjectivities, though subjectivities may also be influenced by personal experiences and other knowledge about bodies and health. There is limited research which explores how children's conceptualizations of health are informed by the dominant obesity discourse. To address this knowledge gap, qualitative data were collected from 8- to 11-year-old children ( n = 29) regarding their conceptualizations of health, healthy bodies, and health practices. Results suggest that children's conceptualizations reflected arguments embedded within the dominant obesity discourse, but at times, also contradicted or deviated from it. Study findings can be applied toward children's health promotion programming to offer a more holistic and inclusive perspective on health and well-being.

Two Decades of Structure Building

PubMed Central

Gernsbacher, Morton Ann

2014-01-01

During the past decade I have been developing a very simple framework for describing the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse comprehension. I call this framework the Structure Building Framework, and it is based on evidence provided during the first decade of discourse processing research. According to the Structure Building Framework, the goal of comprehension is to build coherent mental representations or structures. Comprehenders build each structure by first laying a foundation. Comprehenders develop mental structures by mapping on new information when that information coheres or relates to previous information. However, when the incoming information is less related, comprehenders shift and attach a new substructure. The building blocks of mental structures are memory nodes, which are activated by incoming stimuli and controlled by two cognitive mechanisms: suppression and enhancement. In this article, first I review the seminal work on which the Structure Building Framework is based (the first decade of structure building research); then I recount the research I have conducted to test the Structure Building Framework (the second decade of structure building research). PMID:25484476

Educational silos in nursing education: a critical review of practical nurse education in Canada.

PubMed

Butcher, Diane L; MacKinnon, Karen A

2015-09-01

Changes to practical nurse education (with expanded scopes of practice) align with the increasing need for nurses and assistive personnel in global acute care contexts. A case in point is this critical exploration of Canadian practical nursing literature, undertaken to reveal predominating discourses and relationships to nursing disciplinary knowledge. The objectives of this poststructural critical review were to identify dominant discourses in practical nurse education literature and to analyze these discourses to uncover underlying beliefs, constructed truths, assumptions, ambiguities and sources of knowledge within the discursive landscape. Predominant themes in the discourses surrounding practical nurse education included conversations about the nurse shortage, expanded roles, collaboration, evidence-based practice, role confusion, cost/efficiency, the history of practical nurse education and employer interests. The complex relationships between practical nursing and the disciplinary landscape of nursing are revealed in the analysis of discourses related to the purpose(s) of practical nurse education, curricula/educational programming, relationships between RN and PN education and the role of nursing knowledge. Power dynamics related to employer needs and interests, as well as educational silos and the nature of women's work, are also revealed within the intersection of various discourses. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Science-for-Teaching Discourse in Science Teachers' Professional Learning Communities

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lohwasser, Karin

Professional learning communities (PLCs) provide an increasingly common structure for teachers' professional development. The effectiveness of PLCs depends on the content and quality of the participants' discourse. This dissertation was conducted to add to an understanding of the science content needed to prepare to teach science, and the discourse characteristics that create learning opportunities in teachers' PLCs. To this end, this study examined how middle school science teachers in three PLCs addressed science-for-teaching, and to what effect. Insight into discourse about content knowledge for teaching in PLCs has implications for the analysis, interpretation, and support of teachers' professional discourse, their collaborative learning, and consequently their improvement of practice. This dissertation looked closely at the hybrid space between teachers' knowledge of students, of teaching, and of science, and how this space was explored in the discourse among teachers, and between teachers and science experts. At the center of the study were observations of three 2-day PLC cycles in which participants worked together to improve the way they taught their curriculum. Two of the PLC cycles were supported, in part, by a science expert who helped the teachers explore the science they needed for teaching. The third PLC worked without such support. The following overarching questions were explored in the three articles of this dissertation: (1) What kind of science knowledge did teachers discuss in preparation for teaching? (2) How did the teachers talk about content knowledge for science teaching, and to what effect for their teaching practice? (3) How did collaborating teachers' discursive accountabilities provide opportunities for furthering the teachers' content knowledge for science teaching? The teachers' discourse during the 2-day collaboration cycles was analyzed and interpreted based on a sociocultural framework that included concepts from the practice-based theory of content knowledge for teaching developed by D. L. Ball, Thames, and Phelps (2008) and the Accountable Talk framework by Michaels, O'Connor, & Resnick (2008). The study's findings could provide justification for and ideas on how to provide targeted support for PLCs to make teachers' work on science knowledge more applicable to lesson planning, teaching, and student learning.

Enrollment Logics and Discourses: Toward Developing an Enrollment Knowledge Framework

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Snowden, Monique L.

2013-01-01

This article brings attention to a typology of enrollment knowledge possessed and enacted by contemporary chief enrollment officers. Interview narratives are used to reveal enrollment principles and associated actions--enrollment logics--that form enrollment discourses, which in turn shape the institutionalized presence of strategic enrollment…

Common Ground? How the Encoding of Specialist Vocabulary Affects Peer-to-Peer Online Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paus, Elisabeth; Jucks, Regina

2012-01-01

Using the same specialist terms in online discourse can indicate knowledge overlaps between partners. However, linguistic overlaps do not automatically ensure overlaps in conceptual representations. In particular, learning situations, which typically focus on knowledge acquisition, require a sufficient understanding of domain-specific concepts.…

Comprehension of Discourse Markers and Reading Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Khatib, Mohamad

2011-01-01

According to many research findings, the presence of discourse markers (DMs) enhances readers' comprehension of the texts they read. However, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between knowledge of DMs and reading comprehension (RC) and the present study explores the relationship between them. Knowledge of DMs is measured through…

Promoting Knowledge Creation Discourse in an Asian Primary Five Classroom: Results from an inquiry into life cycles

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

van Aalst, Jan; Sioux Truong, Mya

2011-03-01

The phrase 'knowledge creation' refers to the practices by which a community advances its collective knowledge. Experience with a model of knowledge creation could help students to learn about the nature of science. This research examined how much progress a teacher and 16 Primary Five (Grade 4) students in the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme could make towards the discourse needed for Bereiter and Scardamalia's model of knowledge creation. The study consisted of two phases: a five-month period focusing on the development of the classroom ethos and skills needed for this model (Phase 1), followed by a two-month inquiry into life cycles (Phase 2). In Phase 1, we examined the classroom practices that are thought to support knowledge creation and the early experiences of the students with a web-based inquiry environment, Knowledge Forum®. In Phase 2, we conducted a summative evaluation of the students' work in Knowledge Forum in the light of the model. The data sources included classroom video recordings, artefacts of the in-class work, the Knowledge Forum database, a science content test, questionnaires, and interviews. The findings indicate that the students made substantial progress towards the knowledge creation discourse, particularly regarding the social structure of this kind of discourse and, to a lesser extent, its idea-centred nature. They also made acceptable advances in scientific knowledge and appeared to enjoy this way of learning. The study provides one of the first accounts in the literature of how a teacher new to the knowledge creation model enacted it in an Asian primary classroom.

Productive power and the 'practices of the self' in contraceptive counselling.

PubMed

Hayter, Mark

2006-03-01

This paper explores an under-researched issue within the reproductive health of women - the discursive construction of self-examination instruction in sexual health clinics. The study utilises Foucault's work on 'productive power', the 'practices of the self' and discourse to map out how nurses instruct contraceptive-using women in self-care practices. Forty-nine consultations in sexual health clinics were tape recorded and analysed. The data reveal how nurses utilise the discourse of risk as a technique to reinforce and develop self-care practices - a concept congruent with the Greco-Roman concept of the cura sui, the philosophical notion that one must make oneself into the object of care. Nurses build upon the notion of risk by educating women about their reproductive anatomy and physiology utilising medical texts as tools. This provides a contemporary example of the mia chora: identified by Foucault as the incitement for the individual to develop a usable knowledge of the body. Lastly, nurses instruct women in the development of a self-care regimen - the epimeleia, the development of habitual body techniques. It is proposed that this process is congruent with the Aristotelian notion of habitus, the development of body knowledge, body techniques and self-care practices necessary to pursue health.

Building Mathematics Discourse in Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gresham, Gina; Shannon, Tracy

2017-01-01

Mathematics discourse is a teaching approach that encourages student discussion and reveals an understanding of concepts as students engage in mathematical reasoning and debate (Cobb 2006). Grabowski and Ke (2007) posit that students have significantly higher achievement and positive attitudes toward mathematics after participating in gaming…

Lighting the Way through Scientific Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Li-hsuan

2008-01-01

This article describes a thought-provoking lesson that compares various arrangements of lamp-battery circuits to help students develop the motivation and competence to participate in scientific discourse for knowledge construction. Through experimentation and discourse, students explore concepts about voltage, current, resistance, and Ohm's law.…

Semantic Knowledge Use in Discourse: Influence of Age

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kintz, Stephen; Wright, Heather Harris

2017-01-01

Semantic memory is relatively stable across the lifespan (LaBarge, Edwards, & Knesevich, 1986). However, most research has been conducted at the single concept level (LaBarge et al., 1986, Spaniol et al., 2006). Few researchers have examined how semantic knowledge is used in discourse. The purpose of the study, then, was to determine the…

"Research-Based" and "Profession-Oriented" as Prominent Knowledge Discourses in Curriculum Restructuring of Professional Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Afdal, Hilde W.

2017-01-01

This article questions what kind of actors become involved and analyzes what forms of knowledge are activated, when discourses such as "research-based" and "profession-oriented" become basic preconditions in national curriculum change processes in Norway. A "mapping" is conducted, comprised of actors and ideas, played…

Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

PubMed Central

Vanheule, Stijn

2016-01-01

This paper studies how subjectivity in capitalist culture can be characterized. Building on Lacan's later seminars XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX, the author first outlines Lacan's general discourse theory, which includes four characteristic discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. Next, the author explores the subjectivity and the mode of dealing with jouissance and semblance, which is entailed in a fifth type of discourse, the capitalist discourse, discussed by Lacan (1972). Indeed, like the other discourses that Lacan discerns, the discourse of the capitalist can be thought of as a mode of dealing with the sexual non-rapport. It is argued that in the case of neurosis the discourse of the capitalist functions as an attempt to ignore the sexual non-rapport and the dimension of the unconscious. Psychosis, by contrast, is marked by an a priori exclusion from discourse. In that case, consumerist ways of relating to the other might offer a semblance, and thus the possibility of inventing a mode of relating to the other. Two clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate this perspective: one concerning the neurotic structure and one concerning the psychotic structure. PMID:28018280

Nurses’ Experiences of Managing and Management in a Critical Care Unit

PubMed Central

Ogle, K. Robyn; Glass, Nel

2014-01-01

In this article, we describe the major findings of an ethnographic study undertaken to investigate nurses’ experiences of managing nurses and being managed by nurses in an Australian critical care unit. Our purpose was to valorize and make space for nurses to speak of their experiences and investigate the cultural practices and knowledges that comprised nursing management discourses. Subjugated practices, knowledges, and discourses were identified, revealing how nurses were inscribed by, or resisted, the discourses, including their multiple mobile subject positions. Informed by critical, feminist, and postmodern perspectives, nine mobile subject positions were identified. Direct participant observation, participant interviews, and reflective field notes were analyzed for dominant and subjugated discourses. The major finding described is the subject position of “junior novice.” Nurses informed by dominant patriarchal and organizational discourses participated in constructing and reinscribing their own submissive identity reflected in interprofessional relations that lacked individual valuing and undermined their self-esteem. PMID:28462287

A Cognitive Study of English Loan Words in Japanese Discourse.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hayashi, Takuo; Hayashi, Reiko

1995-01-01

Discusses the use of English loanwords in Japanese discourse from a cognitive perspective and reveals how the world knowledge of English loanwords is applied to a text and constitutes an integral component of the discourse production process both within and beyond the sentence level. (40 references) (MDM)

Analysing Professional Discourse in Interactive Learning: Integrating Historical and Situational Perspectives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Torras, Eulalia; Barbera, Elena

2010-01-01

Written environments in online learning enable professional discourse to be analysed in depth and provide greater knowledge for improving learning and for planning and delivering courses aimed at professional development. Until now, research into professional discourse has highlighted the importance of interaction in the development of…

Evaluating Learning Technology Content with Discourse Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Duvall, Matthew

2016-01-01

The researcher combined qualitative media analysis with tools for discourse analysis to review Blackboard Collaborate™, a tool often used in online education. Technology design references Discourses which dictate how and why these tools should be used. The analysis showed Collaborate™ uses sign systems and knowledge, along with politics, to…

Activating gender stereotypes during online spoken language processing: evidence from Visual World Eye Tracking.

PubMed

Pyykkönen, Pirita; Hyönä, Jukka; van Gompel, Roger P G

2010-01-01

This study used the visual world eye-tracking method to investigate activation of general world knowledge related to gender-stereotypical role names in online spoken language comprehension in Finnish. The results showed that listeners activated gender stereotypes elaboratively in story contexts where this information was not needed to build coherence. Furthermore, listeners made additional inferences based on gender stereotypes to revise an already established coherence relation. Both results are consistent with mental models theory (e.g., Garnham, 2001). They are harder to explain by the minimalist account (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992) which suggests that people limit inferences to those needed to establish coherence in discourse.

Innovation and design of a web-based pain education interprofessional resource.

PubMed

Lax, Leila; Watt-Watson, Judy; Lui, Michelle; Dubrowski, Adam; McGillion, Michael; Hunter, Judith; Maclennan, Cameron; Knickle, Kerry; Robb, Anja; Lapeyre, Jaime

2011-01-01

The present article describes educational innovation processes and design of a web-based pain interprofessional resource for prelicensure health science students in universities across Canada. Operationalization of educational theory in design coupled with formative evaluation of design are discussed, along with strategies that support collaborative innovation. Educational design was driven by content, theory and evaluation. Pain misbeliefs and teaching points along the continuum from acute to persistent pain were identified. Knowledge-building theory, situated learning, reflection and novel designs for cognitive scaffolding were then employed. Design research principles were incorporated to inform iterative and ongoing design. An authentic patient case was constructed, situated in interprofessional complex care to highlight learning objectives related to pre-operative, postoperative and treatment up to one year, for a surgical cancer patient. Pain mechanisms, assessment and management framed content creation. Knowledge building scaffolds were used, which included video simulations, embedded resources, concurrent feedback, practice-based reflective exercises and commentaries. Scaffolds were refined to specifically support knowledge translation. Illustrative commentaries were designed to explicate pain misbeliefs and best practices. Architecture of the resource was mapped; a multimedia, interactive prototype was created. This pain education resource was developed primarily for individual use, with extensions for interprofessional collective discourse. Translation of curricular content scripts into representation maps supported the collaborative design process by establishing a common visual language. The web-based prototype will be formatively and summatively evaluated to assess pedagogic design, knowledge-translation scaffolds, pain knowledge gains, relevance, feasibility and fidelity of this educational innovation.

Factors affecting construction of science discourse in the context of an extracurricular science and technology project

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Webb, Horace P.

Doing and learning science are social activities that require certain language, activities, and values. Both constitute what Gee (2005) calls Discourses. The language of learning science varies with the learning context (Lemke, 2001,1990). Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1990) and Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2000) endorse inquiry science learning. In the United States, most science learning is teacher-centered; inquiry science learning is rare (NRC, 2000). This study focused on 12 high school students from two suburban high schools, their three faculty mentors, and two engineering mentors during an extracurricular robotics activity with FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). FRC employed student-centered inquiry focus to teach science principles integrating technology. Research questions were (a) How do science teachers and their students enact Discourses as they teach and learn science? and (b) How does the pedagogical approach of a learning activity facilitate the Discourses that are enacted by students and teachers as they learn and teach science? Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study examined participants' language during robotic activities to determine how language used in learning science shaped the learning and vice versa. Data sources included videorecordings of participant language and semi-structured interviews with study participants. Transcribed recordings were coded initially using Gee's (2005) linguistic Building Tasks as a priori codes. CDA was applied to code transcripts, to construct Discourses enacted by the participants, and to determine how context facilitated their enactment. Findings indicated that, for the students, FRC facilitated elements of Science Discourse. Wild About Robotics (W.A.R.) team became, through FRC, part of a community similar to scientists' community that promoted knowledge and sound practices, disseminated information, supported research and development and encouraged interaction of its members. The public school science classroom in the U.S. is inimical to inquiry learning because of practices and policies associated with the epistemological stance that spawned the standards and/or testing movement and No Child Left Behind (Baez & Boyles, 2009). The findings of this study provided concrete ideas to accommodate the recommendations by NRC (1996) and NSES (2000) for creating contexts that might lead to inquiry science learning for meaningful student engagement.

Misrepresentations of Indigenous History and Science: Public Broadcasting, the Internet, and Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Iseke-Barnes, Judy

2005-01-01

This paper examines the role of history in power relations which suppress Indigenous knowledges. History is located as being about power and about how the powerful maintain their power. The paper further examines the Bering Strait theory/myth and ways that discourses in history combine with discourses in science to devalue Indigenous knowledges.…

Younger and Older Adults' Use of Verb Aspect and World Knowledge in the Online Interpretation of Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mozuraitis, Mindaugas; Chambers, Craig G.; Daneman, Meredyth

2013-01-01

Eye tracking was used to explore the role of grammatical aspect and world knowledge in establishing temporal relationships across sentences in discourse. Younger and older adult participants read short passages that included sentences such as "Mrs. Adams was knitting/knitted a new sweater"..."She wore her new garment...".…

Toward a Pragmatic Discourse of Constructivism: Reflections on Lessons from Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gordon, Mordechai

2009-01-01

In the past few decades, a constructivist discourse has emerged as a very powerful model for explaining how knowledge is produced in the world, as well as how students learn. Constructivists believe that what is deemed knowledge is always informed by a particular perspective and shaped by various implicit value judgments. However, there is an…

The role of discourse in group knowledge construction: A case study of engineering students

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kittleson, Julie M.; Southerland, Sherry A.

2004-03-01

This qualitative study examined the role of discourse (verbal elements of language) and Discourse (nonverbal elements related to the use of language, such as ways of thinking, valuing, and using tools and technologies) in the process of group knowledge construction of mechanical engineering students. Data included interviews, participant observations, and transcripts from lab sessions of a group of students working on their senior design project. These data were analyzed using discourse analysis focusing on instances of concept negotiation, interaction in which multiple people contribute to the evolving conceptual conversation. In this context, despite instructors' attempts to enhance the collaboration of group members, concept negotiation was rare. In an effort to understand this rarity, we identified themes related to an engineering Discourse, which included participants' assumptions about the purpose of group work, the views about effective groups, and their epistemologies and ontologies. We explore how the themes associated with the engineering Discourse played a role in how and when the group engaged in concept negotiation. We found that underlying ideologies and assumptions related to the engineering Discourse played both facilitating and inhibitory roles related to the group's conceptually based interactions.

Patient or consumer? The colonization of the psychiatric clinic.

PubMed

Evans, Alicia M

2005-12-01

Information is given a privileged place in the psychiatric clinic, as illustrated by the prevalence and volume of data to be collected and forms to be completed by psychiatric nurses. Information though is different to knowledge. The present paper argues that information is part of a managerial discourse that implies commodification whereas knowledge is part of a clinical discourse that allows room for the suffering of the patient. Information belongs to the discourse of managerialism, one that positions the patient as customer/consumer and in doing so renders them unsuffering. The patient's suffering is silenced by their construction as a consumer. The discourse of managerialism seeks a complete data set of information. By way of contrast, another discourse, that of psychoanalysis offers the institution the idea that there are always holes, gaps, and uncertainty. The idea of uncertainty, gaps, things remaining unknown and a limit sits uncomfortably with the dominant discourse of managerialism; one that demands no limits, complete data sets, and many satisfied customers. This market model of managerialism denies the potential of the therapeutic relationship; that something curative might be produced via the transference. In addition, the managerialist discourse potentially positions the patient as both illegitimate and unsuffering.

Inquiry-Based Learning and the Art of Mathematical Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

von Renesse, Christine; Ecke, Volker

2015-01-01

Our particular flavor of inquiry-based learning (IBL) uses mathematical discourse, conversations, and discussions to empower students to deepen their mathematical thinking, building on strengths of students in the humanities. We present an organized catalog of powerful questions, discussion prompts, and talk moves that can help faculty facilitate…

L2 Performance in Text-Chat and Spoken Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sauro, Shannon

2012-01-01

The present study builds upon research in the CAF (complexity, accuracy, fluency) framework for examining learner performance to compare the lexical and syntactic complexity of learner output in spoken discourse and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) during completion of narrative tasks. Data were generated from transcripts and…

Promoting Civil Discourse in the Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Birnie, Billie F.

2016-01-01

Teachers are responsible for what happens in their classrooms, and promoting civil discourse should be among their top priorities. Not only should they model civil speech and behavior, but they also should establish clear boundaries for students, create a climate that nourishes courteous exchange, and help students build vocabularies that enable…

From Interaction to Intersubjectivity: Facilitating Online Group Discourse Processes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dennen, Vanessa Paz; Wieland, Kristina

2007-01-01

This article examines the online discourse that took place in representative threads from two classes, seeking to document indicators that students did or did not engage in co-construction of knowledge. Stahl's (2006) social theory of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is used along with discourse analysis methods to examine these…

Payback Time? Discourses of Lack, Debt and the Moral Regulation of Teacher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beighton, Chris

2016-01-01

This paper analyses recent policy and discourse in the UK lifelong learning sector to identify a tension in discourse which positions teacher educators as essential to the knowledge economy while simultaneously insisting on the deficits they represent. Drawing on critical analyses from Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurizio Lazzarato and Gilles Deleuze, I…

Competitiveness, Diversification and the International Higher Education Cash Flow: The EU's Higher Education Discourse amidst the Challenges of Globalisation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mayo, Peter

2009-01-01

This paper focuses on the EU discourse on Higher Education and analyses this discourse within the context of globalisation. Importance is attached to the issues of lifelong learning, competitiveness, diversification, entrepreneurship, access, knowledge society, modernisation, quality assurance, innovation and creativity, governance and business-HE…

Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Politics, and the Discourse of Experience.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Giroux, Henry A.

1985-01-01

Analyzes how traditional and liberal discourses treat the intersection of culture, power, and knowledge in fashioning a view of teaching and learning. Argues that both traditions fail as modes of critical pedagogy and that it is necessary to develop a critical discourse that embraces pedagogy as a form of cultural politics. (Author/GC)

Undoing Diversity: Knowledge and Neoliberal Discourses in Colleges of Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matus, Claudia; Infante, Marta

2011-01-01

In this article we analyze discourses of "diversity" in colleges of education in Chile. We contend that the use of discourses of diversity, as reproducing the separation between mainstream subjectivities and those uncontained by the category of normal, is one of the ways universities align themselves with the rules of a democratic…

The Place of Social Justice in Higher Education and Social Change Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Singh, Mala

2011-01-01

A familiar discourse about higher education and social change today relates to higher education's socio-economic role within knowledge societies in a globalizing world. This paper addresses how issues of social justice feature in such discourses; whether social justice in higher education has been appropriated into a neo-liberal strategy for…

What counts as knowing: Constructing a communicative repertoire for student demonstration of knowledge in science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Crawford, Teresa

2005-02-01

The purpose of this study was twofold. One purpose was to identify the locally negotiated literate practices that defined ways of communicating information and knowledge across the curriculum in a fourth/fifth grade classroom. Through an ethnographic and sociolinguistic set of analyses, this investigation illustrated how the teacher worked to construct a learning environment that valued the use of multiple discourses as a way of communicating competence as a learner. Another purpose was specifically to address the ways that these practices contributed to student demonstration of knowledge in science. This was accomplished by an analysis of one student's presentation of science knowledge after a study of simple machines. A comparative analysis between his use of two discourses, written and oral, showed that the opportunity to choose between multiple discourses led to his success in demonstrating competence in ways that may have otherwise remained questionable.

"We Don't Want Your Opinion": Knowledge Construction and the Discourse of Opinion in the Equity Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Diangelo, Robin; Sensoy, Ozlem

2009-01-01

As educators who teach courses that examine social power, we often struggle with a specific form of resistance in the equity-oriented classroom: "That's just [the author]'s opinion." This "opinion discourse" emerges when students study scholarship that unsettles dominant knowledge claims and methods or when students are themselves asked to situate…

The Ethics of Belief, Cognition, and Climate Change Pseudoskepticism: Implications for Public Discourse.

PubMed

Torcello, Lawrence

2016-01-01

The relationship between knowledge, belief, and ethics is an inaugural theme in philosophy; more recently, under the title "ethics of belief" philosophers have worked to develop the appropriate methodology for studying the nexus of epistemology, ethics, and psychology. The title "ethics of belief" comes from a 19th-century paper written by British philosopher and mathematician W.K. Clifford. Clifford argues that we are morally responsible for our beliefs because (a) each belief that we form creates the cognitive circumstances for related beliefs to follow, and (b) we inevitably influence each other through those beliefs. This study argues that recent cognitive research supports Cliffordian insights regarding patterns of belief formation and social influence. From the confirmation offered by such research, it follows that informational accuracy holds serious ethical significance in public discourse. Although scientific and epistemological matters are not always thought to be linked to normative morality, this study builds on Clifford's initial insights to show their linkage is fundamental to inquiry itself. In turn, Clifford's ethical and epistemic outline can inform a framework grounded in "public reason" under which seemingly opposed science communication strategies (e.g., "information deficit" and "cultural cognition" models) are philosophically united. With public discourse on climate change as the key example, empirically informed and grounded strategies for science communication in the public sphere are considered. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

The role of journals in building up communities: the experience of Ciência em Tela

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Martins, Isabel; de Souza Barros, Susana

2015-12-01

Ciência em Tela is an open access Brazilian science teacher education online journal that has been published twice a year since 2008 and which encourages the participation of professionals with different backgrounds and the submission of a variety of textual genres, besides research papers. Another feature is that the journal includes practicing schoolteachers not only as authors but also as reviewers, which not only provides those who submit contributions to the journal with an early feedback from their target audience but also helps empower schoolteachers by placing them in a discursive situation in which they are producers, as opposed to consumers, of discourses about science education. In this paper we describe the background to and main aspects of the journal's innovative editorial policy, which seeks to bridge gaps between communities and institutions linked to science education, as well as to discuss the challenges that arise from it, in particular, issues concerning internationalisation and funding, as well as the role of journals in times of colonisation and commodification of knowledge and of discourses.

Describing the Cognitive Level of Professor Discourse and Student Cognition in College of Agriculture Class Sessions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ewing, John C.; Whittington, M. Susie

2009-01-01

The purpose of this study was to describe the cognitive level of professor discourse and student cognition during selected college of agriculture class sessions. Twenty-one undergraduate class sessions were videotaped in 12 professors' courses. Results were interpreted to show that professors' discourse was mostly (62%) at the knowledge and…

Semantic Structure of Classroom Discourse Concerning Proof and Proving in High School Mathematics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ugurel, Isikhan; Boz-Yaman, Burcak

2017-01-01

This study tries to identify high school students' knowledge about the concept of proof, based on classroom discussion. The processes of discourses, both natural and prompted, are studied as they occur between students and teachers. The study employs discourse analysis as the qualitative research framework. Participants are 13 Science High School…

"It's Hard Getting Kids to Talk about Math": Helping New Teachers Improve Mathematical Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bennett, Cory A.

2010-01-01

This article examines how two new teachers, with varied content knowledge and preparation as teachers in mathematics education, improved their use of whole-class discourse in their mathematics classes with a mentor's assistance. Discourse has long been shown to be influential in supporting students' learning of mathematics, but the implementation…

Promotional Discourse in the Websites of Two Australian Universities: A Discourse Analytic Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoang, Thi Van Yen; Rojas-Lizana, Isolda

2015-01-01

This article shows how universities represent themselves through the use of language on their institutional websites. Specifically, it compares and contrasts how a long established university, the University of Melbourne and a young university, Macquarie University construct their institutional identities and build up a relationship with potential…

The Space Between: Building Liberatory Capital in a School-Community Partnership

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Timm, Chad William

2014-01-01

Even before withstanding one of the most devastating economic crises in American history, families living in poverty have battled a dominant discourse that labels them as lacking personal responsibility, initiative, and the ability to make "good" choices. This discourse is reflected in the parent-involvement mandates of the No Child Left…

A Professional Learning Community Activity for Science Teachers: How to Incorporate Discourse-Rich Instructional Strategies into Science Lessons

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lewis, Elizabeth; Baker, Dale; Watts, Nievita Bueno; Lang, Michael

2014-01-01

In this article we describe current educational research underlying a comprehensive model for building a scientific classroom discourse community. We offer a professional development activity for a school-based professional learning community, providing specific science instructional strategies within this interactive teaching model. This design…

Identity as a Nexus of Affect and Discourse in Mathematical Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heyd-Metzuyanim, Einhat

2017-01-01

This theoretical paper suggests identity as a nexus of research on affect and discourse in mathematical learning. It broadens Sfard and Prusak's (2005) discursive definition of identity by building on an analytical framework that examines positioning of students at three levels: the objects described, the interactions achieved, and the alignment…

Not Too "College-Like," Not Too Normal: American Muslim Undergraduate Women's Gendered Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mir, Shabana

2009-01-01

Building on an ethnographic study of American Muslim undergraduate women at two universities in Washington, D.C., I examine undergraduate Muslim women's construction of gendered discourses. Stereotypes feed into both majority and minority constructions of Muslim women's gendered identities. I highlight Muslim women's resistance to and adoption of…

Citizenship Education in Ukraine and Russia: Reconciling Nation-Building and Active Citizenship

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Janmaat, Jan Germen; Piattoeva, Nelli

2007-01-01

This paper examines the discourses framing citizenship education in Ukraine and Russia from "perestroika" to the present and assesses the role of the Council of Europe in promoting democratic citizenship in both countries. We argue that there is a tension between the discourses of active citizenship, strongly disseminated by…

Modeling Comprehension Processes via Automated Analyses of Dialogism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dascalu, Mihai; Allen, Laura K.; McNamara, Danielle S.; Trausan-Matu, Stefan; Crossley, Scott A.

2017-01-01

Dialogism provides the grounds for building a comprehensive model of discourse and it is focused on the multiplicity of perspectives (i.e., voices). Dialogism can be present in any type of text, while voices become themes or recurrent topics emerging from the discourse. In this study, we examine the extent that differences between…

Discourse Features Among Providers, Patients, and Companions and Their Effect on Outcomes of Dementia Diagnosis Disclosure.

PubMed

Wynn, Matthew J; Carpenter, Brian D

2017-12-13

Receiving a diagnosis of dementia has major implications. Although protocols for disclosing difficult information have been developed for other health conditions, no such evidence-based method exists for dementia. As a step toward that goal, this study analyzed the discourse within dementia diagnosis disclosure sessions to identify conversational features associated with psychological outcomes. The Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS) was used to code the discourse among patients, their companions, and providers during 84 dementia diagnosis disclosure sessions following an initial evaluation at an Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Providers dominated the conversation in terms of overall time spent talking. With more severe dementia, patients spoke less and companions spoke more. Provider-positive rapport building was associated with lower patient depression and anxiety following the disclosure session. Patient-positive rapport building was associated with higher companion anxiety, but only when the patient was not suspected to have dementia. No associations were found between other types of discourse and patient or companion psychological outcomes. A relatively small amount of positive rapport building by providers can lead to reduced distress following dementia disclosure. Dementia disclosure best practices should emphasize patient-centered communication techniques in order to minimize psychological distress following diagnosis. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lin, Yu-Wei

2011-04-01

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires.

A discourse on the nature of dental hygiene knowledge and knowing.

PubMed

Cobban, S J; Edgington, E M; Myrick, F; Keenan, L

2009-02-01

Historically, dental hygiene has adopted theory and research from other health disciplines, without adequately modifying these concepts to reflect the unique dental hygiene practice context, leaving dental hygiene's research and theory base underdeveloped. Dental hygiene has yet to articulate its epistemological assumptions--the nature, scope and object of dental hygiene knowledge--or to fully describe the patterns of knowing that are brought to practice. This paper uses a method of inquiry from philosophy to begin the discourse about dental hygiene ways of knowing. In nursing, Carper identified four fundamental patterns of knowing: empirics or the science of nursing; aesthetics or the art of nursing; personal knowledge and ethical or moral knowledge. These patterns were used to explore this concept within dental hygiene. There is more to the nature of dental hygiene knowledge and knowing than rote application of technique-related or research-based information in practice, including judgements about when and how to use different types of information that are used. Currently, empirical forms of knowledge seem to be disproportionately valued, yet evidence was found for all of Carper's four patterns of knowing. Carper's work on patterns of knowing in nursing provided a useful framework to initiate the discourse on ways of knowing in dental hygiene. These results are submitted for others to challenge, refine and extend, for continuing the discussion. Dental hygiene leaders and scholars need to engage in discourse about extending the epistemological assumptions to reflect reality.

Media discourses of low carbon housing: The marginalisation of social and behavioural dimensions within the British broadsheet press.

PubMed

Cherry, Catherine; Hopfe, Christina; MacGillivray, Brian; Pidgeon, Nick

2015-04-01

Decarbonising housing is a key UK government policy to mitigate climate change. Using discourse analysis, we assess how low carbon housing is portrayed within British broadsheet media. Three distinct storylines were identified. Dominating the discourse, Zero carbon housing promotes new-build, low carbon houses as offering high technology solutions to the climate problem. Retrofitting homes emphasises the need to reduce emissions within existing housing, tackling both climate change and rising fuel prices. A more marginal discourse, Sustainable living, frames low carbon houses as related to individual identities and 'off-grid' or greener lifestyles. Our analysis demonstrates that technical and economic paradigms dominate media discourse on low carbon housing, marginalising social and behavioural aspects. © The Author(s) 2013.

Innovation and design of a web-based pain education interprofessional resource

PubMed Central

Lax, Leila; Watt-Watson, Judy; Lui, Michelle; Dubrowski, Adam; McGillion, Michael; Hunter, Judith; MacLennan, Cameron; Knickle, Kerry; Robb, Anja; Lapeyre, Jaime

2011-01-01

INTRODUCTION: The present article describes educational innovation processes and design of a web-based pain interprofessional resource for prelicensure health science students in universities across Canada. Operationalization of educational theory in design coupled with formative evaluation of design are discussed, along with strategies that support collaborative innovation. METHODS: Educational design was driven by content, theory and evaluation. Pain misbeliefs and teaching points along the continuum from acute to persistent pain were identified. Knowledge-building theory, situated learning, reflection and novel designs for cognitive scaffolding were then employed. Design research principles were incorporated to inform iterative and ongoing design. RESULTS: An authentic patient case was constructed, situated in inter-professional complex care to highlight learning objectives related to pre-operative, postoperative and treatment up to one year, for a surgical cancer patient. Pain mechanisms, assessment and management framed content creation. Knowledge building scaffolds were used, which included video simulations, embedded resources, concurrent feedback, practice-based reflective exercises and commentaries. Scaffolds were refined to specifically support knowledge translation. Illustrative commentaries were designed to explicate pain misbeliefs and best practices. Architecture of the resource was mapped; a multimedia, interactive prototype was created. This pain education resource was developed primarily for individual use, with extensions for interprofessional collective discourse. DISCUSSION: Translation of curricular content scripts into representation maps supported the collaborative design process by establishing a common visual language. The web-based prototype will be formatively and summatively evaluated to assess pedagogic design, knowledge-translation scaffolds, pain knowledge gains, relevance, feasibility and fidelity of this educational innovation. PMID:22184552

Is It Believable When It's Scientific? How Scientific Discourse Style Influences Laypeople's Resolution of Conflicts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bromme, Rainer; Scharrer, Lisa; Stadtler, Marc; Hömberg, Johanna; Torspecken, Ronja

2015-01-01

Scientific texts are a genre in which adherence to specific discourse conventions allows for conclusions on the scientific integrity of the information and thus on its validity. This study examines whether genre-typical features of scientific discourse influence how laypeople handle conflicting science-based knowledge claims. In two experiments…

Clitic-Doubled Left Dislocation and Focus Fronting in L2 Spanish: A Case of Successful Acquisition at the Syntax-Discourse Interface

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Slabakova, Roumyana; Kempchinsky, Paula; Rothman, Jason

2012-01-01

This experimental study tests the Interface Hypothesis by looking into processes at the syntax-discourse interface, teasing apart acquisition of syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. Adopting Lopez's (2009) pragmatic features [[plus or minus]a(naphor)] and [[plus or minus]c(ontrast)], which in combination account for the constructions of…

The Tie that Binds: Building Discourse Communities and Group Cohesion through Computer-Based Conferences.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Selfe, Cynthia L.; Eilola, J. Daniel

1988-01-01

Discussion of the use of electronic conferencing to form a discourse community focuses on a case study of student consultants working in a microcomputer lab supporting writing courses at Michigan Technological University. The formulation of a group identity, as well as group values, goals, and expectations are discussed. (16 references) (LRW)

Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Constituting a Discourse of Erotics in Sexuality Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Allen, Louisa

2004-01-01

A tradition of predominately feminist literature has revealed that there is a 'missing discourse of desire' in many sex education programmes. Building on this work, this article explores the gendered effects of this de-eroticized and clinical form of education. It is argued that young women and men's (hetero)sexual subjectivities are…

What's Sexy? Adolescent Girls Discuss Confidence, Danger, and Media Influence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lamb, Sharon; Farmer, Kaelin M.; Kosterina, Elena; Lambe Sariñana, Susan; Plocha, Aleksandra; Randazzo, Renee

2016-01-01

Building on qualitative research about sexualisation by media and culture and the impact on girls' development, in this article we present a discourse analysis of three focus groups of teen girls of colour and of diverse ethnicities asked to talk about sexiness. We focus on the ways the girls both support and resist hegemonic discourses about…

Identifying and Supporting Productive Collaborative Teacher Talk

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Flarend, Alice M.

As improvements and changes in science education are promulgated, science teachers must be educated about these changes. Professional development programs are central to promoting teacher learning. Although the field seems to have agreed upon large-scalepedagogical features of high quality professional development with an emphasis on building a collaborative community of learners, effective implementation of these features is still problematic. The connections between these collaborative features and actual teacher work during the professional development remain unclear. This qualitative discourse study investigated how teachers engaged in small group discussions use discourse to collaborate during a weeklong professional development program that employed these useful pedagogical features. Small group discussions among the forty-two participants, diverse in their demographics and teaching experiences, were video and audio recorded. A collaborative discourse framework is developed and applied to the discussions, successfully categorizing episodes of discourse according to their productive potential for learning. The structure of the PD activities is then investigated to determine characteristics encouraging to these productive learning conversations. The analysis in this study indicated requiring groups to come to a consensus helps groups dig deeper into the content, promoting a more productive negotiation of concepts. Building consensus around an artifact such as a graph strengthened the need for consensus and thereby strengthened the opportunities for productive conversation. In addition, professional development activities that target building and using specific language were also opportunities for productive learning talk, providing opportunities to negotiate the deep meaning of words and concepts rather then leaving them unexamined. When viewed through the lens of Wenger's Community of Practice (1998) these findings are ways of strengthening the community. Consensus strengthens the mutual accountability and the purposeful building of vocabulary strengthens the shared repertoire, as did having the consensus artifact.

Embedding argumentation discourse within elementary inquiry teaching: Implications for professional development

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Borger, Laurie Landon

The National Research Council's most recent report Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, (2007) has suggested a redefinition of science proficiency. "This framework rests on a view of science as both a body of knowledge and an evidence-based, model building enterprise that continually extends, refines, and revises knowledge" (p.2). Therefore embedding argumentation discourse within inquiry teaching includes educating students to voice their own evidence based explanations and justifications for acceptance, refinement, or possible rejection by their peers. This new perspective will require elementary teachers to challenge their own knowledge, beliefs, and practices about science proficiency. It will necessitate the creation of professional development opportunities that are specific to the needs of the teachers who are facilitating the reform during a time period when the NCLB (2001) legislation requires 100% proficiency for all students in reading and math. This intrinsic case study involved the purposive sampling of 30 regular elementary education teachers in one rural school district in Pennsylvania. A grounded theory perspective was used to examine the elementary teachers' beliefs, practices, and barriers as a means to specify the necessary supports needed to accept the challenges associated with the redefinition of science proficiency. Data was collected through a survey, observational inventory, checklist, and interviews. Using constant comparison analysis, this researcher and the district's Science Department Head, identified and refined emerging trends into the following four essential themes: equity and accountability, teacher's beliefs, isolation, and curriculum rigor. Each theme influenced instructional practices. Most notably the implementation of the teacher evaluation plan encouraged teachers to view science as a lower priority and hindered their desire to improve it. Isolation kept teachers' science knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge stagnate, including their beliefs surrounding the ultimate goal of elementary science. The science curriculum did not include explanation or argumentation as a top level goal for instruction consequently instructional practices were limited. Eight specific components for professional development are delineated.

Hybridizing Cultural Understandings of the Natural World to Foster Critical Science Literacy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tang, Kok Sing

Adolescents are constantly exposed to multiple cultural views of the natural world in juxtaposition with the dominant view of science taught in school. This dissertation explores the interaction of these multiple views, and how they shape students' understanding of and attitudes toward science. Situated in a high school physics classroom, a curricular approach was designed and enacted to open a space in the classroom for the convergence of multiple discourses (or systems of cultural knowledge), and subsequently study how students navigate around them. Ethnographic and critical inquiry revealed that when two or more discourses about similar natural events or objects (e.g., toss of a colorguard flag, human body) were directly juxtaposed in the classroom space, conceptual, affective, and ideological conflicts were generated for certain students. This was particularly so for students whose embedded experiences and social affiliations within certain discourse communities (e.g., sport clubs, church) led to their preferred ways of looking at the natural world from one particular discourse, and consequently a negative stance toward alternative ways in other discourses. However, through appropriate pedagogical design and support, such juxtaposition also created opportunities for some students to hybridize different cultural understandings of the natural world as they navigated around multiple discourses. Informed by Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia and voice appropriation, the characteristics of such hybridization were found to include: (a) being aware of heteroglossic differences in the use of language, (b) a dynamic shift in identification toward the dialogic other, (c) a juxtaposition of the other's voices in one's utterances, and (d) a momentary suppression of one's preferences, for strategic motives. Not only did hybridization provide a means for some students to construct conceptual knowledge across discourses, but it also helped them develop critical literacy in evaluating how various views and knowledge of the natural world are constructed by and through discourses. The findings of this dissertation provide insights into hybridization as a crucial mechanism of learning, and provide an alternative but complementary lens for understanding how young people bridge discourses---not as a stable binary but as a dynamic and fluid in-between.

The Diffusion of Evidence-Based Practice: Reviewing the Evidence-Based Practice Networks in the United States and German-Speaking Countries.

PubMed

Ghanem, Christian; Lawson, Thomas R; Pankofer, Sabine; Maragkos, Markos; Kollar, Ingo

2017-01-01

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has had a major influence on U.S. social work while it has rarely been adapted in German-speaking countries. This study investigates how knowledge about EBP is diffused within and across geographical contexts. Network analysis methods reveals different diffusion patterns and provide reasons for these differences. For example, the U.S. discourse is self-contained and based on a more homogeneous knowledge base, while the German discourse is more heterogeneous and focuses on a notion of reflexive professionalism. The different conceptual influences within the U.S. and German discourses are discussed in light of future directions of disciplinary social work.

A narrow view: The conceptualization of sexual problems in human sexuality textbooks.

PubMed

Stelzl, Monika; Stairs, Brittany; Anstey, Hannah

2018-02-01

This study examined the ways in which the meaning of 'sexual problems' is constructed and defined in undergraduate human sexuality textbooks. Drawing on feminist and critical discourse frameworks, the dominant as well as the absent/marginalized discourses were identified using critical discourse analysis. Sexual difficulties were largely framed by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Thus, medical discourse was privileged. Alternative conceptualizations and frameworks, such as the New View of Women's Sexual Problems, were included marginally and peripherally. We argue that current constructions of sexuality knowledge reinforce, rather than challenge, existing hegemonic discourses of sexuality.

Fleet leaders' attitudes about subordinates' use of mental health services.

PubMed

Westphal, Richard J

2007-11-01

Mental disorders are a significant source of medical and occupational morbidity for sailors. Stigma, fear of negative career impact, and subordinates concern about leaders' attitudes are significant barriers to the use of mental health services. Semistructured interviews and military policies were data sources used to analyze the language, knowledge, and attitudes of Navy surface fleet leaders about mental illness and mental health treatment using Foucault's concept of discourse analysis. A discourse is a system of knowledge that influences language, perceptions, values, and social practices. The results showed that leaders' concerns about sailors' mental combat readiness, not mental illness stigma, was the dominant discourse about mental illness and mental health services use. In particular, organizational differences between the surface warfare and the mental health communities may influence leaders' attitudes more than stigma. This study provides an elaborated view of mental health knowledge and power within a Navy community.

Imagining Identities: Young People Constructing Discourses of Race, Ethnicity, and Community in a Contentious Context of Rapid Urban Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tucker-Raymond, Eli; Rosario, Maria L.

2017-01-01

This article uses a critical sociohistorical lens to discuss and explain examples of the ways in which young people reflect, refract, and contribute to discourses of gentrification, displacement, and racial, ethnic, and geographic community identity building in a rapidly changing urban neighborhood. The article explores examples from open-ended…

Empty Tissue Boxes: Considering Poverty in Diversity Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cuthrell, Kristen; Ledford, Carolyn; Stapleton, Joy

2007-01-01

A preservice teacher doing her internship overhears some of her students asking a classmate why he regularly takes home empty tissue boxes. The boy replies that he builds cities and bridges with his empty boxes. His classmates then ask why he does not just build a city with Legos or building blocks. The preservice teacher listens intently as the…

Modeling discourse management compared to other classroom management styles in university physics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Desbien, Dwain Michael

2002-01-01

A classroom management technique called modeling discourse management was developed to enhance the modeling theory of physics. Modeling discourse management is a student-centered management that focuses on the epistemology of science. Modeling discourse is social constructivist in nature and was designed to encourage students to present classroom material to each other. In modeling discourse management, the instructor's primary role is of questioner rather than provider of knowledge. Literature is presented that helps validate the components of modeling discourse. Modeling discourse management was compared to other classroom management styles using multiple measures. Both regular and honors university physics classes were investigated. This style of management was found to enhance student understanding of forces, problem-solving skills, and student views of science compared to traditional classroom management styles for both honors and regular students. Compared to other reformed physics classrooms, modeling discourse classes performed as well or better on student understanding of forces. Outside evaluators viewed modeling discourse classes to be reformed, and it was determined that modeling discourse could be effectively disseminated.

Adaptive capacity and community-based natural resource management.

PubMed

Armitage, Derek

2005-06-01

Why do some community-based natural resource management strategies perform better than others? Commons theorists have approached this question by developing institutional design principles to address collective choice situations, while other analysts have critiqued the underlying assumptions of community-based resource management. However, efforts to enhance community-based natural resource management performance also require an analysis of exogenous and endogenous variables that influence how social actors not only act collectively but do so in ways that respond to changing circumstances, foster learning, and build capacity for management adaptation. Drawing on examples from northern Canada and Southeast Asia, this article examines the relationship among adaptive capacity, community-based resource management performance, and the socio-institutional determinants of collective action, such as technical, financial, and legal constraints, and complex issues of politics, scale, knowledge, community and culture. An emphasis on adaptive capacity responds to a conceptual weakness in community-based natural resource management and highlights an emerging research and policy discourse that builds upon static design principles and the contested concepts in current management practice.

`All We Did was Things Like Forces and Motion …': Multiple Discourses in the development of primary science teachers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Danielsson, Anna; Warwick, Paul

2014-01-01

Previous research has highlighted challenges associated with embracing an inquiry approach to science teaching for primary teachers, often associating these challenges with insecurity linked to the lack of content knowledge. We argue that in order to understand the extent to which primary student teachers are able to embrace science teaching informed by scientific literacy for all, it is important to take into account various, sometimes competing, science teacher and primary teacher Discourses. The aim of this paper is to explore how such Discourses are constituted in the context of learning to teach during a 1-year university-based Post Graduate Certificate of Education course. The empirical data consist of semi-structured interviews with 11 student teachers. The analysis identifies 5 teacher Discourses and we argue that these can help us to better understand some of the tensions involved in becoming a primary teacher with a responsibility for teaching science: for example, in terms of the interplay between the student teachers' own educational biographies and institutionally sanctioned Discourses. One conclusion is that student teachers' willingness and ability to embrace a Discourse of science education, informed by the aim of scientific literacy for all, may be every bit as constrained by their experience of learning science through 'traditional schooling' as it is by their confidence with respect to their own subject knowledge. The 5 Discourses, with their complex interrelations, raise questions about which identity positions are available to students in the intersections of the Discourses and which identity positions teacher educators may seek to make available for their students.

Parents' discursive resources: analysis of discourses in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian health care guidelines for children with diabetes type 1.

PubMed

Boman, Ase; Borup, Ina; Povlsen, Lene; Dahlborg-Lyckhage, Elisabeth

2012-06-01

The incidence of diabetes type 1 in children, the most common metabolic disorder in childhood, increases worldwide, with highest incidence in Scandinavia. Having diabetes means demands in everyday life, and the outcome of the child's treatment highly depends on parents' engagement and involvement. The aim of this study was to explore and describe discourses in health care guidelines for children with diabetes type 1, in Sweden, Norway and Denmark during 2007-2010, with a focus on how parents were positioned. As method a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis was applied, and a six-stage model was used to perform the analysis. The findings shows a Medical, a Pedagogic and a Public Health discourse embedded in the hegemonic Expert discourse. The Expert discourse positioned parents as dependent on expert knowledge, as recipients of education, as valuable and responsible for their child's health through practicing medical skills. This positioning may place parents on a continuum from being deprived of their own initiatives to being invited to take an active part and could result in feelings of guilt and uncertainty, but also of security and significance. From this study we conclude that guidelines rooted in the Expert discourse may reduce opportunities for parents' voices to be heard and may overlook their knowledge. By broadening the selection of authors of the guidelines to include patients and all professionals in the team, new discourses could emerge and the parents' voice might be more prominent. © 2011 The Authors. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences © 2011 Nordic College of Caring Science.

Working Knowledge: Australian Universities and "Real World" Education

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Symes, Colin; Boud, David; McIntyre, John; Solomon, Nicky; Tennant, Mark

2000-11-01

Universities are at a pivotal point in their history and are undergoing dramatic changes. One of the more significant of these changes is the move towards instrumental programmes of learning, as manifest for instance in workplace and work-based learning. This paper argues that this trend threatens the existence of the liberal university, where knowledge is pursued predominantly for its own sake. The paper identifies four dominant discourses in higher education and suggests that these discourses co-exist with one another, and are sometimes dominant, at other times recessive. It argues that the trend to a post-industrialised labour market has seen the emergence of a vocationalised discourse in higher education, which stresses the instrumental at the expense of the liberal.

Towards "Bildung"-Oriented Chemistry Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sjöström, Jesper

2013-01-01

This paper concerns "Bildung"-oriented chemistry education, based on a reflective and critical discourse of chemistry. It is contrasted with the dominant type of chemistry education, based on the mainstream discourse of chemistry. "Bildung"-oriented chemistry education includes not only content knowledge in chemistry, but also…

Public Discourse on HIV and AIDS: An Archival Analysis of National Newspaper Reporting in Uganda, 1996-2011

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lagone, Elizabeth; Mathur, Sanyukta; Nakyanjo, Neema; Nalugoda, Fred; Santelli, John

2014-01-01

Uganda is recognised as an early success story in the HIV epidemic at least in part due to an open and vigorous national dialogue about HIV prevention. This study examined the national discourse about HIV, AIDS, and young people in New Vision, Uganda's leading national newspaper between 1996 and 2011, building from a previous archival analysis of…

Post-Structural Methodology at the Quilting Point: Intercultural Encounters.

PubMed

Gillett, Grant

Lacan's quilting point connects a network of signifiers with the lived world as a place of voices, memory, and adaptation "seen in" the mirror of language. Crossing cultures can obscure the ways we make sense of the world. Some planes of signification, in aiming to be universal in their knowledge (such as the natural sciences), try to track objects and events independent of our thoughts about them and the ways that signifiers may slide past each other. However, cross-structural comparison and the analysis of cross cultural encounters cannot treat its objects of interest that way. Thus we need a theory and methodology that effectively connects the multilayered discourses of subjectivities from diverse cultures and allows triangulation between them in relation to points of shared experience. At such points we need a critical attitude to our own framework and an openness to the uneasy reflective equilibrium that uncovers assumptions and modes of thinking that will hamper us. Quilting points are such points where different discourses converge on a single event or set of events so as to mark "vertical" connections allowing tentative alignments between ways of meaning so that we can begin to build real cross-cultural understanding.

The discourse around usefulness, morality, risk and trust: a focus group study on prenatal genetic testing.

PubMed

Pivetti, Monica; Montali, Lorenzo; Simonetti, Giorgia

2012-12-01

This study explores the underlying values and beliefs that guide women's reasoning on prenatal genetic test (PGT) uptake, as framed by their own words, during a group discussion, in a Catholic country such as Italy. Women's reasoning was explored by means of five focus group consisting of seven pregnant women and 13 new mothers. The focus group material content was analysed using the Nudist software. The discourse around PGT was rooted into four frames of reference: The usefulness dimension was used to express the positions in favour of PGT, whereas morality, risk and trust were used to express negative evaluations on such a technology. Participants advocated for themselves the choice of being tested, besides giving some credit to the partner's opinion. Moreover, participants reported little knowledge on PGT. The research shed some light on the frames of reference used by participants to build their positions on PGT uptake, confirming the public's ability to translate scientific accounts into personally meaningful information. A more complete understanding of the reasons for decisions to test would help counsellors to better communicate with women and couples, and to better assist them to make a better informed testing decision. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the New Rhetoric.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ede, Lisa

Walter Carlton (1978) has suggested that the most prominent characteristic of contemporary rhetorical theory is its attempt to bring into focus the relationship between knowledge and discourse. The concern with establishing the epistemic status of discourse is not, however, limited to rhetoric. Similar questions dominate much contemporary…

Tracking Concept Development through Semiotic Evolution

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ronen, Ilana

2015-01-01

A qualitative research focused on a case study aiming to monitor emergent knowledge in a discourse group by tracking the development of the concept "goal." The analysis, based on "Semiotic Evolution" methodology facilitates the description of interactions between personal perceptions in the group discourse, illustrating the…

Collaborative Epistemic Discourse in Classroom Information-Seeking Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Knight, Simon; Mercer, Neil

2017-01-01

The authors discuss the relationship between information seeking and epistemic beliefs--beliefs about the source, structure, complexity and stability of knowledge--in the context of collaborative information-seeking discourses. They further suggest that both information seeking, and epistemic cognition research agendas, have suffered from a lack…

Therapy Talk: Analyzing Therapeutic Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leahy, Margaret M.

2004-01-01

Therapeutic discourse is the talk-in-interaction that represents the social practice between clinician and client. This article invites speech-language pathologists to apply their knowledge of language to analyzing therapy talk and to learn how talking practices shape clinical roles and identities. A range of qualitative research approaches,…

Embedded Literacy: Knowledge as Meaning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, J. R.

2013-01-01

This paper takes as point of departure the register variable field, and explores its application to the discourse of History and Biology in secondary school classrooms from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics. In particular it considers the functions of technicality and abstraction in these subject specific discourses, and their…

Nation Building and the Role of the University: A Critical Reflection.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Higgs, P.

2002-01-01

Asserts that in South Africa, political and economic discourse has to a large extent perceived the social role of the university in terms of nation building. Suggests instead that the basis for the university's service to society lies in its character as a community of reason. (EV)

Corpus Linguistics, Network Analysis and Co-Occurrence Matrices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stuart, Keith; Botella, Ana

2009-01-01

This article describes research undertaken in order to design a methodology for the reticular representation of knowledge of a specific discourse community. To achieve this goal, a representative corpus of the scientific production of the members of this discourse community (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, UPV) was created. This article…

Discourse Approaches to Writing Assessment.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Connnor, Ulla; Mbaye, Aymerou

2002-01-01

Discusses assessment of English-as-a-Foreign/Second-Language (EFL/ESL) writing. Suggests there is a considerable gap between current practices in writing assessment and criteria suggested by advances in knowledge of discourse structure. Illustrates this by contrasting current practices in the scoring of two major EFL/ESL writing tests with…

Governmentality in Environmental Education Policy Discourses: A Qualitative Study of Teachers in Botswana

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ketlhoilwe, M. J.

2013-01-01

International environmental education policy discourses have influenced policy construction in Botswana and how teachers conduct themselves and teaching in environmental learning. The researcher uses Foucault's notion of governmentality to understand the effects of power/knowledge relations in policy. The analysis is taken further through a…

Everybody's into Environmental Ed, Right? A Foucauldian Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kolenick, Paul

2008-01-01

Michel Foucault's concept of power/knowledge is applied to an exploration of how managerial discourse affects the practice of public environmental education at a publicly owned electric utility. Emerging from interviews with people at SaskPower is a managerial discourse with a particularly instrumental approach to environmental education. The aim…

Managing Uncertainty: Obesity Discourse and Physical Education in a Risk Society.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gard, Michael; Wright, Jan

2001-01-01

Examines how certainty about children, obesity, exercise, and health is produced in the context of 'expert' knowledge and recontextualized in the academic and professional physical education literature. Argues that the unquestioning acceptance of the obesity discourses in physical education helps to construct anxieties about the body, which are…

Mother-Child Conversations about Emotions: Linkages to Child Aggression and Prosocial Behavior

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Garner, Pamela W.; Dunsmore, Julie C.; Southam-Gerrow, Michael

2008-01-01

We examined associations of maternal and child emotional discourse and child emotion knowledge with children's behavioral competence. Eighty-five upper middle-income, mostly White preschoolers and mothers completed a home-based bookreading task to assess discourse about emotions. Children's anger perception bias and emotion situation knowledge…

Students' Experiences in Interdisciplinary Problembased Learning: A Discourse Analysis of Group Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Imafuku, Rintaro; Kataoka, Ryuta; Mayahara, Mitsuori; Suzuki, Hisayoshi; Saiki, Takuya

2014-01-01

Interdisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) aims to provide students with opportunities to develop the necessary skills to work with different health professionals in a collaborative manner. This discourse study examined the processes of collective knowledge construction in Japanese students in the tutorials. Analyses of video-recorded data…

Promoting Cognitive and Social Aspects of Inquiry through Classroom Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jin, Hui; Wei, Xin; Duan, Peiran; Guo, Yuying; Wang, Wenxia

2016-01-01

We investigated how Chinese physics teachers structured classroom discourse to support the cognitive and social aspects of inquiry-based science learning. Regarding the cognitive aspect, we examined to what extent the cognitive processes underlying the scientific skills and the disciplinary reasoning behind the content knowledge were taught.…

Partnering for Research: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Irving, Catherine J.; English, Leona M.

2008-01-01

Using a critical discourse analysis, informed by poststructuralist theory, we explore the research phenomenon of coerced partnership. This lens allows us to pay attention to the social relations of power operating in knowledge generation processes, especially as they affect feminist researchers in adult education. We propose an alternative vision…

Metaphor Analysis in the Educational Discourse: A Critical Review

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zheng, Hong-bo; Song, Wen-juan

2010-01-01

Metaphor analysis is based on the belief that metaphor is a powerful linguistic device, because it extends and encapsulates knowledge about the familiarity and unfamiliarity. Metaphor analysis has been adopted in the educational discourse. The paper categorizes the previous relevant research into 3: interactions between learners and institutions,…

Knowing the Other/Other Ways of Knowing: Indigenous Feminism, Testimonial, and Anti-Globalization Street Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dulfano, Isabel

2017-01-01

In this article, I explore the relationship between anti-globalization counter hegemonic discourse and Indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. Although seemingly unrelated, the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and…

Lloyd Bitzer's "Rhetorical Situation" and the "Exigencies" of Academic Discourse.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walzer, Arthur E.

Academic discourse, which takes its definitive characteristics from the papers written by professors to those in a particular discipline for the purpose of solving problems or furthering knowledge, is sustained by disciplinary rhetorical exigencies that prompt, shape, and convene an audience for such writing. The phrase "rhetorical…

The role of the media in the science-policy nexus. Some critical reflections based on an analysis of the Belgian drug policy debate (1996-2003).

PubMed

Tieberghien, Julie

2014-03-01

Drug policy is one of the most polarised subjects of public debate and media coverage, which frequently tend to be dramatic and event-centred. Although the role of the media in directing the drug discourse is widely acknowledged, limited research has been conducted in examining the particular role of the media in the science-policy nexus. We sought to determine how the (mis)representation of scientific knowledge in the media may, or may not, have an impact on the contribution of scientific knowledge to the drug-policy making process. Using a case study of the Belgian drug-policy debates between 1996 and 2003, we conducted a discourse analysis of specially selected 1067 newspaper articles and 164 policy documents. Our analysis focused on: textual elements that feature intra-discourse differences, how players and scientific knowledge are represented in the text, the arguments used and claims made, and the various types of research utilisation. Media discourse strongly influenced the public's and policy makers' understanding as well as the content of the Belgian drug policy debate between 1996 and 2003. As a major source of scientific knowledge, media coverage supported the 'enlightenment' role of scientific knowledge in the policy-making process by broadening and even determining frames of reference. However, as the presentation of scientific knowledge in the media was often inaccurate or distorted due to the lack of contextual information or statistical misinformation, the media may also support the selective utilisation of scientific knowledge. Many challenges as well as opportunities lie ahead for researchers who want to influence the policy-making process since most research fails to go beyond academic publications. Although media is a valuable linking mechanism between science and policy, by no means does it provide scientists with a guarantee of a more 'evidence-based' drug policy. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Public discourse on mental health and psychiatry: Representations in Swedish newspapers.

PubMed

Ohlsson, Robert

2018-05-01

Mass media plays a central role in shaping public discourse on health and illness. In order to examine media representations of mental health and expert knowledge in this field, two major Swedish daily newspapers from the year 2009 were qualitatively analysed. Drawing on the theory of social representations, the analysis focused on how issues concerning mental health and different perspectives are represented. The results show how the concept of mental illness is used in different and often taken-for-granted ways and how the distinction between normal and pathological is a central underlying question. Laypersons' perspectives are supplemented by views of professionals in the newspapers, where signs of confidence and dependence on expert knowledge are juxtaposed with critique and expressions of distrust. The newspaper discourse thus has salient argumentative features and the way that conflicts are made explicit and issues concerning authoritative knowledge are addressed indicates ambivalence towards the authoritative role of expert knowledge concerning mental health. In this way, the newspapers provide a complex epistemic context for everyday sense-making that can be assumed to have implications for relations between laypersons and professionals in the field of mental health.

The influence of democratic racism in nursing inquiry.

PubMed

Hilario, Carla T; Browne, Annette J; McFadden, Alysha

2018-01-01

Neoliberal ideology and exclusionary policies based on racialized identities characterize the current contexts in North America and Western Europe. Nursing knowledge cannot be abstracted from social, political and historical contexts; the task of examining the influence of race and racial ideologies on disciplinary knowledge and inquiry therefore remains an important task. Contemporary analyses of the role and responsibility of the discipline in addressing race-based health and social inequities as a focus of nursing inquiry remain underdeveloped. In this article, we examine nursing's engagement with ideas about race and racism and explore the ways in which nursing knowledge and inquiry have been influenced by race-based ideological discourses. Drawing on Henry and Tator's framework of democratic racism, we consider how strategic discursive responses-the discourses of individualism, multiculturalism, colour-blindness, political correctness and denial-have been deployed within nursing knowledge and inquiry to reinforce the belief in an essentially fair and just society while avoiding the need to acknowledge the persistence of racist discourses and ideologies. Greater theoretical, conceptual and methodological clarity regarding race, racialization and related concepts in nursing inquiry is needed to address health and social inequities. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Activating Event Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hare, Mary; Jones, Michael; Thomson, Caroline; Kelly, Sarah; McRae, Ken

2009-01-01

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or…

Positive emotion in knowledge creation.

PubMed

Hodgins, Michael; Dadich, Ann

2017-04-10

Purpose Despite the importance of evidence-based practice, the translation of knowledge into quality healthcare continues to be stymied by an array of micro, meso and macro factors. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a need to consider different - if not unconventional approaches - like the role of positive emotion, and how it might be used to promote and sustain knowledge translation (KT). Design/methodology/approach By reviewing and coalescing two distinct theories - the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the organisational knowledge creation theory - this paper presents a case for the role of positive emotion in KT. Findings Theories pertaining to positive emotion and organisational knowledge creation have much to offer KT in healthcare. Three conceptual "entry points" might be particularly helpful to integrate the two domains - namely, understanding the relationship between knowledge and positive emotions; positive emotions related to Nonaka's concept of knowledge creation; and the mutual enrichment contained in the parallel "upward spiralling" of both theories. Research limitations/implications This is a conceptual paper and as such is limited in its applicability and scope. Future work should empirically explore these conceptual findings, delving into positive emotion and KT. Originality/value This is the first paper to bring together two seemingly disparate theories to address an intractable issue - the translation of knowledge into quality healthcare. This represents an important point of departure from current KT discourse, much of which continues to superimpose artefacts like clinical practice guidelines onto complex healthcare context.

The Role of Conceptual and Linguistic Ontologies in Interpreting Spatial Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bateman, John; Tenbrink, Thora; Farrar, Scott

2007-01-01

This article argues that a clear division between two sources of information--one oriented to world knowledge, the other to linguistic semantics--offers a framework within which mechanisms for modelling the highly flexible relation between language and interpretation necessary for natural discourse can be specified and empirically validated.…

The Social Cognition of Medical Knowledge: With Special Reference to Childhood Epilepsy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

MacDonald, Malcolm N.; Badger, Richard; O'Regan, John

2009-01-01

This article arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating…

Using Game-Based Learning to Foster Critical Thinking in Student Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cicchino, Marc I.

2015-01-01

Previous research indicates the importance of student discourse in the construction of knowledge and the fostering of critical thinking skills, especially in the field of problem-based learning (PBL). Further, a growing body of research on game-based learning (GBL) draws parallels between playing certain types of games and the solving of…

"Knowledge Is Power"? A Lacanian Entanglement with Political Ideology in Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clarke, Matthew

2015-01-01

This paper explores the possibilities for critical policy analysis afforded by Lacanian discourse theory, with its emphasis on the unconscious and the agency of the letter, and considers its significance for critical policy analysis in education, in ways that complement and supplement the insights of post-structuralist discourse theory. To explore…

Interpreting the Circulation of Educational Discourse across Space: Searching for New Vocabularies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beech, Jason; Artopoulos, Alejandro

2016-01-01

This article argues that certain established vocabularies that are used to interpret the circulation of educational discourse and its transformation in different settings have significant limitations to capture the complexity inherent to new geographies of power/knowledge in education and that, consequently, we need to develop new concepts to…

Discourse Anaphora in Turkish as Mother Tongue

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kyuchukov, Hristo

2009-01-01

The present paper researches the abilities of Turkish adults from Bulgaria to create narratives. It analyses the narratives of the adults using discourse strategies. The findings show some problems of bilingual adults in creating narratives which are not discussed in the scientific literature. This paper brings some new knowledge to the field of…

Education, Skills and Citizenship: An Emergent Model for Entrepreneurship in Tanzania

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeJaeghere, Joan

2013-01-01

Educating for citizenship is most often associated with a discourse of liberalism in which knowledge, skills and values of equality, rights, justice and national identity are taught. A competing neoliberal discourse with values of self-improvement, responsibility and entrepreneurialism is now quite pervasive in educational policies and practices,…

Patterns of Generative Discourse in Online Discussions during the Field Experience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lafferty, Karen Elizabeth; Kopcha, Theodore J.

2016-01-01

This study examined how online discussion of the classroom challenges that preservice teachers face during the field experience can lead to problem solving and knowledge generation. Drawing upon Horn and Little's (2010) descriptions of generative discourse, the study examined how a community of preservice teachers, their university supervisors,…

Understanding Discourse on Work and Job-Related Well-Being in Public Social Media

PubMed Central

Liu, Tong; Homan, Christopher M.; Alm, Cecilia Ovesdotter; White, Ann Marie; Lytle, Megan C.; Kautz, Henry A.

2016-01-01

We construct a humans-in-the-loop supervised learning framework that integrates crowdsourcing feedback and local knowledge to detect job-related tweets from individual and business accounts. Using data-driven ethnography, we examine discourse about work by fusing language-based analysis with temporal, geospational, and labor statistics information. PMID:27795613

Issues of Teacher Identity in a Restructuring Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) System.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chappell, Clive

2001-01-01

Recent change discourses on skill development, new vocationalism, and economic rationalism imply a need for new teacher knowledge, skills, and practices. These discourses construct a new professional identity for vocational teachers that competes with traditional identities and limits the goals of technical and further education in Australia to…

Reframing Curriculum and Pedagogical Discourse in Universities of Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ntshoe, I.

2012-01-01

This articles aims to demystify curriculum and pedagogical discourses and related practices of sectoral occupational fields and qualifications of universities of technology (UoTs). The article takes issue with the academic tradition which emphasises distinctiveness of UoT as a sector that should focus exclusively on applied knowledge that is fixed…

Methodological Reflections: Supervisory Discourses and Practice-Based Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sarja, Anneli; Janhonen, Sirpa

2009-01-01

The concept of dialogue is often examined apart from the social and historical context in which it is embedded. This paper identifies how dialogue between a superior and a subordinate generates a reorganisation of situated knowledge in the education and training of nurse teachers. We created an analytic method of supervisory discourse founded on…

Tides of Change: New Themes and Questions in Workplace Learning.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fenwick, Tara

2001-01-01

Current issues in workplace learning scholarship include the following: situated learning and knowledge, culture and context of workplaces, texts and discourses mediating working knowledge, identity and difference, and equity and ethics in working knowledge. (Contains 39 references.) (SK)

Northern nursing practice in a primary health care setting.

PubMed

Vukic, Adele; Keddy, Barbara

2002-12-01

This paper explicates the nature of outpost nursing work, and/or the day-to-day realities of northern nursing practice in a primary health care setting in Canada. The study was carried out to systematically explore the work of nurses in an indigenous setting. Institutional ethnography, pioneered by Dorothy Smith was the methodology used to guide this research. The theoretical perspective of this methodology does not seek causes or links but intends to explicate visible practices. It is intended to explicate the social organization of specific discourses that inform work processes of nurses working in remote indigenous communities. The data originated from various sources including spending 2 weeks in a northern remote community shadowing experienced nurses, taking field notes and audio taping interviews with these nurses. One of the two researchers was a northern practice nurse for many years and has had taught in an outpost nursing programme. As part of the process, texts were obtained from the site as data to be incorporated in the analysis. The lived experiences have added to the analytical understanding of the work of nurses in remote areas. Data uncovered documentary practices inherent to the work setting which were then analysed along with the transcribed interviews and field notes derived from the on-site visit. Identifying disjuncture in the discourse of northern nursing and the lived experience of the nurses in this study was central to the research process. The results indicated that the social organization of northern community nursing work required a broad generalist knowledge base for decision making to work effectively within this primary health care setting. The nurse as 'other' and the invisibility of nurses' work of building a trusting relationship with the community is not reflected in the discourse of northern nursing. Trust cannot be quantified or measured yet it is fundamental to working effectively with the community. The nurses in this study saw building trust to promote health and well-being in communities as very important, yet very difficult to achieve. The difficulty in part stems from the constraining, structural, administrative, historical, cultural and political contextual realities that have shaped northern community nursing.

Documenting Art Therapy Clinical Knowledge Using Interviews

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Regev, Dafna

2017-01-01

Practicing art therapists have vast stores of knowledge and experience, but in most cases, their work is not documented, and their clinical knowledge does not enter the academic discourse. This article proposes a systematic approach to the collection of practice knowledge about art therapy based on conducting interviews with art therapists who…

Post-ecological discourse in the making.

PubMed

Zeyer, Albert; Roth, Wolff-Michael

2013-01-01

This article analyses the discourse of 15- to16-year-old Swiss junior high school students in order to understand public discourse on the environment and environmental protection. Discourse analysis reveals four interpretive repertoires as the building blocks for the so-called post-ecological discourse, which can be used to describe important aspects of current ways of talking about ecological issues in Europe. We show that 10 theoretically identifiable dimensions of this discourse can be understood in terms of a mutual interplay between the four interpretive repertoires. Post-ecological discourse in today's (Swiss) society appears to be at its core a loss-of-control-discourse, which leads (in our students) to a latent eco-depression. Thus, the public understanding of science can be affected by unintended consequences of the talk itself (in this case an unintended environmental depression), that is, by the inherent characteristics of the involved repertoires, here especially the so-called folk science repertoire. Fostering public understanding of science is thus not merely a question of providing the public with scientific 'facts'. It is also an issue of paying attention to the available discursive repertoires. If necessary, viable alternative repertoires may have to be offered. In school, for example, conversations about the nature of science, and about complexity and applied ethics might help students learn new interpretive repertoires and how to mobilize these in talking about the environment and environmental protection.

Participant-Observations of 'Effective Dialogue' at a NASA Center: Toward New Paradigm

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Nelson, Stephanie

1995-01-01

Four recently instituted 'dialogic' communication forums at a NASA center are described and analyzed. Their discourse is compared to a (typical) paradigmatic model of dialogic discourse principles. It is argued that dialogue which does not fit the exemplary model may nonetheless be effective for building community, investment, and democratic exchange. The study further suggests that consensus and teamwork may be less evident (and perhaps less effective) than individual voice and oppositional stance.

Cultural dilemmas of choice: Deconstructing consumer choice in health communication between maternity-care providers and ethnic Chinese mothers in New Zealand.

PubMed

Guo, Shujie Phoebe; Munshi, Debashish; Cockburn-Wootten, Cheryl; Simpson, Mary

2014-01-01

This article critically analyses the discourse of consumer choice embedded in health communication interactions between maternity-care providers and migrant ethnic Chinese mothers in New Zealand. Findings indicate that Chinese mothers, as the customers of the New Zealand maternity and health care services, are encouraged to "fit in" with the Western discourse of choice. However, the mothers' cultural predispositions for childbirth and communication have a significant impact on the ways in which they respond to and resist this discourse. Drawing on theoretical insights from postcolonialism and Third World feminism, this article contributes to the study of intercultural health communication by examining cultural dilemmas in the discourse of choice that is often taken for granted in Western health contexts. In doing so, it builds a platform for an inclusive maternity care and health environment in multicultural societies.

Current Realities and Future Possibilities: Language and science literacy—empowering research and informing instruction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yore, Larry D.; Treagust, David F.

2006-02-01

In this final article, we briefly review and synthesize the science and language research and practice that arose from the current literature and presentations at an international conference, referred to as the first “Island Conference”. We add to the synthesis of the articles the conference deliberations and on-going discussions of the field and also offer our views as to how such contributions can take place. These central issues—the definition of science literacy; the models of learning, discourse, reading, and writing and their underlying pedagogical assumptions; the roles of discourse in doing, teaching, and learning science; and the demands on teacher education and professional development in the current reforms in language and science education—provide points of departure for discussion of four possible new considerations to research in this field of endeavour that could contribute to a broader and productive scholarship and deeper and enriched understanding of both teaching and learning. These considerations, each from well-established fields of research literature, are the need to develop support for a contemporary view of science literacy, the role of metacognition in science learning generally, the role of multiple representations in knowledge building and science literacy, and the need for more focused teacher education and professional development programmes.

The Dialectics of African Education and Western Discourses: Counter-Hegemonic Perspectives. Black Studies and Critical Thinking. Volume 21

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wright, Handel Kashope, Ed.; Abdi, Ali A., Ed.

2012-01-01

"The Dialectics of African Education and Western Discourses" addresses how continental Africans who have worked or are currently working in the Canadian academy address their dual legacy of African and Euro-American knowledge paradigms. Reflecting a range of approaches to hegemonic Euro-American paradigms that can be summarized as…

To Show Is to Know? The Conceptualization of Evidence and Discourses of Vision in Social Science and Education Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baker, Bernadette

2017-01-01

The demand for evidence in particular forms shapes contemporary educational policy, curriculum studies' debates over the politics of knowledge "versus" wisdom, and research into classroom practice. This paper provides a genealogical trace that examines the arbitrary and historical linkage of discourses of vision (especially when vision…

Universities and Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: Cases from English Regions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Higher Education Management and Policy, 2005

2005-01-01

The last decade has seen a growing increase in policy discourse in many countries on entrepreneurship and innovation with a prominent emphasis on the role to be played by universities. However, it is far from clear to what extent institutional behaviours are influenced by this enterprising policy discourse based on the broad assumption that…

Spaces In-Between: Indigenous Women Leaders Speak Back to Dominant Discourses and Practices in Educational Leadership

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fitzgerald, Tanya

2010-01-01

My intention in this article is not to solely "talk up" or "talk back" to troubling dominant discourses about, and practices in, educational leadership, but to authenticate and legitimate Indigenous women's voices through theorising their leadership realities and by situating such knowledge in the cultural spaces that they…

Producing Global Citizens for the Future: Space, Discourse and Curricular Reform

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matus, Claudia; Talburt, Susan

2015-01-01

This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education's seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on…

Exposing Ideology within University Policies: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Faculty Hiring, Promotion and Remuneration Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Uzuner-Smith, Sedef; Englander, Karen

2015-01-01

Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper exposes the neoliberal ideology of the knowledge-based economy embedded within university policies, specifically those that regulate faculty hiring, promotion, and remuneration in two national contexts: Turkey and Mexico. The paper follows four stages of CDA: (1) focus upon a social wrong in its…

Discourse Analysis of Interpersonal Meaning to Understand the Discrepancy between Teacher Knowing and Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ilhan, Emine Gül Çelebi; Erbas, Ayhan Kürsat

2016-01-01

As is well known, bridging teacher knowledge or learning with practice is not a straightforward task. This paper aims to explore this discrepancy between a mathematics teacher's knowing and practices and to offer ways of alignment between the two based on the social/interpersonal meanings and their realization through teacher's discourse. In this…

"This State is Racist..": Policy Problematization and Undocumented Youth Experiences in the New Latino South

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rodriguez, Sophia; Monreal, Timothy

2017-01-01

This article examines how state-level policy discourse articulates a category of knowledge about immigrants in South Carolina that governs the everyday experiences of undocumented immigrants. In the analysis of proposed and enacted immigration legislation from 2005 to the present, we use a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse analysis to better…

Neo-Liberal Discourse in the Academy: The Forestalling of (Collective) Resistance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Davies, Bronwyn; Petersen, Eva Bendix

2005-01-01

In this article we analyse the ways in which neo-liberalism is taken up in the discourses and practices of university life. In the "knowledge economy" it might be thought that intellectual work would flourish. Yet the neo-liberal technologies through which universities and individual academics are made into entrepreneurs and made "productive" are…

Recontextualizing and Delivering the Biomedical Model as a Physical Education Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johns, David P.

2005-01-01

This paper examines the problem of delivering a body of knowledge based on biomedical research as a school physical education discourse. The paper attempts to deconstruct the ideology of healthism upon which the discourse is based in order to show how ascetic practices in school physical education are promoted as a way of combating the hedonistic…

Rise of the Digitized Public Intellectual: Death of the Professor in the Network Neutral Internet Age

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lange, Joshua

2015-01-01

The centralised discourse claiming ownership of "knowledge" and "higher education" seems to be declining as the decentralising discourse extolling open source software and informal social network communication are emerging: yet the two are complementary when higher education is seen as a commodity. Thus, in the internet age of…

On Being Guided--A Typology of Career Guidance in EU Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schröder, Christian; Karl, Ute

2017-01-01

With this article we want to illustrate how the central publications of the European Union legitimate a role of Career Guidance Services (CGS) that help in establishing a desired form of social order. Using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, we reconstructed four typical metaphorical conceptualisations of CGS that go along with…

The Role of Policy in Constructing the Peripheral Scientist in the Era of Globalization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Englander, Karen; Uzuner-Smith, Sedef

2013-01-01

This study explores how the logic and values of globalization are manifested in international discourses of higher education in relation to scientific knowledge production and how those values are appropriated in national and institutional policies. This study also explores how this confluence of discourses and policies construct scientists in two…

Students' Discourse When Working in Pairs with Etoys in an Eighth-Grade Mathematics Class

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeJarnette, Anna F.

2016-01-01

I examined students' discourse while working in pairs at the computer in an eighth-grade mathematics class to understand how students kept track of the people and things they discussed. I found that students most often referenced themselves and objects within the environment, through references to shared knowledge and the representations on the…

Re-Envisioning Diversity in Higher Education: From Raising Awareness to Building Critical Consciousness among Faculty

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stachowiak, Dana M.

2015-01-01

In this article, the author describes a disconnect between knowing "about" diversity and "understanding" diversity and recommends re-building the critical consciousness of faculty by turning the current discourse from a framework of diversity to a framework of social justice. As defined in the article, diversity is a call to be…

Experiments in Making History Personal: Public Discourse, Complexity, and Community Building

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwartz, Deborah

2010-01-01

This article is about two initiatives at the Brooklyn Historical Society that extend our efforts to build community and create a platform for ongoing public engagement, in the face of emotionally charged topics. The first project is a powerful oral history program and exhibition that promotes conversation about the war in Vietnam, the war's…

Discourse, Power, and Knowledge in the Management of "Big Science": The Production of Consensus in a Nuclear Fusion Research Laboratory.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kinsella, William J.

1999-01-01

Extends a Foucauldian view of power/knowledge to the archetypical knowledge-intensive organization, the scientific research laboratory. Describes the discursive production of power/knowledge at the "big science" laboratory conducting nuclear fusion research and illuminates a critical incident in which the fusion research…

Knowledge-Based Aid: A Four Agency Comparative Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McGrath, Simon; King, Kenneth

2004-01-01

Part of the response of many development cooperation agencies to the challenges of globalisation, ICTs and the knowledge economy is to emphasise the importance of knowledge for development. This paper looks at the discourses and practices of ''knowledge-based aid'' through an exploration of four agencies: the World Bank, DFID, Sida and JICA. It…

Normative "Sexual" Knowledge and Critique as a Mode of Resistance--A Response to Damien Riggs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burns, Kellie

2013-01-01

In this response to Damien Riggs' analysis of sex education websites, the author draws on Foucault's understanding of knowledge, power and governmentality to understand how some forms of knowledge about sex and sexuality become normalised "official knowledge" that frame institutional policies and practices and shape everyday discourses. Foucault…

Selective traditions in group discussions: teachers' views about good science and the possible obstacles when encountering a new topic

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lundqvist, Eva; Sund, Per

2016-11-01

There is an ongoing discussion about what content that should be taught in science education and there are different views among teachers about what represent good science content. However, teachers are not isolated individuals making their own interpretations, but are part of institutionalised systems building on patterns in the selection of teaching goals and content. Earlier research shows that teachers teach in alignment with different selective traditions, which can be understood as well-developed teaching habits. Individual teachers seem to develop their personal habits on the basis of the contextual situations created by earlier generations of teachers. In order to find out which content teachers find representative for science education, we asked nine teachers to take part in group interviews to talk about what they value as "good" science content. The participants were grouped according to their selective traditions expressed in earlier studies. The method was used to dynamically explore, challenge and highlight teachers' views. The starting point for the group discussions is national tests in science. In Sweden, national tests in biology, physics and chemistry were introduced in secondary school science (year 9) in 2009. One overarching aim of these tests is to support the implementation of the science curricula and to include for example knowledge about socio-scientific issues (SSI). The content of the tests can consequently be seen as important for teachers to consider. The findings show that `resistance' to including SSI is not just an issue for individual teachers. As individuals teachers can create many kinds of obstacles, but still be interested in integrating SSI in their science teaching. However, in group discussions the teachers tend to collectively adopt the scientific rational discourse. This discourse is what joins them and creates their common identity as science teachers. In turn, they seek to free scientific knowledge from social knowledge and thereby make assessment easier.

The Arts and Education: Knowledge Generation, Pedagogy, and the Discourse of Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gadsden, Vivian L.

2008-01-01

Within the past 20 years, the arts have gained increasing prominence in educational discourses as well as public arenas. At the same time that traditional genres of art (e.g., music, visual art, and performance) are being taught as part of school curricula, the study of the arts in education has taken on new venues in supporting learning and…

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Excavating Race and the Enduring Racisms in U.S. Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Anthony L.; Brown, Keffrelyn D.

2015-01-01

Drawing from the theories of racial formation theory and race marking, this chapter explores the durability of racial discourses in school curriculum over time in the United States. The authors' inquiry focuses on racial discourses located in two sources of curricula knowledge: children's literature and U.S. history textbooks.

Expository Discourse in Children, Adolescents, and Adults: Development and Disorders. New Directions in Communication Disorders Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nippold, Marilyn A., Ed.; Scott, Cheryl M., Ed.

2009-01-01

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse--the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex…

A Critical Close-up: Three Films and Their Lessons in Critical Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hodges, Amanda L.

2010-01-01

Movies are a part of social discourse, and they may show "life the way people would like to make it." As educators look at society's changing views of knowledge, learning, teaching, and success, they can engage in that discourse and consider ways it does--or does not--reflect and affect pedagogies and daily lives. As Hollywood directs society's…

The Discourse and Nature of Creativity and Innovation: Ways of Relating to the Novel

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hammershøj, Lars Geer

2017-01-01

In the discourse of the knowledge-based economy, the link between creativity and innovation is usually taken for granted. However, not only is this link of recent date, it joins together two diametrically opposed concepts: the economic concept of innovation and the humanistic concept of creativity. In research too, there is a lack of enquiry into…

Rhetorical Impact through Hedging Devices in the "Results and Discussion" Part of a Civil Engineering Research Article

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Khamesian, Minoo

2015-01-01

It is common knowledge that hedging devices as a rhetorical technique common in all persuasive writing are considerably important in scientific discourse, for they are tools which facilitate presenting claims or arguments in a polite, acceptable and respectful manner. In addition, they are discoursal resources available to a scientific writer's…

Origins of the Discrimination Perceived by Mapuches in Chile Based on an Evaluation of Kimeltuwun

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rapiman, Daniel Quilaqueo

2011-01-01

The aim of this article is to examine the origin of perceived discrimination as it appears in the discourse of Mapuches living in Temuco and Santiago, and how that discourse is related to the evaluation of "kimeltuwun" (educational knowledge). A qualitative design was used to survey Mapuche emigrants to these two urban centers, where…

From Authoritative Discourse to Internally Persuasive Discourse: Discursive Evolution in Teaching and Learning the Language of Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsu, Pei-Ling; Roth, Wolff-Michael

2014-01-01

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

"Well, Hang On, They're Actually Much Better than That!": Disrupting Dominant Discourses of Deficit about English Language Learners in Senior High School English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alford, Jennifer H.

2014-01-01

This paper explores how four English teachers position their English language learners for critical literacy within senior high school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. Such learners are often positioned, even by their teachers, within a broader "deficit discourse" that claims they are inherently lacking the requisite knowledge and…

The Effects of Multiple Script Priming on Word Recognition by the Two Cerebral Hemispheres: Implications for Discourse Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Faust, Miriam; Barak, Ofra; Chiarello, Christine

2006-01-01

The present study examined left (LH) and right (RH) hemisphere involvement in discourse processing by testing the ability of each hemisphere to use world knowledge in the form of script contexts for word recognition. Participants made lexical decisions to laterally presented target words preceded by centrally presented script primes (four…

A Text Knowledge Base from the AI Handbook.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simmons, Robert F.

1987-01-01

Describes a prototype natural language text knowledge system (TKS) that was used to organize 50 pages of a handbook on artificial intelligence as an inferential knowledge base with natural language query and command capabilities. Representation of text, database navigation, query systems, discourse structuring, and future research needs are…

Scientists as writers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yore, Larry D.; Hand, Brian M.; Prain, Vaughan

2002-09-01

This study attempted to establish an image of a science writer based on a synthesis of writing theory, models, and research literature on academic writing in science and other disciplines and to contrast this image with an actual prototypical image of scientists as writers of science. The synthesis was used to develop a questionnaire to assess scientists' writing habits, beliefs, strategies, and perceptions about print-based language. The questionnaire was administered to 17 scientists from science and applied science departments of a large Midwestern land grant university. Each respondent was interviewed following the completion of the questionnaire with a custom-designed semistructured protocol to elaborate, probe, and extend their written responses. These data were analyzed in a stepwise fashion using the questionnaire responses to establish tentative assertions about the three major foci (type of writing done, criteria of good science writing, writing strategies used) and the interview responses to verify these assertions. Two illustrative cases (a very experienced, male physical scientist and a less experienced, female applied biological scientist) were used to highlight diversity in the sample. Generally, these 17 scientists are driven by the academy's priority of publishing their research results in refereed, peer-reviewed journals. They write their research reports in isolation or as a member of a large research team, target their writing to a few journals that they also read regularly, use writing in their teaching and scholarship to inform and persuade science students and other scientists, but do little border crossing into other discourse communities. The prototypical science writer found in this study did not match the image based on a synthesis of the writing literature in that these scientists perceived writing as knowledge telling not knowledge building, their metacognition of written discourse was tacit, and they used a narrow array of genre, strategies, target audiences, and expectations for their writing.

Neural mechanisms of discourse comprehension: a human lesion study

PubMed Central

Colom, Roberto; Grafman, Jordan

2014-01-01

Discourse comprehension is a hallmark of human social behaviour and refers to the act of interpreting a written or spoken message by constructing mental representations that integrate incoming language with prior knowledge and experience. Here, we report a human lesion study (n = 145) that investigates the neural mechanisms underlying discourse comprehension (measured by the Discourse Comprehension Test) and systematically examine its relation to a broad range of psychological factors, including psychometric intelligence (measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale), emotional intelligence (measured by the Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test), and personality traits (measured by the Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Personality Inventory). Scores obtained from these factors were submitted to voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping to elucidate their neural substrates. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that working memory and extraversion reliably predict individual differences in discourse comprehension: higher working memory scores and lower extraversion levels predict better discourse comprehension performance. Lesion mapping results indicated that these convergent variables depend on a shared network of frontal and parietal regions, including white matter association tracts that bind these areas into a coordinated system. The observed findings motivate an integrative framework for understanding the neural foundations of discourse comprehension, suggesting that core elements of discourse processing emerge from a distributed network of brain regions that support specific competencies for executive and social function. PMID:24293267

Science learning in the context of discourse

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

do Nascimento, Silvania Sousa

2013-06-01

The original article by Kamberelis and Wehunt (2012) discusses an interesting and important research subject in science education as it focus on classroom interactions and the characteristics of the discourse production of interlocutors. The authors start from the premise that discourse heterogeneity is constitutive of social activities, which is supported by others like Mikhail Bakhtin (Speech genres and other late essays. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981) and Erving Goffman (Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. Harper and Row, London, 1974). They also present the definitions of three key elements that organize hybrid discourse: (a) lamination of multiple cultural frames, (b) shifting relations between people and their discourse, and (c) shifting power relations between people. Finally, the authors analyze how these three elements organize students' science discourse in the classroom and how it contributes to the creation of a micro-community of practice capable of helping the emergence of a disciplinary knowledge that is legitimized by and strengthens the identity of the group. In the present commentary, I discuss how Michael Foucault's (1970) concept of discursive procedure may help us to analyze the (often neglected) teacher's role in the development of hybrid discourse practices.

Integrating Physics and Math through Microcomputer-Based Laboratories (MBL): Effects on Discourse Type, Quality, and Mathematization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

BouJaoude, Saouma B.; Jurdak, Murad E.

2010-01-01

The purposes of this study were to understand the nature of discourse in terms of knowledge types and cognitive process, source of utterances (student or teacher), and time use in microcomputer-based labs (MBL) and verification type labs (VTL) and to gain an understanding of the role of MBL in promoting mathematization. The study was conducted in…

[Theories of stages of life within the anthropology of romanticism].

PubMed

Schweizer, Pia-Johanna; Schweizer, Stefan

2006-12-01

The essay discusses the importance and prominence of theories about different stages of life in the anthropological and medical discourse of romanticism. This discourse has clearly a stabilising and restaurative function, favouring the age of moderate manhood. The political and social regulative implications of these theories demand a restaurative roll-back. The essay is based on a concept of sociology of knowledge formation.

Hybrid discourse practice and science learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kamberelis, George; Wehunt, Mary D.

2012-09-01

In this article, we report on a study of how creative linguistic practices (which we call hybrid discourse practices) were enacted by students in a fifth-grade science unit on barn owls and how these practices helped to produce a synergistic micro-community of scientific practice in the classroom that constituted a fertile space for students (and the teacher) to construct emergent but increasingly legitimate and dynamic disciplinary knowledges and identities. Our findings are important for the ways in which they demonstrate (a) how students use hybrid discourse practices to self-scaffold their work within complex curricular tasks and when they are not completely sure about how to enact these tasks (b) how hybrid discourse practices can promote inquiry orientations to science, (c) how hybrid discourse practices index new and powerful forms of science pedagogy, and (d) how hybrid discourse practices are relevant to more global issues such as the crucial roles of language fluency and creativity, which are known prerequisites for advanced science learning and which aid students in developing skills that are necessary for entry into science and technology careers.

Promoting Knowledge Creation Discourse in an Asian Primary Five Classroom: Results from an Inquiry into Life Cycles

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Aalst, Jan; Truong, Mya Sioux

2011-01-01

The phrase "knowledge creation" refers to the practices by which a community advances its collective knowledge. Experience with a model of knowledge creation could help students to learn about the nature of science. This research examined how much progress a teacher and 16 Primary Five (Grade 4) students in the International…

Compelling Counternarratives to Deficit Discourses: An Investigation into the Funds of Knowledge of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse U.S. Elementary Students' Households

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kinney, Angela

2015-01-01

This study focused on household funds of knowledge or "historically accumulated bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household functioning and well-being" (Gonzalez, Andrade, Civil, & Moll, 2001). A Funds of Knowledge approach provides both a methodological and theoretical lens for educators to understand both themselves and…

Defining "Knowledge" in Vocational Education Qualifications in England: An Analysis of Key Stakeholders and Their Constructions of Knowledge, Purposes and Content

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bathmaker, Ann-Marie

2013-01-01

What is meant by "knowledge" in vocational education qualifications and who decides? These are significant questions in a context where "skill" is the prevailing discourse. This paper reports on a research project, undertaken in 2010-2011, which investigated the role of national stakeholders in defining knowledge in vocational…

Bringing Knowledge Back In: Perspectives from Liberal Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deng, Zongyi

2018-01-01

From the vantage point of liberal education, this article attempts to contribute to the conversation initiated by Michael Young and his colleagues on 'bringing knowledge back' into the current global discourse on curriculum policy and practice. The contribution is made through revisiting the knowledge-its-own-end thesis associated with Newman and…

Globalisation, Transnational Academic Mobility and the Chinese Knowledge Diaspora: An Australian Case Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Rui; Welch, Anthony R.

2010-01-01

The master discourses of economic globalisation and the knowledge economy each cite knowledge diasporas as vital "trans-national human capital". Based on a case study of a major Australian university, this article examines the potential to deploy China's large and highly-skilled diaspora in the service of Chinese and Australian…

Managing Knowledge Claims in Classroom Discourse: The Public Construction of a Homogeneous Epistemic Status

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heller, Vivien

2017-01-01

Drawing on sequential and multimodal analysis of video-recorded classroom interactions, the paper examines in detail the interactional practices and verbal and bodily displays that serve to (re-)establish a congruency between the teacher's expectation with regard to the participants' relative knowledge and the students' actual knowledge claims. By…

Socially constructed ‘value’ and vocational experiences following neurological injury

PubMed Central

Fadyl, Joanna K.; Payne, Deborah

2016-01-01

Abstract Purpose: Paid work is seen as a key outcome in rehabilitation. However, research demonstrates that because of normative expectations in the job market and workplace, experiences of disability can be intensified in a work context. We sought to explore this issue in more depth by analysing the effects of societal constructions of worker ‘value’ within individual case studies of people with acquired neurological injury. Method: Instrumental case study of four heterogeneous participants, employing a discourse analysis approach. Results: Participants described a perpetuation of discourses in which a disabled body or mind itself is seen to qualify, disqualify or limit a person’s value in employment. Nevertheless, interviews also highlighted discourses that constructed other worker identities: based on pre-injury identities, life experiences and other aspects of self. The contrasts between individuals illustrated how worker identities, when situated within broader societal discourses of worker ‘value’, can either constrain or expand the vocational opportunities available to individuals who experience disability. However, current and historical interactions about worker ‘value’ shaped the identities genuinely available to each individual. Conclusion: Understanding how societal discourses enable and constrain worker identities may be vital to (a) facilitating valid opportunities and (b) navigating situations that could unintentionally hinder vocational possibilities. Implications for RehabilitationThis study shows how worker identities, situated within societal discourses of worker ‘value’, can constrain or broaden vocational opportunities available to individuals who experience disability.Barriers to gaining, maintaining and developing in employment could be re-envisaged in terms of what is limiting a person’s ability to embody an enabling identity.A knowledge of both societal discourses and individuals’ interactions with them may be vital to facilitating opportunities that users of rehabilitation services experience as valid options. This knowledge can also provide information with which to navigate situations that could potentially (sometimes unintentionally) constrain vocational possibilities. PMID:26836299

Reclaiming Indigenous Representations and Knowledges

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Iseke-Barnes, Judy; Danard, Deborah

2007-01-01

This article explores contemporary Indigenous artists', activists', and scholars' use of the Internet to reclaim Indigenous knowledge, culture, art, history, and worldview; critique the political realities of dominant discourse; and address the genocidal history and ongoing repression of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous Internet examples include…

The Politics of Management Knowledge.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clegg, Stewart R., Ed.; Palmer, Gill, Ed.

This book recognizes the political nature of management knowledge, as a discourse produced from, and reproducing, power processes within and between organizations. Critical examinations of certain current management theories--lean production, excellence, entrepreneurship--are examples of relations of power that intermingle with relations of…

Mediating suicide: print journalism and the categorization of queer youth suicide discourses.

PubMed

Cover, Rob

2012-10-01

This article undertakes textual analysis to examine some of the ways in which knowledge around sexuality-related youth suicide and its causes are produced and made available through news media discourses and news-making processes. Four categories of sexuality-related suicide discourses were identified in news stories and features over the past 20 years: statistical research that makes non-heterosexuality implicit as a cause of suicide; stories about deviancy,guilt, and shame; suicide survivor stories; and bullying/harassment of non-heterosexual persons by individuals in schools and other institutions as suicide cause. Through processes of news production and meaning-making, use of expert opinions of primary definers, experiential accounts, reliance on citations of quantitative data, private accounts given as entertainment, and the newsworthiness of suicide as drama, public knowledge on queer youth suicide is guided by contemporary journalism. In all cases, the underlying relationship between heteronormativity, mental health, depression, and despair were frequently excluded in news journalism on queer youth suicide.

Professional Knowledge and Practice in Health, Welfare and Educational Agencies in England in Relation to Children Being Educated at Home: An Exploratory Review

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jennens, Roger

2011-01-01

Discourses of child development hold that the experience a child gains from being at school is crucial to the child's development and well-being. The option of home education challenges such discourse. There is little practice-related literature specific to home-educated children. This article first describes a context and then reviews aspects of…

Teacher or Coach? How Logics from the Field of Sports Contribute to the Construction of Knowledge in Physical Education Teacher Education Pedagogical Discourse through Educational Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Svendsen, Annemari Munk; Svendsen, Jesper Tinggaard

2016-01-01

The main purpose of this paper is to focus attention on educational texts as central conveyers of discourses of sport into physical education teacher education (PETE) and by extension into physical education (PE). A considerable volume of research suggests that sport and games continue to be dominant elements of curriculum and practice in…

Gender, sexuality and the discursive representation of access and equity in health services literature: implications for LGBT communities

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background This article considers how health services access and equity documents represent the problem of access to health services and what the effects of that representation might be for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities. We conducted a critical discourse analysis on selected access and equity documents using a gender-based diversity framework as determined by two objectives: 1) to identify dominant and counter discourses in health services access and equity literature; and 2) to develop understanding of how particular discourses impact the inclusion, or not, of LGBT communities in health services access and equity frameworks.The analysis was conducted in response to public health and clinical research that has documented barriers to health services access for LGBT communities including institutionalized heterosexism, biphobia, and transphobia, invisibility and lack of health provider knowledge and comfort. The analysis was also conducted as the first step of exploring LGBT access issues in home care services for LGBT populations in Ontario, Canada. Methods A critical discourse analysis of selected health services access and equity documents, using a gender-based diversity framework, was conducted to offer insight into dominant and counter discourses underlying health services access and equity initiatives. Results A continuum of five discourses that characterize the health services access and equity literature were identified including two dominant discourses: 1) multicultural discourse, and 2) diversity discourse; and three counter discourses: 3) social determinants of health (SDOH) discourse; 4) anti-oppression (AOP) discourse; and 5) citizen/social rights discourse. Conclusions The analysis offers a continuum of dominant and counter discourses on health services access and equity as determined from a gender-based diversity perspective. The continuum of discourses offers a framework to identify and redress organizational assumptions about, and ideological commitments to, sexual and gender diversity and health services access and equity. Thus, the continuum of discourses may serve as an important element of a health care organization's access and equity framework for the evaluation of access to good quality care for diverse LGBT populations. More specfically, the analysis offers four important points of consideration in relation to the development of a health services access and equity framework. PMID:21957894

Gender, sexuality and the discursive representation of access and equity in health services literature: implications for LGBT communities.

PubMed

Daley, Andrea E; Macdonnell, Judith A

2011-09-29

This article considers how health services access and equity documents represent the problem of access to health services and what the effects of that representation might be for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities. We conducted a critical discourse analysis on selected access and equity documents using a gender-based diversity framework as determined by two objectives: 1) to identify dominant and counter discourses in health services access and equity literature; and 2) to develop understanding of how particular discourses impact the inclusion, or not, of LGBT communities in health services access and equity frameworks.The analysis was conducted in response to public health and clinical research that has documented barriers to health services access for LGBT communities including institutionalized heterosexism, biphobia, and transphobia, invisibility and lack of health provider knowledge and comfort. The analysis was also conducted as the first step of exploring LGBT access issues in home care services for LGBT populations in Ontario, Canada. A critical discourse analysis of selected health services access and equity documents, using a gender-based diversity framework, was conducted to offer insight into dominant and counter discourses underlying health services access and equity initiatives. A continuum of five discourses that characterize the health services access and equity literature were identified including two dominant discourses: 1) multicultural discourse, and 2) diversity discourse; and three counter discourses: 3) social determinants of health (SDOH) discourse; 4) anti-oppression (AOP) discourse; and 5) citizen/social rights discourse. The analysis offers a continuum of dominant and counter discourses on health services access and equity as determined from a gender-based diversity perspective. The continuum of discourses offers a framework to identify and redress organizational assumptions about, and ideological commitments to, sexual and gender diversity and health services access and equity. Thus, the continuum of discourses may serve as an important element of a health care organization's access and equity framework for the evaluation of access to good quality care for diverse LGBT populations. More specfically, the analysis offers four important points of consideration in relation to the development of a health services access and equity framework.

SDH-NET: a South-North-South collaboration to build sustainable research capacities on social determinants of health in low- and middle-income countries.

PubMed

Cash-Gibson, Lucinda; Guerra, German; Salgado-de-Snyder, V Nelly

2015-10-22

It is desirable that health researchers have the ability to conduct research on health equity and contribute to the development of their national health system and policymaking processes. However, in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), there is a limited capacity to conduct this type of research due to reasons mostly associated with the status of national (health) research systems. Building sustainable research capacity in LMICs through the triangulation of South-North-South (S-N-S) collaborative networks seems to be an effective way to maximize limited national resources to strengthen these capacities. This article describes how a collaborative project (SDH-Net), funded by the European Commission, has successfully designed a study protocol and a S-N-S collaborative network to effectively support research capacity building in LMICs, specifically in the area of social determinants of health (SDH); this project seeks to elaborate on the vital role of global collaborative networks in strengthening this practice. The implementation of SDH-Net comprised diverse activities developed in three phases. Phase 1: national level mapping exercises were conducted to assess the needs for SDH capacity building or strengthening in local research systems. Four strategic areas were defined, namely research implementation and system performance, social appropriation of knowledge, institutional and national research infrastructure, and research skills and training/networks. Phase 2: development of tools to address the identified capacity building needs, as well as knowledge management and network strengthening activities. Phase 3: identifying lessons learned in terms of research ethics, and how policies can support the capacity building process in SDH research. The implementation of the protocol has led the network to design innovative tools for strengthening SDH research capacities, under a successful S-N-S collaboration that included national mapping reports, a global open-access learning platform with tools and resources, ethical guidelines for research, policy recommendations, and academic contributions to the global SDH discourse. The effective triangulation of S-N-S partnerships can be of high value in building sustainable research capacity in LMICs. If designed appropriately, these multicultural, multi-institutional, and multidisciplinary collaborations can enable southern and northern academics to contextualize global research according to their national realities.

Discourse analysis--making connections between knowledge and power: an interview with Debbie Payne by Lynne S. Giddings and Pamela J. Wood.

PubMed

Payne, Debbie

2002-07-01

Discourse analysis is a relative newcomer to the variety of qualitative research methodologies used in nursing and midwifery research in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This is the seventh article in a series based on interviews with nursing and midwifery researchers, designed to offer the beginning researcher a first-hand account of the experience of using particular methodologies. This article focuses on discourse analysis as interpreted by Debbie Payne (RGON, MA [Hons]) in interview. Debbie has recently finished her PhD thesis (submitted for examination) and is a Senior Lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. For her thesis Debbie used Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore the use of the term 'elderly primigravida' to describe mothers who are pregnant for the first time when aged 35 years or over.

Culture, nature and particulate matter - Hybrid reframings in air pollution scholarship

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cupples, Julie

Air pollution is a thoroughly hybrid phenomenon. It is composed of inseparable physical, scientific, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions. It is both an object of environmental science and embedded in our everyday social and cultural worlds. Nevertheless, much air pollution scholarship focuses solely on the physical dimensions of air pollution which are expressed quantitatively and pays little or no regard to the identities, discourses, bodies and emotions which constitute and are constituted by air pollution as a physical reality. This article argues for a more reflexive and hybrid approach to air pollution research which bridges intellectually confining binaries. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour and other actor-network theorists, it argues that if we can let go of a foundational nature, disrupt our humanism and take non-scientific knowledges seriously, we might develop a new respect for the atmospheric environment and begin the task of building a better common world.

The power of wholeness, consciousness, and caring a dialogue on nursing science, art, and healing.

PubMed

Cowling, W Richard; Smith, Marlaine C; Watson, Jean

2008-01-01

Wholeness, consciousness, and caring are 3 critical concepts singled out and positioned in the disciplinary discourse of nursing to distinguish it from other disciplines. This article is an outgrowth of a dialogue among 4 scholars, 3 who have participated extensively in work aimed at synthesizing converging points in nursing theory development. It proposes a unified vision of nursing knowledge that builds on their work as a reference point for extending reflection and dialogue about the discipline of nursing. We seek for an awakening of a higher/deeper place of wholeness, consciousness, and caring that will synthesize new ethical and intellectual forms and norms of "ontological caring literacy" to arrive at a unitary caring science praxis. We encourage the evolution of a mature caring-healing-health discipline and profession, helping affirm and sustain humanity, caring, and wholeness in our daily work and in the world.

Hierarchical semantic structures for medical NLP.

PubMed

Taira, Ricky K; Arnold, Corey W

2013-01-01

We present a framework for building a medical natural language processing (NLP) system capable of deep understanding of clinical text reports. The framework helps developers understand how various NLP-related efforts and knowledge sources can be integrated. The aspects considered include: 1) computational issues dealing with defining layers of intermediate semantic structures to reduce the dimensionality of the NLP problem; 2) algorithmic issues in which we survey the NLP literature and discuss state-of-the-art procedures used to map between various levels of the hierarchy; and 3) implementation issues to software developers with available resources. The objective of this poster is to educate readers to the various levels of semantic representation (e.g., word level concepts, ontological concepts, logical relations, logical frames, discourse structures, etc.). The poster presents an architecture for which diverse efforts and resources in medical NLP can be integrated in a principled way.

Three Forms of the Knowledge Economy: Learning, Creativity and Openness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peters, Michael A.

2010-01-01

This paper outlines and reviews three forms and associated discourses of the "knowledge economy": the "learning economy", based on the work of Bengt-Ake Lundvall; the "creative economy" based on the work of Charles Landry, John Howkins and Richard Florida; and the "open knowledge economy" based on the work of Yochai Benkler and others. Arguably,…

Unfolding Possibilities through a Decolonizing Project: Indigenous Knowledges and Rural Japanese Women

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mayuzumi, Kimine

2009-01-01

Rural Japanese women have been overlooked or misrepresented in the academic and nationalist discourses on Japanese women. Using an anti-colonial feminist framework, I advocate that centering discussions on Indigenous knowledges will help fill this gap based on the belief that Indigenous-knowledge framework is a tool to show the agency of the…

The Quest for High-Level Knowledge in Schools: Revisiting the Concepts of Classification and Framing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morais, Ana M.; Neves, Isabel P.

2018-01-01

This article centres on the problem of raising the level of school knowledge, particularly science knowledge, for all. The article describes studies in science education developed in Portugal by Morais and Neves and collaborators. These studies are mainly based on Bernstein's model of pedagogic discourse (PD), and on his theorisation on knowledge…

Critical Analysis of Textbooks: Knowledge-Generating Logics and the Emerging Image of "Global Economic Contexts"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thoma, Michael

2017-01-01

This paper presents an approach to the critical analysis of textbook knowledge, which, working from a discourse theory perspective (based on the work of Foucault), refers to the performative nature of language. The critical potential of the approach derives from an analysis of knowledge-generating logics, which produce particular images of reality…

Knitted Patterns or Contagious Hotspots?: Linking Views on Knowledge and Organizational Networked Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cornelissen, Frank; de Jong, Tjip; Kessels, Joseph

2012-01-01

Purpose: This paper aims to propose a framework which connects perspectives on knowledge and learning to various approaches of social networks studies. The purpose is twofold: providing input for the discourse in organizational studies about the way different views on knowledge and networks drive design choices and activities of researchers,…

Hierarchies of Knowledge, Incommensurabilities and Silences in South African ECD Policy: Whose Knowledge Counts?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rudolph, Norma

2017-01-01

Policy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC's renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating "a better life for all" as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family…

Nennu and Shunu: gender, body politics, and the beauty economy in China.

PubMed

Yang, Jie

2011-01-01

This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, "tender" women (nennu) and "ripe" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.

Discourse Analysis and Social Construction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bazerman, Charles

1990-01-01

A brief review of social constructivism as a general movement and how it has been applied in particular to scientific knowledge precedes a review of investigations into the role language and linguistic activities have in the social construction of knowledge. A 39-citation unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science - an interdisciplinary round table discussion.

PubMed

Rietmann, Felix; Schildmann, Mareike; Arni, Caroline; Cook, Daniel Thomas; Giuriato, Davide; Göhlsdorf, Novina; Muigai, Wangui

2017-03-01

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge.

The Perceptions of Elementary School Teachers Regarding Their Efforts to Help Students Utilize Student-to-Student Discourse in Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Craddock, Jennifer Lovejoy

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the perceptions of elementary teachers who teach science as opposed to science teacher specialists regarding their efforts to help students use student-to-student discourse for improving science learning. A growing body of research confirms the importance of a) student-to-student discourse for making meaning of science ideas and b) moving students' conceptual development towards a more scientific understanding of the natural world. Based on those foundations, the three research questions that guided this study examined the value elementary teachers place on student-to-student discourse, the various approaches teachers employ to promote the use of student-to-student discourse for learning science, and the factors and conditions that promote and inhibit the use of student-to-student discourse as an effective pedagogical strategy in elementary science. Data were gathered from 23 elementary teachers in a single district using an on-line survey and follow-up interviews with 8 teachers. All data were analyzed and evolving themes led to the following findings: (1) elementary teachers value student-to-student discourse in science, (2) teachers desire to increase time using student-to-student discourse, (3) teachers use a limited number of student-to-student discourse strategies to increase student learning in science, (4) teachers use student-to-student discourse as formative assessment to determine student learning in science, (5) professional development focusing on approaches to student-to-student discourse develops teachers' capacity for effective implementation, (6) teachers perceive school administrators' knowledge of and support for student-to-student discourse as beneficial, (7) time and scheduling constraints limit the use of student-to-student discourse in science. Implications of this study included the necessity of school districts to focus on student-to-student discourse in science, provide teacher and administrator professional development regarding student-to-student discourse instructional strategies, and promote collaboration across disciplines. This study suggests that future research be conducted regarding the role of administrators in fostering student-to-student discourse, the perspectives of secondary teachers implementing student-to-student discourse, the use of student-to-student discourse in other subjects, and leadership approaches to broadening the study across districts.

Try to be healthy, but don't forgo your masculinity: deconstructing men's health discourse in the media.

PubMed

Gough, Brendan

2006-11-01

The emergence of discourse around men's health has been evident now for at least 10 years across academic, policy and media texts. However, recent research has begun to question some of the assumptions presented concerning masculinity and men's health, particularly within popular media representations. The present paper builds on previous research by interrogating the construction of men's health presented in a recent special feature of a UK national newspaper (The Observer, November 27, 2005). The dataset was subjected to intensive scrutiny using techniques from discourse analysis. Several inter-related discursive patterns were identified which drew upon essentialist notions of masculinity, unquestioned differences between men and women, and constructions of men as naïve, passive and in need of dedicated help. The implications of such representations for health promotion are discussed.

Altschul's legacy in mediating British and American psychiatric nursing discourses: common sense and the 'absence' of the accountable practitioner.

PubMed

Tilley, S

1999-08-01

This paper contributes to an archaeology of knowledge in the field of psychiatric and mental health nursing. It focuses on a principal concern of contributors to literature on British psychiatric nursing: the problem of defining psychiatric nursing. Early British writers describing psychiatric nursing accomplished the 'presence' of psychiatric nursing as a discursive object, by discursively constructing the 'absence' of the psychiatric nurse doing, and being accountable for, 'appropriate' work. Altschul's (1972) Patient-nurse Interaction was the key text in this tradition, mediating British and American discourses, setting the methodological and substantive agenda for an important body of subsequent British psychiatric nursing research. The paper examines a number of topics in the American and British discourses mediated by Altschul: the privileging of nurses' presence and language in communication with patients; lay versus professional knowledge, and interaction as gossip; 'common sense' as a topic; common sense as different from 'identifiable perspective'; the problem of accountability and the hierarchy of credibility; accountability, the 'absent' nurse, and issues of method. Altschul's later work keeps in tension two potentially conflicting claims--on the one hand, that the practice of psychiatric nursing depends on the 'kind of person' the nurse is, and on the other, that specialist discourses have priority in determining the basis for practice. Altschul played a crucial role in establishing the role of research in British psychiatric nursing discipline: locating the accountable individual practitioner, and devising remedies for 'absence'. In doing so, she anticipated current discourses on nurses' accountability, particularly their inability to demonstrate 'evidence' of their 'effectiveness'.

Knowledge, Power, and Social Policy: John M. MacEachran and Alberta's 1928 Sexual Sterilization Act

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Puplampu, Korbla P.

2008-01-01

This article examines how academic knowledge and power have shaped the discourse on human classification and how political authorities use academic knowledge producers to legitimize public policy. Specifically, the article draws on the role of John M. MacEachran, a former academic at the University of Alberta, in the implementation of the Alberta…

Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, and Transdisciplinary Collaboration: Implications for Vocational Psychology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collin, Audrey

2009-01-01

The literature on interdisciplinarity identifies several forms of collaboration: multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary (as bridge building or integration). To assist vocational psychology translate its interdisciplinary discourse into action, this paper uses that literature to identify the benefits, challenges and conditions…

Normative discourses on the desire to have children.

PubMed

Vargas, Eliane Portes; Moás, Luciane da Costa

2010-08-01

Reflections on normative discourses on sexuality, family and reproduction are shown, promoted by medical and juridical knowledge in modern society. This study was based on the assumption that changes and maintenance of values and practices coexist in the current discourses on the desire to have children, expressed as claims in the dimension of sexual and reproductive rights, with new demands in the sphere of public and health policies. The current value attributed to family is founded on the model of modern conjugal family, which can be observed in the changes that have occurred in family relations and sexual identities. Based on a new configuration of values, the expectation of paternity and maternity has partly become a value of the homosexual relationship. However, despite changes in the sphere of family relations and social identities, the centrality of the heterosexual couple prevails in the medical and juridical discourse on the desire to have children.

Electrophysiological indices of brain activity to content and function words in discourse.

PubMed

Neumann, Yael; Epstein, Baila; Shafer, Valerie L

2016-09-01

An increase in positivity of event-related potentials (ERPs) at the lateral anterior sites has been hypothesized to be an index of semantic and discourse processing, with the right lateral anterior positivity (LAP) showing particular sensitivity to discourse factors. However, the research investigating the LAP is limited; it is unclear whether the effect is driven by word class (function word versus content word) or by a more general process of structure building triggered by elements of a determiner phrase (DP). To examine the neurophysiological indices of semantic/discourse integration using two different word categories (function versus content word) in the discourse contexts and to contrast processing of these word categories in meaningful versus nonsense contexts. Planned comparisons of ERPs time locked to a function word stimulus 'the' and a content word stimulus 'cats' in sentence-initial position were conducted in both discourse and nonsense contexts to examine the time course of processing following these word forms. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the Discourse context revealed a significant interaction of condition and site due to greater positivity for 'the' relative to 'cats' at anterior and superior sites. In the Nonsense context, there was a significant interaction of condition, time and site due to greater positivity for 'the' relative to 'cats' at anterior sites from 150 to 350 ms post-stimulus offset and at superior sites from 150 to 200 ms post-stimulus offset. Overall, greater positivity for both 'the' and 'cats' was observed in the discourse relative to the nonsense context beginning approximately 150 ms post-stimulus offset. Additionally, topographical analyses were highly correlated for the two word categories when processing meaningful discourse. This topographical pattern could be characterized as a prominent right LAP. The LAP was attenuated when the target stimulus word initiated a nonsense context. The results of this study support the view that the right LAP is an index of general discourse processing rather than an index of word class. These findings demonstrate that the LAP can be used to study discourse processing in populations with compromised metalinguistic skills, such as adults with aphasia or traumatic brain injury. © 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

What might we be saying to potential applicants to medical school? Discourses of excellence, equity, and diversity on the web sites of Canada's 17 medical schools.

PubMed

Razack, Saleem; Maguire, Mary; Hodges, Brian; Steinert, Yvonne

2012-10-01

Medical school Web sites often advance arguments to claim institutional excellence and appeal to the "best and the brightest" who might join their institutions as medical students. What do these texts communicate about institutional excellence, or the excellence of potential applicants to medical school? How are discourses related to social accountability, such as those concerning diversity and equity, represented? From July through December 2010, using the concepts of excellence, equity, and diversity, the authors examined the discourses identified on the Web sites of Canada's 17 medical schools, focusing on faculty welcome pages, deans' messages, and those pages specifically targeting applicants to medicine. Institutional prestige and applicant suitability were generally promoted through discourses of academic excellence such as research, innovation, and global positioning. Service-to-society discourses were much less prominent. Diversity discourses emerged primarily as appeals to institutions' cosmopolitan sophistication. Equity, when mentioned, tended to focus on increasing the participation of indigenous and rural students in medicine. Institutional positioning can be situated on a continuum from the more "centric" (typical academic excellence claims) to the more "eccentric" (excellence claims grounded in local contexts such as service to a region or constituency). Discourses can play a central role in regulating social institutional practices. It is worthwhile for medical schools to examine the messages that medical schools are communicating on their Web sites. If schools are to move beyond prestige-based characterizations of excellence and build a socially accountable profession, open and inclusive discussions are needed.

Older People's Discourses About Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: A Foucauldian Exploration.

PubMed

Lamers, Carolien P T; Williams, Rebecca R

2016-12-01

This study aims to contribute an alternative understanding of the position of older people in the euthanasia and assisted suicide (EU/AS) debate. Seven interviews were analyzed using Foucauldian discourse analysis, to explore concepts like knowledge, power, subjectification and surveillance. The participants presented a "confused and conflicted" discourse, expressing the view that EU/AS is a family affair, whilst also articulating a strong sense of self-determination. Although a discourse of the medicalization of dying through medical control and surveillance was endorsed, an alternative discourse of "dying outside the medical gaze" emerged. Participants, who were in favor of EU/AS, felt "voiceless," as apparent double standards were applied in the debate, and powerful others, for example, physicians and politicians, seemed reluctant to engage. Within an "aged death" discourse, the anticipated dependency on poor care from (professional) others, made participants consider EU/AS as ways of avoiding this stage of life and the associated loss of dignity. By using Foucauldian discourse analysis, alternative power relationships were revealed which might give a different interpretation to the concept of the "slippery slope." Societal discourses and related behaviors, which devalue the dependent and old, might become internalized by older people, leading them to consider EU/AS as preferable end-of-life options. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy.

PubMed

Kaldewey, David

2018-01-01

This article analyzes the concept of "grand challenges" as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to "problems" are increasingly substituted by references to "challenges" indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers.

Higher Skills and the Knowledge Economy: The Challenge of Offshoring

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Craig, John; Gunn, Andrew

2010-01-01

Recent economics literature on offshoring highlights the trend towards the relocation of high-skill jobs to emerging economies. This evolution presents a challenge to the established knowledge economy discourse on which the relationship between higher education, higher skills, higher productivity and higher incomes has been based. This paper…

Using Food Science Concepts to Enact Science-Indigenous Knowledge Systems Classroom Based Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kwofie, Samuel; Ogunniyi, Meshach

2011-01-01

According to the World Bank and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) could serve as leverage for augmenting policy formulation regarding health, environment and education. By exploring the appropriate pedagogic approaches, the potential exist for integrating IKS into the…

The Issue of Research Graduate Employability in Australia: An Analysis of the Policy Framing (1999-2013)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Molla, Tebeje; Cuthbert, Denise

2015-01-01

The prevalent knowledge economy discourse has direct implications for higher education policies and practices. It is expected that the higher education sector supports national economic competitiveness mainly through promoting scientific research, supporting technological transfer and innovation, and producing "knowledge workers" such as…

Knowing "Now," Learning Futures. The Politics and Knowledge Practices of Vocational Education and Training.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butler, Elaine

2000-01-01

Critically examines the emerging dominance of vocationalism in education, supported by discourses of globalization and the "Risk Society." Analyzes "knowledge games" in vocational education and practices that seek to train workers to perform as economic/productive units in the marketplace. Urges development of creative,…

Restructuring Teachers' Work-Lives and Knowledge in England and Spain

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Muller, Jorg; Norrie, Caroline; Hernandez, Fernando; Goodson, Ivor

2010-01-01

This article explores the restructuring of education in England and Spain. Against a presumably homogeneous global streamlining of educational systems according to competition-driven goals, the comparison of teachers' work-lives and professional knowledge evidences a variety of experiences under-represented in discourses on global restructuring.…

Pour Savoir ou vous en etes. Evaluez vous-meme vos connaissances (Knowing Where You Are. Evaluate Your Knowledge by Yourself).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aiello, Angelo; And Others

1986-01-01

A form is presented for language teacher self-evaluation concerning attitudes and knowledge about learning theories, general linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, teaching methodology, the communicative approach, class activities, class management, instructional support, and evaluation. (MSE)

New Directions in Interdisciplinarity: Broad, Deep, and Critical

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Frodeman, Robert; Mitcham, Carl

2007-01-01

Aristotle launched Western knowledge on a trajectory toward disciplinarity that continues to this day. But is the knowledge management project that began with Aristotle adequate for the age of Google? Perhaps an undisciplined discourse more evocative of Plato can help us constitute new, more relevant inter- and transdisciplinary forms of…

A Group Intelligence-Based Asynchronous Argumentation Learning-Assistance Platform

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Huang, Chenn-Jung; Chang, Shun-Chih; Chen, Heng-Ming; Tseng, Jhe-Hao; Chien, Sheng-Yuan

2016-01-01

Structured argumentation support environments have been built and used in scientific discourse in the literature. However, to the best our knowledge, there is no research work in the literature examining whether student's knowledge has grown during learning activities with asynchronous argumentation. In this work, an intelligent computer-supported…

Six Acts of Miscognition: Implications for Art Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tavin, Kevin M.

2010-01-01

Employing Lacanian theory as a necessary supplement to contemporary approaches in art education, this article provides a critique and response to art education discourse around "cognition." This response unfolds in six acts: (1) Unknown knowledge, (2) Unmeant knowledge, (3) Missing metaphors, (4) Stupidity, (5) Symptoms and sinthomes, and (6)…

Disciplined Judgment: Toward a Reasonably Constrained Constructivism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stemhagen, Kurt; Reich, Gabriel A.; Muth, William

2013-01-01

Teachers wishing to apply constructivist theories to P-12 pedagogy must skillfully move between student knowledge constructions and powerful disciplinary knowledge and discourses. Although the gulf between these two ways of knowing varies markedly by discipline, constructivist methods are often taught as if they can be applied uniformly across all…

Expanding the developmental models of writing: A direct and indirect effects model of developmental writing (DIEW)

PubMed Central

Kim, Young-Suk Grace; Schatschneider, Christopher

2016-01-01

We investigated direct and indirect effects of component skills on writing (DIEW) using data from 193 children in Grade 1. In this model, working memory was hypothesized to be a foundational cognitive ability for language and cognitive skills as well as transcription skills, which, in turn, contribute to writing. Foundational oral language skills (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) and higher-order cognitive skills (inference and theory of mind) were hypothesized to be component skills of text generation (i.e., discourse-level oral language). Results from structural equation modeling largely supported a complete mediation model among four variations of the DIEW model. Discourse-level oral language, spelling, and handwriting fluency completely mediated the relations of higher-order cognitive skills, foundational oral language, and working memory to writing. Moreover, language and cognitive skills had both direct and indirect relations to discourse-level oral language. Total effects, including direct and indirect effects, were substantial for discourse-level oral language (.46), working memory (.43), and spelling (.37), followed by vocabulary (.19), handwriting (.17), theory of mind (.12), inference (.10), and grammatical knowledge (.10). The model explained approximately 67% of variance in writing quality. These results indicate that multiple language and cognitive skills make direct and indirect contributions, and it is important to consider both direct and indirect pathways of influences when considering skills that are important to writing. PMID:28260812

The development of discourse referencing in Cantonese-speaking children.

PubMed

Wong, Anita M Y; Johnston, Judith R

2004-08-01

The ability to make clear reference in connected discourse was examined in children learning Cantonese, a Chinese language where noun phrase constituents, whatever their grammatical role, are omissible from sentences under discourse conditions that are not well-understood. Forty-three typically developing children aged 3 ; 0, 5 ; 0, 7 ; 0 and 12 ; 0 told 16 stories based on picture sequences. A panel of adult native Cantonese speakers was asked to judge the referential adequacy of each child's stories by identifying the character the child was talking about in 32 targeted referential acts. The targeted acts were of three sorts: MAINTENANCE of a known character, INTRODUCTION of a second new character, and REINTRODUCTION of a known character. Reference was judged to be adequate when 3 out of 4 'listeners' could successfully identify the character. Children's referential expressions were most adequate for Maintenance, less adequate for Introduction, and least adequate for Reintroduction. The twelve- and seven-year-olds approached ceiling on all three functions. The five-year-olds scored poorly on Reintroduction, and the three-year-olds failed both Introduction and Reintroduction, despite knowledge of at least one of the possible linguistic forms required for these acts as evidenced in a sentence imitation task. Viewed within the framework of Levelt's (1989) discourse model, the data improve our understanding of the developmental period during which children learn to make appropriate presuppositions about the listener's knowledge and attentional states.

Organ donation as transition work: Policy discourse and clinical practice in The Netherlands.

PubMed

Paul, Katharina T; Avezaat, Cees J J; Ijzermans, Jan N; Friele, Roland D; Bal, Roland A

2014-07-01

An increasing number of patients become eligible for organ transplants. In the Netherlands, at the level of policy discourse, growing waiting lists are often referred to as a persistent "shortage" of organs, producing a "public health crisis." In this way, organ donation is presented as an ethical, social, and medical necessity. Likewise, policy discourse offers a range of seemingly unambiguous solutions: improving logistical infrastructure at the level of hospitals, developing organizational and legal protocols, as well as public information campaigns. Instead of taking these problem and solution definitions as given, we critically examine the relationship between policy discourse and clinical practice. Based on a historical review, first, we trace the key moments of transformation where organ donation became naturalized in Dutch policy discourse, particularly in its altruistic connotation. Second, based on in-depth interviews with medical professionals, we show how those involved in organ donation continue to struggle with the controversial nature of their clinical practice. More specifically, we highlight their use of different forms of knowledge that underlie clinicians' "transition work": from losing a patient to "gaining" a donor. © The Author(s) 2013.

Caring science and the science of unitary human beings: a trans-theoretical discourse for nursing knowledge development.

PubMed

Watson, Jean; Smith, Marlaine C

2002-03-01

Two dominant discourses in contemporary nursing theory and knowledge development have evolved over the past few decades, in part by unitary science views and caring theories. Rogers' science of unitary human beings (SUHB) represents the unitary directions in nursing. Caring theories and related caring science (CS) scholarship represent the other. These two contemporary initiatives have generated two parallel, often controversial, seemingly separate and unrelated, trees of knowledge for nursing science. This paper explores the evolution of CS and its intersection with SUHB that have emerged in contemporary nursing literature. We present a case for integration, convergence, and creative synthesis of CS with SUHB. A trans-theoretical, trans-disciplinary context emerges, allowing nursing to sustain its caring ethic and ontology, within a unitary science. The authors critique and review the seminal, critical issues that have separated contemporary knowledge developments in CS and SUHB. Foundational issues of CS, and Watson's theory of transpersonal caring science (TCS), as a specific exemplar, are analysed, alongside parallel themes in SUHB. By examining hidden ethical-ontological and paradigmatic commonalities, trans-theoretical themes and connections are explored and revealed between TCS and SUHB. Through a creative synthesis of TCS and SUHB we explicate a distinct unitary view of human with a relational caring ontology and ethic that informs nursing as well as other sciences. The result: is a trans-theoretical, trans-disciplinary view for nursing knowledge development. Nursing's history has been to examine theoretical differences rather than commonalities. This trans-theoretical position moves nursing toward theoretical integration and creative synthesis, vs. separation, away from the 'Balkanization' of different theories. This initiative still maintains the integrity of different theories, while facilitating and inviting a new discourse for nursing science. The result: Unitary Caring Science that evokes both science and spirit.

The intellectual basis for Latino AIDS policy: towards the humanities and health policy.

PubMed

Hayes-Bautista, David E

1992-01-01

The AIDS epidemic touches upon basic humanities themes: sex, death and social worth, to name just three. AIDS policy in general builds upon society's discourse on these topics. The growing Latino population (25% of California and Texas) needs an AIDS policy that builds upon the Latino humanities tradition. The contours of the Latino intellectual tradition, as focused on issues attendant to health, are presented, with examples from Aztec, colonial and modern times.

Medical teachers conceptualize a distinctive form of clinical knowledge.

PubMed

Barrett, J; Yates, L; McColl, G

2015-05-01

For over four decades, there have been efforts to specify the types of knowledge that medical students need, how that knowledge is acquired and how its constituent parts are related. It is one of the areas of continuing concern underlying medical education reform. Despite their importance to medical students' learning and development, the perspectives of medical teachers in hospitals are not always considered in such discourse. This study sought to generate an understanding of these teachers' values, perspectives and approaches by listening to them and seeing them in their everyday teaching work, finding and understanding the meanings they bring to the work of medical teaching in hospitals. In interviews, all of the teachers talked more about the optimal forms of knowledge that are important for students than they talked about the form of the teaching itself. Many revealed to students what knowledge they do and do not value. They had a particular way of thinking about clinical knowledge as existing in the people and the places in which the teaching and the clinical practice happen, and represented this as 'real' knowledge. By implication, there is other knowledge in medical education or in students' heads that is not real and needs to be transformed. Their values, practices and passions add texture and vitality to existing ways of thinking about the characteristics of clinical knowledge, how it is depicted in the discourse and the curriculum and how it is more dynamically related to other knowledge than is suggested in traditional conceptualizations of knowledge relationships.

The right hemisphere's contribution to discourse processing: A study in temporal lobe epilepsy.

PubMed

Lomlomdjian, Carolina; Múnera, Claudia P; Low, Daniel M; Terpiluk, Verónica; Solís, Patricia; Abusamra, Valeria; Kochen, Silvia

2017-08-01

Discourse skills - in which the right hemisphere has an important role - enables verbal communication by selecting contextually relevant information and integrating it coherently to infer the correct meaning. However, language research in epilepsy has focused on single word analysis related mainly to left hemisphere processing. The purpose of this study was to investigate discourse abilities in patients with right lateralized medial temporal lobe epilepsy (RTLE) by comparing their performance to that of patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE). 74 pharmacoresistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients were evaluated: 34 with RTLE and 40 with LTLE. Subjects underwent a battery of tests that measure comprehension and production of conversational and narrative discourse. Disease related variables and general neuropsychological data were evaluated. The RTLE group presented deficits in interictal conversational and narrative discourse, with a disintegrated speech, lack of categorization and misinterpretation of social meaning. LTLE group, on the other hand, showed a tendency to lower performance in logical-temporal sequencing. RTLE patients showed discourse deficits which have been described in right hemisphere damaged patients due to other etiologies. Medial and anterior temporal lobe structures appear to link semantic, world knowledge, and social cognition associated areas to construct a contextually related coherent meaning. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Strategic Relationship Management in School Public Relations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Hair, Mary John; O'Hair, H. Dan; Lee, Renee; Averso, Randy

2006-01-01

Research supports the need for schools to operate as professional learning communities fueled by a supportive accurate understanding of collaborative relationships among school stakeholders. These relationships are necessary to build trust and foster discourse focused on improved teaching and learning practices and increased student achievement.…

University Architecture.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Edwards, Brian

This book explores how universities relate their built environment to academic discourse, asserting that the character of universities is often a charming dialogue between order and disarray. It contains numerous photographs and building plans for example campuses throughout the world. In part 1, "The Campus," chapters are: (1) "Academic Mission…

Arranging marriage; negotiating risk: genetics and society in Qatar.

PubMed

Kilshaw, Susie; Al Raisi, Tasneem; Alshaban, Fouad

2015-01-01

This paper considers how the globalized discourse of genetic risk in cousin marriage is shaped, informed and taken up in local moral worlds within the context of Qatar. This paper investigates the way Qataris are negotiating the discourse on genetics and risk. It is based on data from ongoing ethnographic research in Qatar and contributes to anthropological knowledge about this understudied country. Participants were ambivalent about genetic risks and often pointed to other theories of causation in relation to illness and disability. The discourse on genetic risk associated with marrying in the family was familiar, but for some participants the benefits of close marriage outweighed potential risks. Furthermore, the introduction of mandatory pre-marital screening gave participants confidence that risks were monitored and minimized.

Teacher knowledge and discourse control: Quantitative evidence from novice biology teachers' classrooms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Carlsen, William S.

This article describes the effects of science teacher subject-matter knowledge on classroom discourse at the level of individual utterances. It details one of three parallel analyses conducted in a year-long study of language in the classrooms of four new biology teachers. The conceptual framework of the study predicts that when teaching unfamiliar subject matter, teachers use a variety of discourse strategies to constrain student talk to a narrowly circumscribed topic domain. This article includes the results of an utterance-by-utterance analysis of teacher and student talk in a 30-lesson sample of science instruction. Data are broken down by classroom activity (e.g., lecture, laboratory, group work) for several measures, including mean duration of utterances, domination of the speaking floor by the teacher, frequency of teacher questioning, cognitive level of teacher questions, and student verbal participation. When teaching unfamiliar topics, the four teachers in this study tended to talk more often and for longer periods of time, ask questions frequently, and rely heavily on low cognitive level questions. The rate of student questions to the teacher varied with classroom activity. In common classroom communicative settings, student questions were less common when the teacher was teaching unfamiliar subject matter. The implications of these findings include a suggestion that teacher knowledge may be an important unconsidered variable in research on the cognitive level of questions and teacher wait-time.

From "Animal Machines" to "Happy Meat"? Foucault's Ideas of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power Applied to 'Animal-Centred' Welfare Discourse.

PubMed

Cole, Matthew

2011-01-11

Michel Foucault's work traces shifting techniques in the governance of humans, from the production of 'docile bodies' subjected to the knowledge formations of the human sciences (disciplinary power), to the facilitation of self-governing agents directed towards specified forms of self-knowledge by quasi-therapeutic authorities (pastoral power). While mindful of the important differences between the governance of human subjects and the oppression of nonhuman animals, exemplified in nonhuman animals' legal status as property, this paper explores parallel shifts from disciplinary to pastoral regimes of human-'farmed' animal relations. Recent innovations in 'animal-centred' welfare science represent a trend away from the 'disciplinary' techniques of confinement and torture associated with 'factory farms' and towards quasi-therapeutic ways of claiming to know 'farmed' animals, in which the animals themselves are co-opted into the processes by which knowledge about them is generated. The new pastoral turn in 'animal-centred' welfare finds popular expression in 'happy meat' discourses that invite 'consumers' to adopt a position of vicarious carer for the 'farmed' animals who they eat. The paper concludes that while 'animal-centred' welfare reform and 'happy meat' discourses promise a possibility of a somewhat less degraded life for some 'farmed' animals, they do so by perpetuating exploitation and oppression and entrenching speciesist privilege by making it less vulnerable to critical scrutiny.

Validation of the Survey of Pre-Service Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching and Technology: A Multi-Institutional Sample

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ritzhaupt, Albert D.; Huggins-Manley, Anne Corinne; Ruggles, Krista; Wilson, Matthew

2016-01-01

The TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) has gained tremendous momentum from within the educational technology community. Specifically, much discourse has focused on how to measure this multidimensional construct to further define the contours of the framework and potentially make some…

Reading Processing Skills among EFL Learners in Different Proficiency Levels

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dhanapala, Kusumi Vasantha; Yamada, Jun

2015-01-01

This study aims to understand how EFL learners in different reading proficiency levels comprehend L2 texts, using five-component skills involving measures of (1) vocabulary knowledge, (2) drawing inferences and predictions, (3) knowledge of text structure and discourse organization, (4) identifying the main idea and summarizing skills, and (5)…

Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dale, Roger, Ed.; Robertson, Susan, Ed.

2009-01-01

This book grew out of the experience of a European Union Thematic Network of the same title, and focuses on aspects of the complex and varying relationships between globalisation, Europeanisation and Education. The volume is divided into two parts: Part One: Governance and the Knowledge Economy, focuses on how the discourses of a Knowledge Economy…

Discursive Battles about the Meaning of University: The Case of Danish University Reform and Its Academics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Krejsler, John

2006-01-01

The meaning of university and, subsequently, academics' working conditions are rapidly changing as knowledge economy and globalisation discourses continue to deepen across the Western world. Higher education and research agendas are increasingly staged in the discursive universe of knowledge economy language: common strategies and harmonisation…

Discourses of Interdisciplinarity and the Shifting Topography of Academic Work: Generational Perspectives on Facilitating and Resisting Neoliberalism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martimianakis, Maria Athina; Muzzin, Linda

2015-01-01

Generational differences in the way knowledge-makers negotiate shifts in relation to interdisciplinary knowledge-making at one Canadian university are studied. Semi-structured interviews with 20 participants in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines were conducted. Using a Foucauldian approach, transcripts were read to…

What Happens to the Girls? Gender, Work and Learning in Canada's "New Economy"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fenwick, Tara

2004-01-01

Policies hailing lifelong learning in the so-called New Economy promote equitable knowledge work and work-related learning opportunities for all. Gender is hardly mentioned in these discourses; some might assume gender is 'resolved' in a new economy emphasizing entrepreneurism, technology, knowledge creation and continuous learning. However a…

Silencing the Center: Local Knowledge and Imported Model in Learning Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bazna, Maysaa

2009-01-01

This qualitative study investigates the interaction between local and imported knowledges in a specific case of transnational importation; the whole-sale importation of the American medical learning disabilities (LDs) model in Kuwait. A discourse analysis of the narratives of local educators at the only school for LDs in the country reveals a…

Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Farley, Lisa

2009-01-01

Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of "protecting the child" continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in…

Teachers' Identity, Self and the Process of Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoveid, Halvor; Hoveid, Marit Honerod

2008-01-01

In this paper we try, by drawing on some insights from practical knowledge, to bridge a gap between common conceptions of teaching on the one hand, and of learning on the other. In Western traditions of educational thought and discourse, practical knowledge--i.e. the dynamics of thinking, speaking, acting, and personal writing--is frequently…

Metaphors--Messengers of Meaning: A Contribution to an Evolutionary Sociology of Science.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maasen, Sabine; Weingart, Peter

1995-01-01

Presents the idea that the central link between science and society is established by a diffusion of knowledge. Suggests knowledge transfers may be analyzed in a metaphorical context and that a metaphorical analysis should be combined with discourse analysis and central concepts of evolutionary theory. (50 references) (Author/AEF)

Beyond Collaboration: Embodied Teacher Learning and the Discourse of Collaboration in Education Reform

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Riveros, Augusto

2012-01-01

In this paper I highlight the significance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's contribution to the study of teacher learning. I particularly draw on his notion of "embodiment" to show that professional knowledge is embodied knowledge and that teachers make sense of their professional world through their embodied action. I contrast my…

From Comparison between Scientists to Gaining Cultural Scientific Knowledge: Leonardo and Galileo

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Galili, Igal

2016-01-01

Physics textbooks often present items of disciplinary knowledge in a sequential order of topics of the theory under instruction. Such presentation is usually univocal, that is, isolated from alternative claims and contributions regarding the subject matter in the pertinent scientific discourse. We argue that comparing and contrasting the…

Knowledge, Education and the Limits of Africanisation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Horsthemke, Kai

2004-01-01

Africanisation has, during the last few decades, been a buzzword that has enjoyed special currency in South Africa. Africanisation is generally seen to signal a (renewed) focus on Africa, on reclamation of what has been taken from Africa, and, as such, it forms part of post-colonialist, anti-racist discourse. With regard to knowledge, it comprises…

Representing Family: Community Funds of Knowledge, Bilingualism, and Multimodality

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marshall, Elizabeth; Toohey, Kelleen

2010-01-01

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in…

High School Students' Knowledge of a Square as a Basis for Developing a Geometric Learning Progression

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Seah, Rebecca; Horne, Marj; Berenger, Adrian

2016-01-01

This study surveyed and analysed four secondary school students' writing about a square. Sfard's discursive approach to understanding mathematical discourse was used to analyse the responses collected from 214 Australian secondary school students. The results showed that geometric knowledge was developed experientially and not developmentally.…

Task Types and Discursive Features: Mediating Role of Meta-Talk in Focus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mohamadi, Zohre; Rahimpour, Massoud

2018-01-01

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

Sociological Tools in the Study of Knowledge and Practice in Mathematics Teacher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parker, Diane; Adler, Jill

2014-01-01

In this paper, we put Basil Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse to work together with additional theoretical resources to interrogate knowledge and practice in mathematics teacher education. We illustrate this methodology through analysis of an instance of mathematics teacher education pedagogic practice. While the methodology itself is…

Educational Technology--Mapping the Terrain with Bernstein as Cartographer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Czerniewicz, L.

2010-01-01

This paper uses the literature of educational technology as the site of analysis in order to map the field of educational technology. Having considered Kuhn and Bourdieu's theories, the paper frames the analysis of the field in Bernsteinian terms as a horizontal knowledge structure in a vertical knowledge discourse. Using the concepts of…

With an Eye on the Mathematical Horizon: Dilemmas of Teaching Elementary School Mathematics. Craft Paper 90-3.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ball, Deborah Loewenberg

Much educational discourse centers on the importance of teachers' subject matter knowledge. Complementing concerns for subject matter knowledge is interest in developing and studying alternative pedagogies that emphasize active learning and meaningful engagement. Teaching and learning would be improved, so the argument goes, if classrooms were…

Building biomedical web communities using a semantically aware content management system.

PubMed

Das, Sudeshna; Girard, Lisa; Green, Tom; Weitzman, Louis; Lewis-Bowen, Alister; Clark, Tim

2009-03-01

Web-based biomedical communities are becoming an increasingly popular vehicle for sharing information amongst researchers and are fast gaining an online presence. However, information organization and exchange in such communities is usually unstructured, rendering interoperability between communities difficult. Furthermore, specialized software to create such communities at low cost-targeted at the specific common information requirements of biomedical researchers-has been largely lacking. At the same time, a growing number of biological knowledge bases and biomedical resources are being structured for the Semantic Web. Several groups are creating reference ontologies for the biomedical domain, actively publishing controlled vocabularies and making data available in Resource Description Framework (RDF) language. We have developed the Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) as a reusable platform for advanced structured online collaboration in biomedical research that leverages these ontologies and RDF resources. SCF supports structured 'Web 2.0' style community discourse amongst researchers, makes heterogeneous data resources available to the collaborating scientist, captures the semantics of the relationship among the resources and structures discourse around the resources. The first instance of the SCF framework is being used to create an open-access online community for stem cell research-StemBook (http://www.stembook.org). We believe that such a framework is required to achieve optimal productivity and leveraging of resources in interdisciplinary scientific research. We expect it to be particularly beneficial in highly interdisciplinary areas, such as neurodegenerative disease and neurorepair research, as well as having broad utility across the natural sciences.

Performing Theory: Playing in the Music Therapy Discourse.

PubMed

Kenny, Carolyn

2015-01-01

Performative writing is an art form that seeks to enliven our discourse by including the senses as a primary source of information processing. Through performative writing, one is seduced into engaging with the aesthetic. My art is music. My craft is Music Therapy. My theme is performing theory. Listen to the sound and silence of words, phrases, punctuation, syllables, format. My muses? I thank D. Soyini Madison, Ron Pelias, Philip Glass, Elliot Eisner, and Tom Barone for inspiration, and my teachers/Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers who embraced the long tradition of oral transmission of knowledge and the healing power of sound. Stay, stay in the presence of the aesthetic. © the American Music Therapy Association 2015. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

[Not Available].

PubMed

Kaufmann, D

1996-01-01

The beginning of the 19th century saw the definite separation of the medical discourse from the Enlightened public discourse on the knowledge of human nature. Especially in the emerging field of psychiatry new definitions of the interaction between somatic and psychic processes occurred. In this context the psychiatric "moral treatment" (psychische Kurmethode) meant a direct therapeutical intervention into these processes. Pain as a heroic means that worked directly on the nerve-system gained a key role to restore the mad patient's lost consciousness of the self. This physiological concept of pain, mainly represented by Johann Christian Reil who operated in a new space of medical knowledge, came into conflict with changing attitudes and a new sensitivity of the middle classes to corporal punishment and violence at the beginning of the 19th century.

Uptake of critical knowledge in nursing practice: lessons learned from a knowledge translation study.

PubMed

Anderson, Joan M; Browne, Annette J; Reimer-Kirkham, Sheryl; Lynam, M Judith; Rodney, Paddy; Varcoe, Colleen; Wong, Sabrina; Tan, Elsie; Smye, Victoria; McDonald, Heather; Baumbusch, Jennifer; Khan, Koushambhi Basu; Reimer, Joanne; Peltonen, Adrienne; Brar, Anureet

2010-09-01

This article is based on a knowledge translation (KT) study of the transition of patients from hospital to home. It focuses on the lessons learned about the challenges of translating research-derived critical knowledge in practice settings. The authors situate the article in current discourses about KT; discuss their understanding of the nature of critical knowledge; and present themes from their body of research, which comprises the knowledge that was translated. The findings have the potential to guide future KT research that focuses on the uptake of critical knowledge in nursing practice.

The oblique perspective: philosophical diagnostics of contemporary life sciences research.

PubMed

Zwart, Hub

2017-12-01

This paper indicates how continental philosophy may contribute to a diagnostics of contemporary life sciences research, as part of a "diagnostics of the present" (envisioned by continental thinkers, from Hegel up to Foucault). First, I describe (as a "practicing" philosopher) various options for an oblique (or symptomatic) reading of emerging scientific discourse, bent on uncovering the basic "philosophemes" of science (i.e. the guiding ideas, the basic conceptions of nature, life and technology at work in contemporary life sciences research practices). Subsequently, I outline a number of radical transformations occurring both at the object-pole and at the subject-pole of the current knowledge relationship, namely the technification of the object and the anonymisation or collectivisation of the subject, under the sway of automation, ICT and big machines. Finally, I further elaborate the specificity of the oblique perspective with the help of Lacan's theorem of the four discourses. Philosophical reflections on contemporary life sciences concur neither with a Master's discourse (which aims to strengthen the legitimacy and credibility of canonical sources), nor with university discourse (which aims to establish professional expertise), nor with what Lacan refers to as hysterical discourse (which aims to challenge representatives of the power establishment), but rather with the discourse of the analyst, listening with evenly-poised attention to the scientific files in order to bring to the fore the cupido sciendi (i.e. the will to know, but also to optimise and to control) which both inspires and disrupts contemporary life sciences discourse.

Discourse in freshman engineering teams: The relationship between verbal persuasions, self-efficacy, and achievement

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yasar, Senay

Collaborative teamwork is a common practice in both science and engineering schools and workplaces. This study, using a mixed-methods approach, was designed to identify which team discourse characteristics are correlated with changes in student self-efficacy and achievement. Bandura's self-efficacy theory constitutes the theoretical framework. Seven teams, consisting of first-year engineering students, took the pre- and post-surveys and were video- and audio-recorded during a semester-long Introduction to Engineering Design course. Three instruments were developed: a self-efficacy survey, a team interaction observation protocol, and a team interaction self-report survey. The reliability and validity of these instruments were established. An iterative process of code development and refinement led to the development of thirty-five discourse types, which were grouped under six discourse categories: task-oriented, response-oriented, learning-oriented, support-oriented, challenge-oriented, and disruptive. The results of the quantitative data analysis showed that achievement and gain in self-efficacy were significantly correlated ( r=.55, p<.01). There was also a positive correlation between support-orientated discourse and post self-efficacy scores ( r=.43, p<.05). Negative correlations were observed between disruptive discourse behaviors and post self-efficacy (r=-.48, p<.05). Neither being challenged by peers nor receiving negative feedback revealed significant correlations with student self-efficacy. In addition, no direct correlations between the team discourse characteristics and achievement were found. These findings suggest that collaborative teamwork can lead to achievement to the extent that it supports self-efficacy. They also suggest that interactions such as receiving positive or negative feedback have less impact on self-efficacy than does the overall constructive behavior of the group. The qualitative component of the study, which focused on three case studies, presents how supportive and disruptive interactions occurred during team discourse. Discussion includes recommendations for educators on how to help teams build supportive environments as well as what to look for when forming teams and evaluating student team interactions.

Students' Conceptions of and Approaches to Knowledge Building and Its Relationship to Learning Outcomes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tsai, Pei-Shan; Chai, Ching Sing; Hong, Huang-Yao; Koh, Joyce Hwee Ling

2017-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among students' conceptions of knowledge building, approaches to knowledge building, knowledge-building behaviors and learning outcomes. A total of 48 primary school students (from grades 3 and 4) who had experienced knowledge-building activities participated in the present study. After…

The power of integration: radiotherapy and global palliative care.

PubMed

Rodin, Danielle; Grover, Surbhi; Elmore, Shekinah N; Knaul, Felicia M; Atun, Rifat; Caulley, Lisa; Herrera, Cristian A; Jones, Joshua A; Price, Aryeh J; Munshi, Anusheel; Gandhi, Ajeet K; Shah, Chiman; Gospodarowicz, Mary

2016-07-01

Radiotherapy (RT) is a powerful tool for the palliation of the symptoms of advanced cancer, although access to it is limited or absent in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). There are multiple factors contributing to this, including assumptions about the economic feasibility of RT in LMICs, the logical challenges of building capacity to deliver it in those regions, and the lack of political support to drive change of this kind. It is encouraging that the problem of RT access has begun to be included in the global discourse on cancer control and that palliative care and RT have been incorporated into national cancer control plans in some LMICs. Further, RT twinning programs involving high- and low-resource settings have been established to improve knowledge transfer and exchange. However, without large-scale action, the consequences of limited access to RT in LMICs will become dire. The number of new cancer cases around the world is expected to double by 2030, with twice as many deaths occurring in LMICs as in high-income countries (HICs). A sustained and coordinated effort involving research, education, and advocacy is required to engage global institutions, universities, health care providers, policymakers, and private industry in the urgent need to build RT capacity and delivery in LMICs.

An exploration of ruling relations and how they organize and regulate nursing education in the high-fidelity patient simulation laboratory.

PubMed

Limoges, Jacqueline

2010-03-01

Recently, schools of nursing have adopted the use of high-fidelity human patient simulators in laboratory settings to teach nursing. Although numerous articles document the benefits of teaching undergraduate nursing students in this way, little attention has been paid to the discourses and texts organizing this approach. This institutional ethnography uses the critical feminist sociology of Dorothy E. Smith to examine the literature and interviews with Practical and Bachelor of Science in Nursing students, and their faculty about this experience. The research shows how discourses rationalize and sustain certain processes at the expense of others. For example, ruling discourses such as biomedicine, efficiency, and the relational ontology are activated to construct the simulation lab as part of nursing and nursing education. The analysis also highlights the intended and unintended effects of these discourses on nursing education and discusses how emphasizing nursing knowledges can make the simulation lab a positive place for learning.

The ineffable disease: exploring young people's discourses about HIV/AIDS in Alberta, Canada.

PubMed

Graffigna, Guendalina; Olson, Kärin

2009-06-01

The ongoing epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Western societies (in particular in North America), where most of the population knows about the disease and how it is transmitted, suggests that providing information is not enough to change unsafe conduct. More complex psychosocial processes, mainly still unexplored, seem to underlie the translation of health knowledge about the disease and the infection into safe practices. In this article we explore the discourse of young people in Alberta about HIV/AIDS and discuss ways in which this information might be used to shape preventive strategies. We conducted eight focus groups with young people 18 to 25 years of age living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and analyzed the data using psychosocial discourse analysis. The results confirm the role of young people's interpersonal exchanges in determining HIV/AIDS preventive conduct and show the importance of social discourses about HIV/AIDS in mediating the impact of preventive campaigns on young people's attitudes and beliefs.

Assumptions about culture in discourse on ethnic minority health.

PubMed

Jaeger, Kirsten

2013-01-01

This paper is interested in the way the concept of culture is deployed in documents aimed at investigating, informing on and promoting aspects of ethnic minority health. Within a health-political discourse focusing increasingly on individual lifestyles, ethnic minority health became subject to increased political and professional interest in the last decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Analysis of the discourse on ethnic minority health emerging in five texts addressing health professionals shows that the culture of ethnic minority citizens is primarily seen as contributing to low levels of knowledge about health and to adverse health behavior. Thus, the texts present cultural beliefs and practices as contributing to the high prevalence of lifestyle diseases among ethnic minority population groups. The analysis, however, demonstrates that a more nuanced discourse is evolving, taking the complexity of the culture concept into account. In accordance with Danish health-political priorities, the most recent text analyzed in this study promotes an individualistic approach to both ethnic minority and Danish ethnic majority citizens.

"Your Whole Effort Has Been to Create Desire": Reproducing Knowledge and Evading Censorship in the Nineteenth- Century Subscription Press.

PubMed

Puglionesi, Alicia

2015-01-01

Historians once regarded the passage of the Comstock Laws in 1873 as a death knell for the public discourse on gender, sex, and reproduction that thrived in the early nineteenth-century United States, but this view has given way to a more complex appreciation of the strategies available to actors seeking knowledge about the body. I examine some of these strategies in late-century health and hygiene manuals. Although certain discourses about sex became closed off, others persisted and evolved in the interstices of Comstock's regulatory state. Readers' demand for information did not abate in 1873; savvy publishers found different ways to meet it, utilizing suggestion, allusion, and nontextual cues from which active readers could extract useful knowledge. A once-public debate about the morality, effectiveness, and appropriate use of contraception had become coded in the pages of health and hygiene manuals, pointing readers to the burgeoning mass market for contraceptive devices as a locus of reproductive control.

Socialization into science: An ethnographic study in a field research station

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Calovini, Theresa Ann

While the place of language in building the tasks and activities of the science classroom has received attention in the education literature, how students do the work of affiliation building through language remains poorly understood. This dissertation is based on ethnographic research in an apprenticeship learning situation at a biological field research station. I carried out this research with five undergraduates apprentices. I focus on how the language used in this apprenticeship situation positioned the apprentices with science. Issues of access and diversity in science education have motivated this research but this point can be missed because the five apprentices were all fairly successful in university science. They had all secured their job for the summer as paid research assistants. Yet, even with these successful students, science had a complicated place in their lives. I draw on Gee's (1999) notion of Discourse to understand this complexity. I focus on four Discourses--- Science, Knowing about the Animals, Senior Projects and RAships, and Relationships ---which were important in the apprentices' learning about and socialization with science. I try to understand the inter-workings of these four Discourses through a detailed analysis of three conversations involving one of the participants, Michelle. Michelle's use of narrative emerged as a linguistic resource which she used to explore dilemmas she experienced in the tensions between these four Discourses. Michelle was in many ways an ideal apprentice. She did her job well and she sought and received expert advice on her Senior project. Nonetheless, Michelle faced obstacles in her pursuit of a career in science and these obstacles related to language use and her use of narrative. I show how her use of narrative either facilitated or impeded her learning, depending on the context of the interaction. My analysis of Discourse points to important issues in language use by both students and teachers, with broad implications across a range of teaching/learning contexts. I describe multi-genre science reports as a pedagogy that might allow flexibility for students' representations with science, a flexibility that might be necessary given the complicated ways science plays out in the lives of students.

Re-establishing an ecological discourse in the policy debate over how to value ecosystems and biodiversity.

PubMed

Spash, Clive L; Aslaksen, Iulie

2015-08-15

In this paper we explore the discourses of ecology, environmental economics, new environmental pragmatism and social ecological economics as they relate to the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. Conceptualizing biodiversity and ecosystems as goods and services that can be represented by monetary values in policy processes is an economic discourse being increasingly championed by ecologists and conservation biologists. The latter promote a new environmental pragmatism internationally as hardwiring biodiversity and ecosystems services into finance. The approach adopts a narrow instrumentalism, denies value pluralism and incommensurability, and downplays the role of scientific knowledge. Re-establishing an ecological discourse in biodiversity policy implies a crucial role for biophysical indicators as independent policy targets, exemplified in this paper by the Nature Index for Norway. Yet, there is a recognisable need to go beyond a traditional ecological approach to one recognising the interconnections of social, ecological and economic problems. This requires reviving and relating to a range of alternative ecologically informed discourses, including an ecofeminist perspective, in order to transform the increasingly dominant and destructive relationship of humans separated from and domineering over Nature. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Challenging HIV vulnerability discourse: the case of professional and entrepreneurial women in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

PubMed

Jangu, Neema William; Tam, Ailie; Maticka-Tyndale, Eleanor

2017-05-01

A poverty-HIV narrative has dominated many HIV prevention strategies in Africa despite epidemiological data showing higher prevalence of infection among educated and wealthier women in several African countries. This paper examines the perspectives of professional and entrepreneurial women on HIV risk and vulnerability based on their knowledge and lived experiences, comparing this to the HIV discourse evident in five strategic documents that shape intervention in Tanzania. The purpose is to uncover the confluence and dissonance between the discourses of government and those of professional women themselves. Qualitative research methods included critical discourse analysis of five strategic documents and thematic analysis of 37 in-depth interviews with women. The findings challenge fixed representations of women and notions of vulnerability embedded in the poverty-HIV discourse. Women described using their sexuality and sexual agency as a means to elevate their position in ways that made them vulnerable to sexual harassment and coercion. This is explored through two intersecting themes: non-marital sexual exchanges to gain an education or employment, and marriage. The intersecting social positions and constructions of female sexuality and agency expressed by the women in this study provide insights into other avenues and forms of HIV vulnerability.

The everyday meets the academic: How bilingual Latino/a third graders use sociocultural resources to learn in science and social studies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McIntosh Ciechanowski, Kathryn E.

Driven by questions surrounding the documented "fourth-grade slump" in student test scores and about the content learning of English language learners, this dissertation examines the science and social studies literacy practices of third grade bilingual Latino/as in an urban school. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I examined three questions: (a) What content area demands are evident in instruction and in the assigned texts that children read? (b) What sociocultural knowledge do students draw on in the reading and writing of content area texts? How does it shape their reading and writing? and (c) What linguistic knowledge do students draw on in the reading and writing of content area texts? How does it shape their reading and writing? These questions are premised on three key tenets from the extant research literature. First, research has documented that middle grade students struggle to make sense of content texts, which could be caused by not only a scarcity of expository texts in early grades but also by discipline-specific demands in the content texts. Second, although all students may struggle to read specialized texts, students from non-mainstream backgrounds may struggle more because they do not possess the social and linguistic capital valued in mainstream schools. Third, sociocultural research has documented the importance of social and cultural funds of knowledge in classroom learning and knowledge construction. Guided by these tenets, I observed for six months in 2 classes and recorded field notes, interviewed participants, collected artifacts, and conducted pre- and post-unit assessments. Analytic methods included quantitative evaluation of assessments and constant comparative and discourse analyses. Findings indicate that the textbooks posed linguistic and conceptual demands and represented multiple discourses including the discourses of the natural and social sciences. To make sense of texts, students drew from various sociocultural resources such as popular culture, family, and children's literature. The teacher was more likely to take up these resources (although briefly) when they tightly aligned with instructional goals. Bilingual students faced great complexity as they drew upon linguistic resources to learn technical language and content in two languages and within multiple academic and everyday discourses.

Scientific literacy and academic identity: Creating a community of practice

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Reveles, John Michael

2005-07-01

This one-year ethnographic study of a third grade classroom examined the construction of elementary school science. The research focused on the co-development of scientific literacy and academic identity. Unlike much research in science education that views literacy as merely supportive of science; this dissertation research considers how students learned both disciplinary knowledge in science as well as about themselves as learners through language use. The study documented and analyzed how students came to engage with scientific knowledge and the impact this engagement had upon their academic identities over time. Ethnographic and discourse analytic methods were employed to investigate three research questions: (a) How were the students in a third grade classroom afforded opportunities to acquire scientific literate practices through the spoken/written discourse and science activities? (b) In what ways did students develop and maintain academic identities taken-up over time as they discursively appropriated scientific literate practices via classroom discourse? and (c) How did students collectively and individually inscribe their academic identities and scientific knowledge into classroom artifacts across the school year? Through multiple forms of analyses, I identified how students' communication and participation in science investigations provided opportunities for them to learn specific scientific literate practices. The findings of this empirical research indicate that students' communication and participation in science influenced the ways they perceived themselves as active participants within the classroom community. More specifically, students were observed to appropriate particular discourse practices introduced by the teacher to frame scientific disciplinary knowledge and investigations. Thus, emerging academic identities and developing literate practices were documented via analysis of discursive (spoken, written, and enacted) classroom interactions. A unique feature of this research is that it investigated how students' identities changed through participation in inquiry-based science activities. At this point, the importance of communication in science has not been extensively studied from this perspective. Research to date has focused on either the social or cognitive aspects of interaction. This research contributes to the improvement in participation of underserved, underrepresented students in science, a major equity concern for the state and nation.

Medication communication through documentation in medical wards: knowledge and power relations.

PubMed

Liu, Wei; Manias, Elizabeth; Gerdtz, Marie

2014-09-01

Health professionals communicate with each other about medication information using different forms of documentation. This article explores knowledge and power relations surrounding medication information exchanged through documentation among nurses, doctors and pharmacists. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in 2010 in two medical wards of a metropolitan hospital in Australia. Data collection methods included participant observations, field interviews, video-recordings, document retrieval and video reflexive focus groups. A critical discourse analytic framework was used to guide data analysis. The written medication chart was the main means of communicating medication decisions from doctors to nurses as compared to verbal communication. Nurses positioned themselves as auditors of the medication chart and scrutinised medical prescribing to maintain the discourse of patient safety. Pharmacists utilised the discourse of scientific judgement to guide their decision-making on the necessity of verbal communication with nurses and doctors. Targeted interdisciplinary meetings involving nurses, doctors and pharmacists should be organised in ward settings to discuss the importance of having documented medication information conveyed verbally across different disciplines. Health professionals should be encouraged to proactively seek out each other to relay changes in medication regimens and treatment goals. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Collaborative Drawing on a Shared Digital Canvas in Elementary Science Education: The Effects of Script and Task Awareness Support

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gijlers, Hannie; Weinberger, Armin; van Dijk, Alieke Mattia; Bollen, Lars; van Joolingen, Wouter

2013-01-01

Creating shared representations can foster knowledge acquisition by elementary school students by promoting active integration and translation of new information. In this study, we investigate to what extent awareness support and scripting facilitate knowledge construction and discourse quality of elementary school students (n?=?94) in a…

Global Discourses and Power/Knowledge: Theoretical Reflections on Futures of Higher Education during the Rise of Asia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geerlings, L. R. C.; Lundberg, A.

2018-01-01

This paper re-reads a selection of critical interdisciplinary theories in an attempt to open a space in higher education for cross-cultural dialogue during the rise of Asia. Theories of globalization, deterritorialization, power/knowledge and postcolonialism indicate that students and academics have the ability to re-imagine and influence…

Autistic Expertise: A Critical Reflection on the Production of Knowledge in Autism Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Milton, Damian E. M.

2014-01-01

The field of autism studies is a highly disputed territory within which competing contradictory discourses abound. In this field, it is the voices and claims of autistic people regarding their own expertise in knowledge production concerning autism that is most recent in the debate, and traditionally the least attended to. In this article, I…

Knowledge Production beyond Local and National Blindspots: Remedying Professional Ocularcentrism of Diversity in Music Teacher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Westerlund, Heidi; Karlsen, Sidsel

2017-01-01

In this article, we argue that mainstream discourses of diversity in music education are ocularcentric; that is, they provide a one-sided way of understanding diversity that has prevented music educators from seeing our biases. In remedying these local and national professional blindspots, we propose transnational knowledge production, which we…

Teachers' Understanding of Mathematical Cognition in Childhood: Towards a Shift in Pedagogical Content Knowledge?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Henning, Elizabeth

2013-01-01

This article about the discourse of pedagogy as related to child cognition in mathematics addresses the issue of what constitutes the main disciplinary content and the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of foundation-phase teachers. I argue that, unless child cognition itself is the primary disciplinary content of foundation-phase teacher's…

Travelling and Embedded Policy: The Case of Knowledge Transfer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ozga, Jenny; Jones, Robert

2006-01-01

Knowledge transfer (KT) has entered the higher education arena in the UK as the "third sector" of higher education activity--along with research and teaching. Its antecedents lie in the commercialization and technology transfer of the late 1980s and 1990s, and this business-like orientation remains dominant in the KT policy discourse.…

Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olssen, Mark; Peters, Michael A.

2005-01-01

The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of '[new public management', during the 1980s and 1990s has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institutions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and…

Food, Obesity Discourses and the Subjugation of Environmental Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Flynn, Gabrielle

2015-01-01

In this article, I critically analyse how meanings of health and food, tied to obesity reduction, "subjugate" environmental priorities and knowledges of food. To do this, I explore the meanings of health and food constructed in the NSW Health Munch & Move program. I examine the use of language to construct notions of food and health…

Knowing the Natural World: The Construction of Knowledge about Evolution in and out of the Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perkins, Alison Emily Havard

2009-01-01

Evolution is a central underlying concept to a significant number of discourses in civilized society, but the complexity of understanding basic tenets of this important theory is just now coming to light. Knowledge about evolution is constructed from both formal and "free-choice" opportunities, like television. Nature programs are commonly…

Classroom Conversation Analysis and Critical Reflective Practice: Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk Framework in Focus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghafarpour, Hajar

2017-01-01

The uniqueness of the Language Classroom and its complexity raises a need for foreign language teachers to develop necessary skills and knowledge to observe, analyse and evaluate their classroom discourse. Hence, interactional awareness of language teachers is an integral part of pedagogical and practical knowledge. In this article, the…

Integrating Social Activity Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multilayered Methodological Model for Examining Knowledge Mediation in Mentoring

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Becher, Ayelet; Orland-Barak, Lily

2016-01-01

This study suggests an integrative qualitative methodological framework for capturing complexity in mentoring activity. Specifically, the model examines how historical developments of a discipline direct mentors' mediation of professional knowledge through the language that they use. The model integrates social activity theory and a framework of…

The Use of Discourse Analysis To Enhance ESP Teacher Knowledge: An Example Using Aviation English.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sullivan, Patricia; Girginer, Handan

2002-01-01

Provides an example of one process used by a teacher-researcher to increase and expand the use of relevant materials, knowledgeable teachers, and teamwork with subject matter professionals in English for academic purposes' (EAP) programs. The study was conducted for an EAP program in a civil aviation school in Turkey. (Author/VWL)

"Institutional Organization of Knowledge": The Missing Link in Educational Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Karmon, Amnon

2007-01-01

Background: For over a hundred years, there have been efforts to change the way that schools transmit knowledge. Most of these efforts have failed. The most common explanations found in educational research for this are either: 1) macro-social, according to which social interests and powers hinder these changes. 2) teacher-oriented, according to…

Knowing climate change, embodying climate praxis: experiential knowledge in southern Appalachia

Treesearch

Jennifer L. Rice; Brian J. Burke; Nik Heynen

2015-01-01

Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences...

Building Nuclear Communities: The Hanford Education Action League.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ratliff, Jeanne; Salvador, Michael

Many scholars have examined the jeremiad in American rhetoric and political discourse. The Hanford Education Action League (HEAL), which influenced policy changes in the operations of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, is a social movement organization whose founding members used the jeremiad to create a symbolic community which…

Making the Invisible Visible: The Oklahoma Science Project.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCarty, Robbie; Pedersen, Jon E.

2002-01-01

Reports that teachers in preservice education programs still view the teaching of science much in the same traditional ways as our predecessors. "The Oklahoma Science Project (OSP) Model for Professional Development: Practicing Science Across Contexts" will build discourses and relationships that can be extended across contexts to establish…

Effects of Four Years of Exercise, Language, and Social Interventions on Alzheimer Discourse.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mahendra, Nidhi; Arkin, Sharon

2003-01-01

This article describes a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic intervention program for mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients that provided communication skills practice in the context of health-enhancing and esteem-building community-based activities, physical fitness training and supervised volunteer work. Effects for four participants…

"Just Go in Looking Good": The Resilience, Resistance, and Kinship-Building of Trans* College Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nicolazzo, Z.

2016-01-01

This article explores the strategies transgender college students use to navigate gender-dichotomous collegiate environments. Using a critical collaborative ethnographic methodology (Bhattacharya, 2008), this 18-month ethnographic study alongside 9 transgender students elucidated how gender operates as a discourse to regulate the collegiate life…

Children's Empowerment in Play

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Canning, Natalie

2007-01-01

This article examines the level of empowerment and autonomy children can create in their play experiences. It examines the play discourses that children build and maintain and considers the importance of play contexts in supporting children's emotional and social development. These aspects of play are often unseen or misunderstood by the adult…

Weird Science: Teaching Composition in an Antifoundational World.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bernard-Donals, Michael

The antifoundational or "hermeneutic" paradigm, particularly as it has been internalized by the field of composition studies, exists in a weak version or a strong version. The weak version stresses interactive consensus-building pedagogical practices where discourse is remade by negotiating it with others. The strong version suggests…

Assessment "as" Learning: Enhancing Discourse, Understanding, and Achievement in Innovative Science Curricula

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hickey, Daniel T.; Taasoobshirazi, Gita; Cross, Dionne

2012-01-01

An assessment-oriented design-based research model was applied to existing inquiry-oriented multimedia programs in astronomy, biology, and ecology. Building on emerging situative theories of assessment, the model extends prevailing views of formative assessment "for" learning by embedding "discursive" formative assessment more directly into the…

Digital Natives or Digital Tribes?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Watson, Ian Robert

2013-01-01

This research builds upon the discourse surrounding digital natives. A literature review into the digital native phenomena was undertaken and found that researchers are beginning to identify the digital native as not one cohesive group but of individuals influenced by other factors. Primary research by means of questionnaire survey of technologies…

The SWAN Scientific Discourse Ontology

PubMed Central

Ciccarese, Paolo; Wu, Elizabeth; Kinoshita, June; Wong, Gwendolyn T.; Ocana, Marco; Ruttenberg, Alan

2015-01-01

SWAN (Semantic Web Application in Neuromedicine) is a project to construct a semantically-organized, community-curated, distributed knowledge base of Theory, Evidence, and Discussion in biomedicine. Unlike Wikipedia and similar approaches, SWAN’s ontology is designed to represent and foreground both harmonizing and contradictory assertions within the total community discourse. Releases of the software, content and ontology will be initially by and for the Alzheimer Disease (AD) research community, with the obvious potential for extension into other disease research areas. The Alzheimer Research Forum, a 4,000-member web community for AD researchers, will host SWAN’s initial public release, currently scheduled for late 2007. This paper presents the current version of SWAN’s ontology of scientific discourse and presents our current thinking about its evolution including extensions and alignment with related communities, projects and ontologies. PMID:18583197

Constitutions of Nature by Teacher Practice and Discourse in Ontario Grade 9 and 10 Academic Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hoeg, Darren Glen

This thesis presents an ethnographic study, based broadly on principles and methods of institutional ethnography, on the constitution of nature by nine Ontario Grade 9 and 10 Academic Science teachers. The intent of this methodological approach is to examine how the daily practice of participants works toward constituting nature in specific ways that are coordinated by the institution (Ontario public school and/or school science). Critical Discourse Analysis and general inductive analysis were performed on interview transcripts, texts related to teaching science selected by participants, and policy documents (i.e. curriculum; assessment policy) that coordinate science teacher practice. Findings indicate specific, dominant, and relatively uniform ontological and epistemological constitutions of nature. Nature was frequently constituted as a remote object, distant from and different than students studying it. More complex representations included constituting nature as a model, machine, or mathematical algorithm. Epistemological constitutions of nature were enacted through practices that engaged students in manipulating nature; controlling nature, and dominating nature. Relatively few practices that allow students to construct different constitutions of nature than those prioritized by the institution were observed. Dominant constitutions generally assume nature is simply the material to study, from which scientific knowledge can be obtained, with little ethical or moral consideration about nature itself, or how these constitutions produce discourse and relationships that may be detrimental to nature. Dominant constitutions of nature represent a type of objective knowledge that is prioritized, and made accessible to students, through science activities that attain a position of privilege in local science teacher cultures. The activities that allow students to attain the requisite knowledge of nature are collected, collated, and shared among existing science teachers. Activities are adapted to meet the knowledge requirements of the curriculum, which is institutionally coordinated by a system of management, based on accountability and performance. Thus, teachers come to see teaching practice that 'works' as contained in those science activities that engage students in learning nature as a specific representation (model/machine) or through science methods that control students learning so that they arrive at the correct knowledge. This allows teachers to assess and evaluate students' acquisition of the institutionally valued knowledge of nature. This system of coordination is sustained through discourse that enables teaching practices that aligns with institutional priorities of measuring performance, while at the same time, limiting teachers from being able to conceive of other teaching practices that might enable different constitutions of nature.

"Dying a hero": parents' and young people's discourses on concurrent sexual partnerships in rural Tanzania.

PubMed

Wamoyi, Joyce; Wight, Daniel

2014-07-22

Concurrent sexual partnerships (CSPs) have been speculated to drive the HIV pandemic in many sub-Saharan African countries. We have limited understanding of how people think and talk about CSPs, how beliefs are transmitted across generations, and how this might affect the practice. This paper explores these issues to understand how CSPs are perpetuated and help identify opportunities for interventions to modify them. The study employed an ethnographic research design involving: participant observation in 10 households, 60 in-depth interviews (IDIs), and nine participatory focus group discussions (FGDs). Participants were young people aged 14-24 and parents/carers of young people within this age group. The 60 IDIs were conducted with: 17 fathers, 13 mothers, 13 young men and 17 young women (six of whom had had unplanned pregnancies and 11 had no children). The nine FGDs were conducted with groups of: fathers (2), mothers (2), young women (2), and young men (3). A discourse analysis was carried out with all the transcripts. Data were analysed with the aid of NVIVO 8 software. Six distinct discourses were identified from the way participants talked about CSPs and the norms driving the practice: 1) predatory masculine sexuality; 2) masculine respectability; 3) feminine respectability; 4) empowered modern women; 5) traditional health beliefs; 6) public health. Discourses legitimating CSPs were drawn on and reproduced primarily by young people and the media and only indirectly by parents. Discourses discouraging CSPs were used primarily by parents, religious leaders and learning institutions and only indirectly by young people themselves. Better knowledge of the discourses through which young people CSPs, and how these discourses are transmitted across generations, might help develop "culturally compelling" interventions that modify these discourses to enhance sexual health.

“Dying a hero”: parents’ and young people’s discourses on concurrent sexual partnerships in rural Tanzania

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background Concurrent sexual partnerships (CSPs) have been speculated to drive the HIV pandemic in many sub-Saharan African countries. We have limited understanding of how people think and talk about CSPs, how beliefs are transmitted across generations, and how this might affect the practice. This paper explores these issues to understand how CSPs are perpetuated and help identify opportunities for interventions to modify them. Methods The study employed an ethnographic research design involving: participant observation in 10 households, 60 in-depth interviews (IDIs), and nine participatory focus group discussions (FGDs). Participants were young people aged 14-24 and parents/carers of young people within this age group. The 60 IDIs were conducted with: 17 fathers, 13 mothers, 13 young men and 17 young women (six of whom had had unplanned pregnancies and 11 had no children). The nine FGDs were conducted with groups of: fathers (2), mothers (2), young women (2), and young men (3). A discourse analysis was carried out with all the transcripts. Data were analysed with the aid of NVIVO 8 software. Results Six distinct discourses were identified from the way participants talked about CSPs and the norms driving the practice: 1) predatory masculine sexuality; 2) masculine respectability; 3) feminine respectability; 4) empowered modern women; 5) traditional health beliefs; 6) public health. Discourses legitimating CSPs were drawn on and reproduced primarily by young people and the media and only indirectly by parents. Discourses discouraging CSPs were used primarily by parents, religious leaders and learning institutions and only indirectly by young people themselves. Conclusion Better knowledge of the discourses through which young people CSPs, and how these discourses are transmitted across generations, might help develop “culturally compelling” interventions that modify these discourses to enhance sexual health. PMID:25048413

The organising vision for telehealth and telecare: discourse analysis.

PubMed

Greenhalgh, Trisha; Procter, Rob; Wherton, Joe; Sugarhood, Paul; Shaw, Sara

2012-01-01

To (1) map how different stakeholders understand telehealth and telecare technologies and (2) explore the implications for development and implementation of telehealth and telecare services. Discourse analysis. 68 publications representing diverse perspectives (academic, policy, service, commercial and lay) on telehealth and telecare plus field notes from 10 knowledge-sharing events. Following a familiarisation phase (browsing and informal interviews), we studied a systematic sample of texts in detail. Through repeated close reading, we identified assumptions, metaphors, storylines, scenarios, practices and rhetorical positions. We added successive findings to an emerging picture of the whole. Telehealth and telecare technologies featured prominently in texts on chronic illness and ageing. There was no coherent organising vision. Rather, four conflicting discourses were evident and engaged only minimally with one another's arguments. Modernist discourse presented a futuristic utopian vision in which assistive technologies, implemented at scale, would enable society to meet its moral obligations to older people by creating a safe 'smart' home environment where help was always at hand, while generating efficiency savings. Humanist discourse emphasised the uniqueness and moral worth of the individual and tailoring to personal and family context; it considered that technologies were only sometimes fit for purpose and could create as well as solve problems. Political economy discourse envisaged a techno-economic complex of powerful vested interests driving commodification of healthcare and diversion of public funds into private business. Change management discourse recognised the complicatedness of large-scale technology programmes and emphasised good project management and organisational processes. Introduction of telehealth and telecare is hampered because different stakeholders hold different assumptions, values and world views, 'talk past' each other and compete for recognition and resources. If investments in these technologies are to bear fruit, more effective inter-stakeholder dialogue must occur to establish an organising vision that better accommodates competing discourses.

Mapping discourses using Q methodology in Matang Mangrove Forest, Malaysia.

PubMed

Hugé, Jean; Vande Velde, Katherine; Benitez-Capistros, Francisco; Japay, Jan Harold; Satyanarayana, Behara; Nazrin Ishak, Mohammad; Quispe-Zuniga, Melissa; Mohd Lokman, Bin Husain; Sulong, Ibrahim; Koedam, Nico; Dahdouh-Guebas, Farid

2016-12-01

The sustainable management of natural resources requires the consideration of multiple stakeholders' perspectives and knowledge claims, in order to inform complex and possibly contentious decision-making dilemmas. Hence, a better understanding of why people in particular contexts do manage natural resources in a particular way is needed. Focusing on mangroves, highly productive tropical intertidal forests, this study's first aim is to map the diversity of subjective viewpoints among a range of stakeholders on the management of Matang Mangrove Forest in peninsular Malaysia. Secondly, this study aims to feed the reflection on the possible consequences of the diversity of perspectives for the future management of mangroves in Malaysia and beyond. The use of the semi-quantitative Q methodology allowed us to identify three main discourses on mangrove management: i. the optimization discourse, stressing the need to improve the current overall satisfactory management regime; ii. the 'change for the better' discourse, which focuses on increasingly participatory management and on ecotourism; and iii. the conservative 'business as usual' discourse. The existence of common points of connection between the discourses and their respective supporters provides opportunities for modifications of mangrove management regimes. Acknowledging this diversity of viewpoints, reflecting how different stakeholders see and talk about mangrove management, highlights the need to develop pro-active and resilient natural resource management approaches. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Advancing the deliberative turn in natural resource management: an analysis of discourses on the use of local resources.

PubMed

Rodela, Romina

2012-04-15

The natural resource management literature stresses the need for public participation and community involvement in resource management and planning. Recently, some of this literature turned to the theory on deliberative democracy and demonstrated that a deliberative perspective on participation can help to challenge established practices and contribute with new ideas about how to conduct participation. The purpose of this paper is to consider the latest developments in deliberative democracy and outline the implications arising from these insights for a "deliberative turn" in resource management. A bottom-up protected area establishment, the Goričko Landscape Park, is examined. The empirical case is discussed from a discursive perspective, which relied on John Dryzek's approach to discourse analysis here used to explore the construction of discourses on the use of local natural resources. Two discourses are identified and the way these interfaced with the participatory park establishment process is considered. Findings indicate that advocates of the two discourses engaged differently with the participatory tools used and this had important implications for the park establishment. The case study suggests that, in contexts where participation has been recently introduced, knowledge of discourses on the use of local natural resources and of mobilization strategies actors may pursue could usefully assist in the design and implementation of participatory processes. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

[The national public discourse on priority setting in health care in German print media].

PubMed

Liesching, Florian; Meyer, Thorsten; Raspe, Heiner

2012-01-01

Germany's Central Ethics Committee of the Federal Chamber of Physicians (FCP) and other relevant national actors called for a public discourse on priority setting in health care. Politicians, members of a Federal Joint Committee and health insurance representatives, however, refused to promote or participate in the establishment of a public discussion. A change to that attitude only became apparent after former FCP President Hoppe's opening speech at the annual FCP assembly in Mainz in 2009. The present paper applies the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, implemented through Qualitative Content Analysis and elements of Grounded Theory, to examine the development of the national public discourse in leading German print media. It creates a matrix that represents the discourse development between May 2009 and May 2010 and reflects central actors, their "communicative phenomena" and their interactions. Additionally, the matrix has been extended to cover the period until December 2011. Hoppe's arguments for priority setting in health care are faced with a wide opposition assuming opposing prerequisites and thus demanding alternative remedies. The lack of interaction between the different parties prevents any development of the speakers' positions. Incorrect accounts, reductions and left-outs in the media representation add to this effect. Consequently, the public discussion on priority setting is far from being an evolving rational discourse. Instead, it constitutes an exchange of preformed opposing positions. Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier GmbH.

Influence of Participation, Facilitator Styles, and Metacognitive Reflection on Knowledge Building in Online University Courses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cacciamani, Stefano; Cesareni, Donatella; Martini, Francesca; Ferrini, Tiziana; Fujita, Nobuko

2012-01-01

Understanding how to foster knowledge building in online and blended learning environments is a key for computer-supported collaborative learning research. Knowledge building is a deeply constructivist pedagogy and kind of inquiry learning focused on theory building. A strong indicator of engagement in knowledge building activity is the…

Imperialism, race, and therapeutics: the legacy of medicalizing the "colonial body".

PubMed

Barton, Patricia

2008-01-01

The era of high colonialism in South Asia coincided with the period when eugenics came to dominate much of the scientific discourse in Europe and America. Such attitudes were naturally transplanted into the colonial world where medical researchers helped to establish a pathological "difference" between Europeans in India and the colonial "Other," thus creating a medical discourse dominated by racial segregated treatment regimes. With the growth of trans-national transfer of scientific knowledge, this colonial "research" began to underpin racially constructed medical practices wherever they occurred.

EBM

PubMed Central

Isaac, Carol A.; Franceschi, Amy

2008-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to explore new perspectives about difficulties academicians may have communicating with clinicians, obtaining subjects, and gaining compliance for their research. Sackett et al1 defined evidence-based medicine (EBM) as an integration of best research evidence, clinical expertise, and patient values. However, Guyatt et al2 places clinical observation and experience last in the evidence hierarchy with the randomized controlled trial held as the standard for clinical intervention. The hierarchical discourse of medical knowledge produces opposition rather than collaboration between researcher, clinician, and patient. Foucault gave new perspectives describing how power circulates through individuals within organizational discourse.3 Drawing on literature and experience, this paper describes how the hierarchical model of power in the research community obstructs new areas of knowledge, and how clinicians create resistance. Alleviating perceptions of dominance and creating connections produces cohesion within medical communities. PMID:19018888

'Inductions of labour': on becoming an experienced midwifery practitioner in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

PubMed

Surtees, Ruth

2008-03-01

This paper analyzes and explores varying discourses within the talk of new practitioner direct entry (DE) midwives in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, midwifery is theorized as a feminist profession undertaken in partnership with women. Direct entry midwifery education is similarly based on partnerships between educators and students in the form of liberatory pedagogies. The context for the analysis is a large ethnographic study undertaken with a variety of differently positioned midwives based mainly in one city in New Zealand. I interviewed and observed over 40 midwives in their different practice settings in 2003. Complex and contesting forms of knowledge production are analyzed in this paper drawing on methodological insights from Foucauldian discourse analysis. New practitioners engage in techniques of self-monitoring and surveillance as they move towards becoming established practitioners. New midwifery subjectivities and forms of knowledge production which contest authoritative forms of knowledge are produced. Midwives in New Zealand are seen to inhabit a complex and liminal space of midwifery praxis. Paradoxically, they are exhorted to remain the 'guardians of normal birth' in a time of increasing interventions into birth both locally and internationally. Paradoxes encountered by new midwifery practitioners in New Zealand as they struggle to maintain ideals of 'normal' birth may be paralleled by the constraints inadvertently produced through governing discourses of emancipatory or liberatory pedagogies. The relevance of this is also highly critical for midwifery and birth practices internationally.

Experience of suicidal thoughts: a discourse analytic study.

PubMed

Galasiński, Dariusz; Ziółkowska, Justyna

2013-01-01

In this paper we explore the relationship between current psychiatric thinking on suicide and service users' accounts of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. The data comes from recordings of psychiatric interviews collected in three psychiatric hospitals in Poland. Assuming a constructionist view of discourse we argue that the literature on suicide ignores and simplifies the experience of those who think about suicide and attempt to commit it, and constructs their experiences as a homogeneous group of 'thoughts' with only limited content. We also offer a preliminary insight into the complexity of 'suicide thoughts', as narrated by those reporting them. We demonstrate that they are marginalized and made relatively irrelevant in the accounts of attempted suicide. Additionally, we demonstrate that while women construct suicide attempts (whether actually attempted in the end or not) as at least potentially beyond their control, men's narratives show them in control of the attempt, as if choosing an available option. We conclude by exploring possibilities of further qualitative discourse analytic research which builds on the findings we present here.

A postmodern Pandora's box: anti-vaccination misinformation on the Internet.

PubMed

Kata, Anna

2010-02-17

The Internet plays a large role in disseminating anti-vaccination information. This paper builds upon previous research by analyzing the arguments proffered on anti-vaccination websites, determining the extent of misinformation present, and examining discourses used to support vaccine objections. Arguments around the themes of safety and effectiveness, alternative medicine, civil liberties, conspiracy theories, and morality were found on the majority of websites analyzed; misinformation was also prevalent. The most commonly proposed method of combating this misinformation is through better education, although this has proven ineffective. Education does not consider the discourses supporting vaccine rejection, such as those involving alternative explanatory models of health, interpretations of parental responsibility, and distrust of expertise. Anti-vaccination protestors make postmodern arguments that reject biomedical and scientific "facts" in favour of their own interpretations. Pro-vaccination advocates who focus on correcting misinformation reduce the controversy to merely an "educational" problem; rather, these postmodern discourses must be acknowledged in order to begin a dialogue. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Integrating the epistemic and ontological aspects of content knowledge in science teaching and learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Papadouris, Nicos; Constantinou, Constantinos P.

2017-04-01

Promoting facility with content knowledge is one of the most important objectives of science teaching. Conventionally, the focus for this objective is placed on the substantive side of content knowledge (e.g. science concepts/laws), whereas its epistemic or ontological aspects (e.g. why do we construct concepts?) rarely receive explicit attention. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument for the value of elevating the attention paid to the epistemic/ontological aspects of content knowledge and integrating them with its substantive side. Our argument is structured in two parts. The first unpacks the epistemic/ontological aspects of content knowledge and their role in science. For this, we focus on two specific aspects (i.e. ontological status and epistemic value of science concepts), which we elaborate in the context of two particular content domains, namely magnetism and energy. The second part of the argument highlights the potential of discourse on epistemic/ontological aspects to facilitate learning in science. We delineate how such discourse could (a) promote coherent conceptual understanding, (b) foster a productive epistemological stance towards science learning, and (c) enhance students' appreciation of ideas associated with the nature of science. The article concludes with a discussion of ensuing implications for science education.

The Influence of Perceived Information Overload on Student Participation and Knowledge Construction in Computer-Mediated Communication

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Chun-Ying; Pedersen, Susan; Murphy, Karen L.

2012-01-01

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been used widely to engage learners in academic discourse for knowledge construction. Due to the features of the task environment, one of the main problems caused by the medium is information overload (IO). Yet the literature is unclear about the impact of IO on student learning. This study therefore…

Effects of Discussion Constraints, Discourse Maps, and Interactive Intercultural Elaboration in Online Discussions on Students' Knowledge Construction, Critical Thinking, and Intercultural Sensitivity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nguyen, Hien Thu

2009-01-01

Research shows both benefits and challenges of online discussion as a collaborative learning activity. Online discussion is especially challenging for novice college students who have limited metacognitive skills as well as limited knowledge of the subject domain. With limited metacognitive skills, it can be challenging for novice students to…

Reading for Meaning: The Foundational Knowledge Every Teacher of Science Should Have

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Patterson, Alexis; Roman, Diego; Friend, Michelle; Osborne, Jonathan; Donovan, Brian

2018-01-01

Reading is fundamental to science and not an adjunct to its practice. In other words, understanding the meaning of the various forms of written discourse employed in the creation, discussion, and communication of scientific knowledge is inherent to how science works. The language used in science, however, sets up a barrier, that in order to be…

The Marginalisation of Social Justice as a Form of Knowledge in Teacher Education in England

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bagley, Carl; Beach, Dennis

2015-01-01

This paper utilises the analytical concepts developed in the work of Basil Bernstein to reflect on the ways in which discourses such as social justice are especially vulnerable in teacher education in England. In particular, under new-managerial regimes the forms of knowledge which are emphasised and valued focus on the instrumental and…

Provision and Preservation of Knowledge: A Department of Educational and Psychological Research as Laboratory for Analyzing Scientific Discourse.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bierschenk, Bernhard

Two kinds of perspectives governing the provision and preservation of knowledge, a universal and an ecological perspective, are discussed in this paper. In the first case, scientific observations are represented through a semantic interpretation of facts. This is illustrated with a series of experiments on semantic feature perception in the recall…

Examining the Integration of Talk and Writing for Student Knowledge Construction through Argumentation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Ying-Chih

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine students' understanding of argumentation when talk and writing were provided as learning tools, as well as to explore how talk and writing can best support students' construction of scientific knowledge. Most current studies have examined discourse patterns over a short interval of only a few class periods…

The discourse of causal explanations in school science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Slater, Tammy Jayne Anne

Researchers and educators working from a systemic functional linguistic perspective have provided a body of work on science discourse which offers an excellent starting point for examining the linguistic aspects of the development of causal discourse in school science, discourse which Derewianka (1995) claimed is critical to success in secondary school. No work has yet described the development of causal language by identifying the linguistic features present in oral discourse or by comparing the causal discourse of native and non-native (ESL) speakers of English. The current research responds to this gap by examining the oral discourse collected from ESL and non-ESL students at the primary and high school grades. Specifically, it asks the following questions: (1) How do the teachers and students in these four contexts develop causal explanations and their relevant taxonomies through classroom interactions? (2) What are the causal discourse features being used by the students in these four contexts to construct oral causal explanations? The findings of the social practice analysis showed that the teachers in the four contexts differed in their approaches to teaching, with the primary school mainstream teacher focusing largely on the hands-on practice , the primary school ESL teacher moving from practice to theory, the high school mainstream teacher moving from theory to practice, and the high school ESL teacher relying primarily on theory. The findings from the quantitative, small corpus approach suggest that the developmental path of cause which has been identified in the writing of experts shows up not only in written texts but also in the oral texts which learners construct. Moreover, this move appears when the discourse of high school ESL and non-ESL students is compared, suggesting a developmental progression in the acquisition of these features by these students. The findings also reveal that the knowledge constructed, as shown by the concept maps created from the discourse, follows a developmental path similar to the linguistic causal path, from the concrete, hands-on, observable items to more abstract, theoretical concepts. This study is the first systemic functional comparison of the oral discourse of primary and secondary learners as well as the first to compare ESL and non-ESL speakers in this way, and as such it helps map general trends in causal discourse development. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Citizenship Education as an Expression of Democratization and Nation-Building Processes in Russia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Piattoeva, Nelli

2005-01-01

Over the past several decades, interest in and attention to the concept of citizenship and citizenship education has increased throughout Europe. An insightful observer might distinguish two interlinked discourses in the arguments around citizenship. One, that the political citizenship mostly related to the functioning of representative democracy…

Theory Building through Praxis Discourse: A Theory- and Practice-Informed Model of Transformative Participatory Evaluation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harnar, Michael A.

2012-01-01

Stakeholder participation in evaluation, where the evaluator engages stakeholders in the process, is prevalent in evaluation practice and is an important focus of evaluation research. Cousins and Whitmore proposed a bifurcation of participatory evaluation into the two streams of transformative participatory and practical participatory evaluation…

Accomplished Teaching: Using Video Recorded Micro-Teaching Discourse to Build Candidate Teaching Competencies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shaw, Denise

2017-01-01

Objectives of this articles are to present the findings of video recorded communication between teacher candidates and peers during simulated micro-teaching. The micro-teaching activity in its entirety combines conventional face-to-face interaction, video micro-teaching, peer and instructor feedback, alongside self-reflection to undergird the…

Trust, Accountability, Autonomy: Building a Teacher-Driven Professional Growth Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jebson, Hugh; DiNota, Carlo

2011-01-01

Faculty evaluation--arguably no other topic in independent education evokes as much passionate discourse--mostly negative, or at least freighted with anxiety. But, in the authors' experience, it does not have to be this way. At their school, Berkeley Preparatory School (Florida), they have recently developed a teacher evaluation model that is…

Mind Machines, Myth, Metaphor, and Scientific Imagination.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jansen, Sue Curry

This paper builds upon the poetics of scientific discourse which provide extraordinary insights into the workings of the scientific imagination and into the ways it is both colonized and liberated by the medium of social and ideological transfer--metaphor. The paper examines what constructivism is teaching us about the role metaphor plays in…

Teaching English Learners: Building on Cultural and Linguistic Strengths

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Souto-Manning, Mariana

2010-01-01

Souto-Manning examines the role of classroom discourse analysis in helping to change a teacher's perceptions of English Language Learners from students who need "fixing" to experts from whom teachers may learn. She finds that blurring the lines between teacher/student and subject/object positions opens up pedagogical third spaces that are often…

Who Is for Community Participation? Who Is Community Participation for? Exploring the Well-Being Potential for Involvement in Regeneration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Evans, Melvyn

2008-01-01

Commencing from the identification of an emerging discourse in government circles expounding the benefits of community participation, this article examines critically the claims that community participation enhances involvement in decision making, builds social capital, reduces social exclusion, improves public service delivery and enhances local…

A Methodological Framework for Studying Policy-Oriented Teacher Inquiry in Qualitative Research Contexts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koro-Ljungberg, Mirka

2014-01-01

System-based and collaborative teacher inquiry has unexplored potential that can impact educational policy in numerous ways. This impact can be increased when teacher inquiry builds momentum from classrooms and teaching practices and simultaneously addresses district, state, and national discourses and networks. In this conceptual paper, I…

Students' Experience of University Space: An Exploratory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cox, Andrew M.

2011-01-01

The last decade has seen a wave of new building across British universities, so that it would appear that despite the virtualization discourses around higher education, space still matters in learning. Yet studies of student experience of the physical space of the university are rather lacking. This paper explores the response of one group of…

Morphophonological Practice: An Ethnographic Study of Grammar and Discourse in Four American English Stuttering Speech Communities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dumas, Nathaniel William

2010-01-01

Using the Practice Theory Approach to Language, this dissertation examines how social actors use communicative practices within activities to constitute a communicative context that I call the American English Stuttering Speech Community (AESSC). Building on previous linguistic research on stuttering and sociological research on collectives of…

Gendered Constructions of Citizenship: Young Kenyans' Negotiations of Rights Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arnot, Madeleine; Chege, Fatuma N.; Wawire, Violet

2012-01-01

This paper contributes to the study of citizenship by interrogating how young people in Nairobi (Chege and Arnot 2012) perceive their rights of citizenship. It builds on previous analyses of the connections between gender, education and poverty's poor urban settlements by focusing on the political dimensions of the young people's lives. The…

Building New Networks from the Old: Women's Experiences with Electronic Communications.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Takayoshi, Pamela

1994-01-01

Presents research to support the argument that patterns of interaction deeply entrenched within a patriarchal system cannot be undermined simply by offering access to a new medium such as computer-mediated communication. Claims that, in moving away from traditional discourse forms that oppress and marginalize women, scholars run the risk of those…

Civility in Politics and Education. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mower, Deborah, Ed.; Robison, Wade L., Ed.

2011-01-01

This book examines the concept of civility and the conditions of civil disagreement in politics and education. Although many assume that civility is merely polite behavior, it functions to aid rational discourse. Building on this basic assumption, the book offers multiple accounts of civility and its contribution to citizenship, deliberative…

Assertion, Regulation and Consent: Gay Students, Straight Flatmates, and the (Hetero)Sexualisation of University Accommodation Space

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taulke-Johnson, Richard

2010-01-01

Building upon conceptualisations of the sexualisation of space, this paper interrogates the ways in which heterosexual discourses are produced, enforced, legitimised and maintained as dominant within student accommodation. Analysis is derived from interviews with 17 gay male undergraduates attending a UK institution. I detail the micro-level…

Constructing Reading: Building Conceptions of Literacy in a Volunteer Read-Aloud Program

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dawes, Erika Thulin

2007-01-01

This study describes the interactions of three adult-child reading partnerships in a program that matches corporate volunteers with "at risk" students for weekly hour-long story reading sessions. Using discourse analysis within a sociocultural framework, the researcher identified variation in the way these partners were constructing the act and…

Strategies to Engage Students' Production of Electron Configurations in a Prototypical Chemistry Classroom Community

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grueber, David J.

2012-01-01

This study investigated associations between teacher-student interaction and students' persistence to complete written electron configurations in a high school chemistry classroom. Analyses of the interactions were guided with an Expectancy-Value framework to identify the discourse strategies used by the teacher to build engagement in a classroom…

Mixed Methods in Indigenous Research: Building Relationships for Sustainable Intervention Outcomes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chilisa, Bagele; Tsheko, Gaelebale N.

2014-01-01

Indigenous communities raise concerns that they are overresearched and tired of research always asking the same questions and reproducing the same answers, thus pressuring researchers to open the discourse on mixed methods research so as to enable new debates and approaches to emerge. A postcolonial indigenous paradigm provides a theoretical…

Building Intercultural Empathy through Writing: Reflections on Teaching Alternatives to Argumentation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peirce, Karen P.

2007-01-01

Writing assignments that focus on nonargumentative discourse can take many forms. Such assignments can prompt students to produce individually constructed writing, or they can be more collaborative in nature. They can focus on traditional formats, following MLA citation guidelines, using Times New Roman 12-point font, maintaining one-inch margins,…

Making Curriculum from Scratch: "Testimonio" in an Urban Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cruz, Cindy

2012-01-01

"Testimonio," as a genre of the dispossessed, the migrant, and the queer, is a response to larger discourses of nation-building and has the potential to undermine the larger narratives that often erase and make invisible the expendable and often disposable labor and experiences of immigrants, the working class, African Americans, and…

Telecollaboration in the Secondary Language Classroom: Case Study of Adolescent Interaction and Pedagogical Integration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ware, Paige; Kessler, Greg

2016-01-01

This study builds on research examining the in-school technology practices of adolescent language learners by exploring the patterns of classroom literacy practices that emerge when a telecollaborative project is introduced into a conventional secondary language classroom. We draw on the conceptual frameworks and discourse analytical tools…

Music Education and Human Flourishing: A Meditation on Democratic Origins

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Allsup, Randall Everett

2012-01-01

This philosophical essay is a meditation on the multiple and contested meanings of the concept of democracy with the aim of redirecting dominant discourses in music education practices and building new capacities for democracy's practical use in music classrooms. Inspired by philosopher John Dewey's travels to China, and his influence on major…

The Mental Timeline in Discourse Organization and Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Choonkyu

2012-01-01

Early language research has revealed important insights into the building blocks of language, such as morphosyntactic features and rules and truth-conditions of sentences. Once we situate language in real-life use, however, a wide range of factors come into play. Language interacts not only with the surrounding linguistic context but also with the…

Conceptualising Education Quality in Zambia: A Comparative Analysis across the Local, National and Global Discourses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Jeongmin; Zuilkowski, Stephanie Simmons

2017-01-01

Building on the Education for All movement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development re-emphasises quality education as a discrete goal. Contextualising the discussion surrounding this goal in Zambia, this study examines how education quality is conceptualised by educational stakeholders at local, national, and global levels. Triangulating…

Where is nursing in academic nursing? Disciplinary discourses, identities and clinical practice: a critical perspective from Ireland.

PubMed

McNamara, Martin S

2010-03-01

To elicit the languages of legitimation of senior nursing academics and national leaders and to investigate the extent to which distinctive disciplinary identities and discourses are embedded in them. Over six years after Irish nursing education became established in the higher education sector, an investigation into the disciplinary maturity of the field is overdue. A constructivist-structuralist research design was used; data were elicited by means of naturalistic professional conversations and subjected to critical discourse analytic methods to interrogate their structuring and structured character. The focus here is on the latter. The languages of legitimation of Irish nursing's key disciplinary custodians were elicited and subjected to a critical discourse analysis informed by a theoretical framework that helps to explicate the bases of claims to academic legitimacy embedded in these languages. Clinical practice figures as a problematic component of Irish nursing's academic identity and disciplinary discourse. Yet a focus on clinical practice is seen as central to the autonomy, integrity and distinctiveness of nursing as an academic discipline as well as to the legitimacy and credibility of those who claim to profess it. The overall consensus on the state of academic nursing in Ireland is that of a field characterised by low autonomy, high density, weak specialisation and disciplinary immaturity. The analysis highlights the need for academic nursing to reconfigure its relationships with clinical nursing, increase its intellectual autonomy, enhance its internal coherence, strengthen the epistemic power of its knowledge base and critically evaluate the ways the past should inform current and future practices and identities. The production and dissemination of knowledge for nursing policy and practice provides the foundation for nursing education. If clinical practice is not central to the educational and research activities of nurse academics, the relevance of academic nursing to its professional base and its status and future trajectory as a distinct presence in academia, will continue to be questioned.

Trajectories of collaborative scientific conceptual change: Middle school students learning about ecosystems in a CSCL environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Lei

The dissertation aims to achieve two goals. First, it attempts to establish a new theoretical framework---the collaborative scientific conceptual change model, which explicitly attends to social factor and epistemic practices of science, to understand conceptual change. Second, it report the findings of a classroom study to investigate how to apply this theoretical framework to examine the trajectories of collaborative scientific conceptual change in a CSCL environment and provide pedagogical implications. Two simulations were designed to help students make connections between the macroscopic substances and the aperceptual microscopic entities and underlying processes. The reported study was focused on analyzing the aggregated data from all participants and the video and audio data from twenty focal groups' collaborative activities and the process of their conceptual development in two classroom settings. Mixed quantitative and qualitative analyses were applied to analyze the video/audio data. The results found that, overall participants showed significant improvements from pretest to posttest on system understanding. Group and teacher effect as well as group variability were detected in both students' posttest performance and their collaborative activities, and variability emerged in group interaction. Multiple data analyses found that attributes of collaborative discourse and epistemic practices made a difference in student learning. Generating warranted claims in discourse as well as the predicting, coordinating theory-evidence, and modifying knowledge in epistemic practices had an impact on student's conceptual understanding. However, modifying knowledge was found negatively related to students' learning effect. The case studies show how groups differed in using the computer tools as a medium to conduct collaborative discourse and epistemic practices. Only with certain combination of discourse features and epistemic practices can the group interaction lead to successful convergent understanding. The results of the study imply that the collaborative scientific conceptual change model is an effective framework to study conceptual change and the simulation environment may mediate the development of successful collaborative interactions (including collaborative discourse and epistemic practices) that lead to collaborative scientific conceptual change.

Students Assessing Their Own Collaborative Knowledge Building

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Eddy Y. C.; Chan, Carol K. K.; van Aalst, Jan

2006-01-01

We describe the design of a knowledge-building environment and examine the role of knowledge-building portfolios in characterizing and scaffolding collaborative inquiry. Our goal is to examine collaborative knowledge building in the context of exploring the alignment of learning, collaboration, and assessment in computer forums. The key design…

Instantiating informatics in nursing practice for integrated patient centred holistic models of care: a discussion paper.

PubMed

Hussey, Pamela A; Kennedy, Margaret Ann

2016-05-01

A discussion on how informatics knowledge and competencies can enable nursing to instantiate transition to integrated models of care. Costs of traditional models of care are no longer sustainable consequent to the spiralling incidence and costs of chronic illness. The international community looks towards technology-enabled solutions to support a shift towards integrated patient-centred models of care. Discussion paper. A search of the literature was performed dating from 2000-2015 and a purposeful data sample based on relevance to building the discussion was included. The holistic perspective of nursing knowledge can support and advance integrated healthcare models. Informatics skills are key for the profession to play a leadership role in design, implementation and operation of next generation health care. However, evidence suggests that nursing engagement with informatics strategic development for healthcare provision is currently variable. A statistically significant need exists to progress health care towards integrated models of care. Strategic and tactical plans that are robustly pragmatic with nursing insights and expertise are an essential component to achieve effective healthcare provision. To avoid exclusion in the discourse dominated by management and technology experts, nursing leaders must develop and actively promote the advancement of nursing informatics skills. For knowledge in nursing practice to flourish in contemporary health care, nurse leaders will need to incorporate informatics for optimal translation and interpretation. Defined nursing leadership roles informed by informatics are essential to generate concrete solutions sustaining nursing practice in integrated care models. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Responses to different types of inquiry prompts: college students' discourse, performance, and perceptions of group work in an engineering class

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Balgopal, Meena M.; Casper, Anne Marie A.; Atadero, Rebecca A.; Rambo-Hernandez, Karen E.

2017-08-01

Working in small groups to solve problems is an instructional strategy that allows university students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines the opportunity to practice interpersonal and professional skills while gaining and applying discipline-specific content knowledge. Previous research indicates that not all group work prompts result in the same experiences for students. In this study we posed two types of prompts (guided and open) to undergraduate engineering students in a statics course as they participated in group work projects. We measured student discourse, student performance, and perceptions of group work. We found that guided prompts were associated with higher-level discourse and higher performance (project scores) than open prompts. Students engaged in guided prompts were more likely to discuss distribution of labour and design/calculation details of their projects than when students responded to open prompts. We posit that guided prompts, which more clearly articulate expectations of students, help students determine how to divide tasks amongst themselves and, subsequently, jump to higher levels of discourse.

Reference Production in Young Speakers with and without Autism: Effects of Discourse Status and Processing Constraints

PubMed Central

Arnold, Jennifer E.; Bennetto, Loisa; Diehl, Joshua J.

2008-01-01

We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made during a narrative by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to depend on two areas of cognitive functioning: a) judging the attention and knowledge of one’s interlocutor, and b) the use of memory and attention mechanisms to represent the discourse situation. We predicted possible group differences, since autism is often associated with deficits in a) mentalizing and b) memory and attention, as well as a more general tendency to have difficulty with the pragmatic aspects of language use. Results revealed that some of the participants with autism were significantly less likely to produce pronouns or zeros in some discourse contexts. However, the difference was only one of degree. Overall, all participants in our analysis exhibited fine-grained sensitivity to the discourse context. Furthermore, referential choices for all participants were modulated by factors related to the cognitive effort of language production. PMID:19111285

The psycholinguistics of developing text construction.

PubMed

Berman, Ruth A

2008-11-01

This paper outlines functionally motivated quantifiable criteria for characterizing different facets of discourse--global-level principles, categories of referential content, clause-linking complex syntax, local linguistic expression and overall discourse stance--in relation to the variables of development, genre and modality. Concern is with later, school-age language development, in the conviction that the long developmental route of language acquisition can profitably be examined in the context of extended discourse. Findings are reviewed from a cross-linguistic project that elicited narrative and expository texts in both speech and writing at four age groups: (9-10 years, 12-13, 16-17 and adults). Clear developmental patterns emerge from middle childhood to adulthood, with significant shifts in adolescence; global-level text organization is mastered earlier in narratives than in expository essays, but the latter promote more advanced use of local-level lexicon and syntax; and spoken texts are more spread out than their denser written counterparts in clause-linkage, referential content and lexical usage. These and other findings are discussed in terms of the growth and reorganization of knowledge about types of discourse and text-embedded language use.

Mythical thinking, scientific discourses and research dissemination.

PubMed

Hroar Klempe, Sven

2011-06-01

This article focuses on some principles for understanding. By taking Anna Mikulak's article "Mismatches between 'scientific' and 'non-scientific' ways of knowing and their contributions to public understanding of science" (IPBS 2011) as a point of departure, the idea of demarcation criteria for scientific and non-scientific discourses is addressed. Yet this is juxtaposed with mythical thinking, which is supposed to be the most salient trait of non-scientific discourses. The author demonstrates how the most widespread demarcation criterion, the criterion of verification, is self-contradictory, not only when it comes to logic, but also in the achievement of isolating natural sciences from other forms of knowledge. According to Aristotle induction is a rhetorical device and as far as scientific statements are based on inductive inferences, they are relying on humanities, which rhetoric is a part of. Yet induction also has an empirical component by being based on sense-impressions, which is not a part of the rhetoric, but the psychology. Also the myths are understood in a rhetorical (Lévi-Strauss) and a psychological (Cassirer) perspective. Thus it is argued that both scientific and non-scientific discourses can be mythical.

"Correcting an Erring Wife Is Normal": Moral Discourses of Spousal Violence in Ghana.

PubMed

Adjei, Stephen Baffour

2018-06-01

This study draws insights from discursive psychology to explore moral discourses of spousal violence in Ghana. In particular, it investigates how sociocultural norms and practices are invoked in talk of perpetrators and victims as moral warrants for husband-to-wife abuse in Ghana. Semi-structured focus group and personal interviews were conducted with a total of 40 participants: 16 victims, 16 perpetrators, and eight key informants from rural and urban Ghana. Participants' discursive accounts suggest that husbands have implicit moral right and obligation to punish their wives for disobedience and other infractions against male authority in marriage. Both perpetrators and victims build their talk around familiar normative discourses and practices that provide tacit support for spousal violence in Ghana. While perpetrators mobilize culturally resonant and normative repertoires to justify abuse, blame their victims, and manage their moral accountability; victims position husband-to-wife abuse as normal, legitimate, disciplinary, and corrective. These moral discourses of spousal violence apparently serve to relieve perpetrators of moral agency; prime battered women to accept abuse; and devastate their agency to leave abusive marital relationships. The findings contribute to our understanding of how cultural and social norms of spousal violence are morally constituted, reproduced, and sustained in talk of perpetrators, victims, and other key members of society.

Foucault on targets.

PubMed

Lynch, John

2004-01-01

This paper seeks to gain an insight into the behavior of a large NHS trust, in its attempt to meet a 90 percent patient access target, in a week long national audit in March 2003. Why did individuals act in dramatically different ways to their norm over this period. The work of Michel Foucault is used to explore these issues. The discourses of power, knowledge, discipline and governmentality are identified as key foucaudian themes that offer an alternative interpretation of how individuals behave in their place of work. The importance of the historical context of discourse within the NHS cannot be underestimated in shaping the behavior of individuals and groups today. Power and knowledge permeate NHS organizations through disciplinary practices and dressage. Governmentality seeks to maintain the status quo through disciplinary processes such as national healthcare targets. The natural response of NHS organizations is therefore, to seek order and conformity rather than disorder and conflict.

Quality care as ethical care: a poststructural analysis of palliative and supportive district nursing care.

PubMed

Nagington, Maurice; Walshe, Catherine; Luker, Karen A

2016-03-01

Quality of care is a prominent discourse in modern health-care and has previously been conceptualised in terms of ethics. In addition, the role of knowledge has been suggested as being particularly influential with regard to the nurse-patient-carer relationship. However, to date, no analyses have examined how knowledge (as an ethical concept) impinges on quality of care. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 patients with palliative and supportive care needs receiving district nursing care and thirteen of their lay carers. Poststructural discourse analysis techniques were utilised to take an ethical perspective on the current way in which quality of care is assessed and produced in health-care. It is argued that if quality of care is to be achieved, patients and carers need to be able to redistribute and redevelop the knowledge of their services in a collaborative way that goes beyond the current ways of working. Theoretical works and extant research are then used to produce tentative suggestions about how this may be achieved. © 2015 The Authors Nursing Inquiry Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Developing a workable teacher identity: Building and negotiating identity within a professional network

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rostock, Roseanne

The challenge of attracting and retaining the next generation of teachers who are skilled and committed to meeting the growing demands of the profession is of increasing concern to researchers and policy makers, particularly since 45--50% of beginning teachers leave the profession within five years (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003). Reasons for such attrition include compensation, status and working conditions; however, there is growing evidence that a critical factor in new teacher retention hinges on teachers' ability to accomplish the difficult task of forming a workable professional identity in the midst of competing discourses about teaching (Alsup, 2006; Britzman, 2003). There is little research on professional identity development among those beginning teachers at highest risk for attrition (secondary math and science teachers, and those with strong academic backgrounds). This study explores the professional identity development of early-career math and science teachers who are part of the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation's (KSTF) teaching fellowship program, an external support network that aims to address many of the issues leading to high attrition among this particular population of teachers. Using narrative research methods, I examine three case studies of beginning teachers, exploring how they construct professional identity in relation to various discourse communities and negotiate tensions across multiple discourses. The cases identify both dominant discourses and counter-discourses that the teachers draw upon for important identity development resources. They also demonstrate that the way a teacher manages tensions across competing discourses is important to how well one can negotiate a workable professional identity. In particular, they emphasize the importance of engaging in borderland discourses (Gee, 1996) as a way of taking agency in one's own identity development as well as in transforming one's discourse communities. These cases shed light on how these beginning teachers work to negotiate a workable professional identity that may sustain them in a teaching career. In addition, they help us understand how a support network like KSTF can serve as a resource for helping new teachers construct professional identities, therefore addressing some of the issues that may lead to attrition among this population of new teachers.

Analyzing Visitors' Discourse, Attitudes, Perceptions, and Knowledge Acquisition in an Art Museum Tour after Using a 3D Virtual Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

D'Alba, Adriana

2012-01-01

The main purpose of this mixed methods research was to explore and analyze visitors' overall experience while they attended a museum exhibition, and examine how this experience was affected by previously using a virtual 3dimensional representation of the museum itself. The research measured knowledge acquisition in a virtual museum, and compared…

Using Deliberation in the Classroom: A Teaching Pedagogy to Enhance Student Knowledge, Opinion Formation, and Civic Engagement

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Latimer, Christopher; Hempson, Karen M.

2012-01-01

This article presents the findings of a study concerning the use of deliberation as a tool for classroom instruction. Utilizing deliberative polling as the basis for this project, we wanted to determine whether this form of discourse will have an impact on student knowledge, opinions about a policy issue, and levels of engagement. The use of pre-…

The Alchemy of Learning and Work: Negotiating Learner Knowledge in a Global Society

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dabic, Snezana

2008-01-01

This article explores issues of literacy and identity of skilled migrants in an educational context in Australia as a learning society. First, it concentrates on forms of knowledge imposed on the learner and looks at how new discourses shape the self. Next, it tests the validity of the four pillars of education in the life of the learner. The…

Information Warfare: Evaluation of Operator Information Processing Models

DTIC Science & Technology

1997-10-01

that people can describe or report, including both episodic and semantic information. Declarative memory contains a network of knowledge represented...second dimension corresponds roughly to the distinction between episodic and semantic memory that is commonly made in cognitive psychology. Episodic ...3 is long-term memory for the discourse, a subset of episodic memory . Partition 4 is long-term semantic memory , or the knowledge-base. According to

Mind the Gap: Privileging Epistemic Access to Knowledge in the Transition from Leaving Certificate Music to Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, Gwen

2014-01-01

In recent years, music at Leaving Certificate level has come under increasing focus in media and higher education discourse as an easy option. In particular, scant attention has been paid to the musical knowledge and skills needed in the transition to higher music education within the Irish context. This paper addresses the perceived gap in…

Knowledge Production at Industrial Research Institutes: Institutional Logics and Struggles for Relevance in the Swedish Institute for Surface Chemistry, 1980-2005

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bruno, Karl; Larsen, Katarina; van Leeuwen, Thed N.

2017-01-01

This article examines dynamics of knowledge production and discourses of basic-applied science and relevance at the Swedish Institute for Surface Chemistry, a semi-public industrially oriented research institute, from 1980 to 2005. We employ a three-pronged method, consisting of (1) an analysis of how the institute articulated its research…

An investigation of environmental and sustainability discourses associated with the substantive purposes of environmental assessment

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Rozema, Jaap G., E-mail: j.rozema@uea.ac.uk; Bond, Alan J., E-mail: alan.bond@uea.ac.uk; Cashmore, Matthew, E-mail: cashmore@plan.aau.dk

2012-02-15

This paper investigates the discursive construction of the substantive purposes of environmental assessment (EA). It addresses these purposes by exploring the complex and often multifaceted linkages between political factors and plural views of democracy, public participation, and the role of science that are embedded in environmental and sustainability discourses. The interaction between policy-making and public actors leads to the formulation of divergent and potentially competing rationales for public participation, and for social appraisal more generally. Participatory approaches have also given impetus to the development of several interpretations on the role of science in assessment procedures. Science is important in mediatingmore » public participation and the two are therefore reciprocally linked. This leads to discourses that become manifest in the construction of substantive purposes. Discourse analysis in EA is a relevant method for examining trends and patterns in sustainable development. It is argued that public participation is an important, if not decisive, variable in the articulation and civil legitimacy of certain purposes. A general proposition that results from this paper is that EA, although typically presented as an objective scientific tool, is an intrinsically normative process. Enhanced knowledge on the construction, and reconstruction over time, of substantive purposes is required if environmental and sustainability discourses are to be used and understood as meaningful analytical instruments to assess the socio-political implications of EA. - Highlights: Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Substantive purposes related to environmental assessment may be best analyzed through discourse analysis. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Environmental and sustainability discourses are contingent on the level of participatory democracy and civic science. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Public participation is a decisive variable in the construction of the substantive purpose of environmental assessment.« less

Questioning 'participation': a critical appraisal of its conceptualization in a Flemish participatory technology assessment.

PubMed

van Oudheusden, Michiel

2011-12-01

This article draws attention to struggles inherent in discourse about the meaning of participation in a Flemish participatory technology assessment (pTA) on nanotechnologies. It explores how, at the project's outset, key actors (e.g., nanotechnologists and pTA researchers) frame elements of the process like 'the public' and draw on interpretive repertoires to fit their perspective. The examples call into question normative commitments to cooperation, consensus building, and common action that conventionally guide pTA approaches. It is argued that pTA itself must reflect an awareness of competing interests and perspectives inherent in the discourse associated with the meaning of 'participation' if it is to incite action beyond vested interests and ensure genuine mutual learning.

Oral health education for schoolchildren: a qualitative study of dental care professionals' view of knowledge and learning.

PubMed

Hedman, E; Ringberg, K; Gabre, P

2009-08-01

The aim of the study was to describe and interpret dental professionals' view of knowledge, learning, health promotion and their expectations of and attitudes to the response from schoolchildren. A qualitative study design was used with discourse method. Nine dental hygienists and dental nurses, who have practised oral health education among schoolchildren, described their work in tape-recorded, semi-structured interviews. The discourse method stresses the variation and distinctions in the statements, and to understand the content of the text, its contextual dependence must be taken into account. The preventive discourse could be found in all interviews, but it was concentrated on disease prevention and less on maintaining health. The biomedical view of knowledge dominated. Children's and parent's own responsibility for healthy habits was stressed, but no reflection of ethical considerations associated with influencing people's life-style was found. The text revealed discrepancy between the informants, and even within the same individual, showing ambivalence towards oral health education. Some individuals suggested lessons guided by communication with the children, while others wanted to maintain methods based on information about oral diseases to a greater extent. Different perspectives were found. The expression 'oral health promotion' was frequently used and supported by all the interviewed informants, but the statements did not reveal the informant's definition of the concept. Several educators focused on signs of diseases and less on the individual's view of their own health. In the future, oral health education programme needs to focus on quality of life, behavioural variables and indicators of empowerment rather than just disease outcomes.

The Choreography of Accountability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Webb, P. Taylor

2006-01-01

The prevailing performance discourse in education claims school improvements can be achieved through transparent accountability procedures. The article identifies how teachers generate performances of their work in order to satisfy accountability demands. By identifying sources of teachers' knowledge that produce choreographed performances, I…

Narrative Strategies: A Case Study of Developing Storytelling Skills by a Learner of Spanish.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liskin-Gasparro, Judith E.

1996-01-01

Analyzes the narrative, descriptive, and evaluative structures of one person's two stories, drawn from oral proficiency interviews, about the same event told at the intermediate high and advanced levels on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) scale. The discourse analysis revealed that the second story builds upon the…

Verbal Interaction and Development in Families with Adolescents. Advances in Applied Developmental Psychology, Volume 15.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hofer, Manfred, Ed.; Youniss, James, Ed.; Noack, Peter, Ed.

Individuation theory is rooted in the belief that it is a major developmental task for adolescents to establish their identity while simultaneously maintaining a relationship with their parents. Building on the individuation paradigm, the researchers contributing to this edited volume zeroed in on discourse as a critical mechanism through which…

Building Fictional Ethos: Analysing the Rhetorical Strategies of Persona Design for Online Role Play

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doerr-Stevens, Candance

2011-01-01

This article presents a qualitative case study that uses discourse and social semiotic analysis methods in order to examine the rhetorical construction of fictional personas within an online role play used for learning in the college classroom. Of special focus are the differing patterns of semiotic resource use (for example, language and…

Making It Happen: How Career Academies Can Build College and Career Exploration Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Visher, Mary G.; Altuna, Jacklyn N.; Safran, Stephanie

2013-01-01

The phrase "preparing students for college and career" has become so ubiquitous that it has become almost a mantra in educators' discourse in recent years. Whether mentioned in the Common Core State Standards, in the mission statements of high schools, or in political campaigns, improving the college and career readiness of young people…

Challenging the Dichotomy between "Urban" and "Suburban" in Educational Discourse and Policy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Posey-Maddox, Linn

2016-01-01

This article builds a case for nuanced conceptualizations of "urban" and "-suburban" educational contexts and issues. The author analyzes data across two studies--one of upper-middle-class White parents with children in Chicago public schools, and the other of Black low-income and working-class parents who moved from Chicago to…

Proceedings of the Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) (15th, Assisi, Italy, June 29-July 4, 1991), Volume 2.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Furinghetti, Fulvia, Ed.

Research reports from the annual conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education include: "A Comparison of Children's Learning in Two Interactive Computer Environments" (Edwards); "On Building a Self-Confidence in Mathematics" (Eisenberg); "Classroom Discourse and Mathematics…

How Socialization Happens on the Ground: Narrative Practices as Alternate Socializing Pathways in Taiwanese and European-American Families

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Peggy J.; Fung, Heidi; Lin, Shumin; Chen, Eva Chian-Hui; Boldt, Benjamin R.

2012-01-01

This monograph builds upon our cumulative efforts to investigate personal storytelling as a medium of socialization in two disparate cultural worlds. Drawing upon interdisciplinary fields of study that take a discourse-centered approach to socialization, we combined ethnography, longitudinal home observations, and microlevel analysis of everyday…

Belonging in the Academy: Building a "Casa Away from Casa" for Latino/a Undergraduate Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gonzales, Sandra M.; Brammer, Ethriam Cash; Sawilowsky, Shlomo

2015-01-01

This action research study, supported by a quantitative data analysis, presents a counternarrative to the deficit discourse regarding Latino/a First Time in Any College (FTIAC) departure during the first year of college. It argues that an intentional learning community model, that is culturally and linguistically responsive to Latino/a student…

Embodying Our Values in Our Teaching Practices: Building Open and Critical Discourse through Computer Mediated Communication

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geelan, David R.; Taylor, Peter C.

2004-01-01

Computer mediated communication--including web pages, email and web-based bulletin boards--was used to support the development of a cooperative learning community among students in a web-based distance education unit for practicing science and mathematics educators. The students lived in several Australian states and a number of Pacific Rim…

"We Value Your Food but Not Your Language": Education Systems and Nation-Building Processes in Flanders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clycq, Noel

2017-01-01

Education systems are crucial social and cultural apparatuses. They are designed to homogenize at least to a large extent the discourses and praxis of the citizens of a nation by channelling them as much as possible through a unified educational system. However, in ethnically and culturally diversified societies, these homogenizing social…

Moulding Interpersonal Relations through Conditional Clauses: Consensus-Building Strategies in Written Academic Discourse

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Warchal, Krystyna

2010-01-01

This paper focuses on the interpersonal potential of the conditional clause as a rhetorical device for establishing a dialogue between the author and the reader of an academic text in search for shared understanding and consensus. It presents a corpus-based analysis of functions conditional clauses play in linguistics research articles in an…

Towards a Dialogic Understanding of Children's Art-Making Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Hyunsu

2018-01-01

This article is intended to identify the complex process of children's art making by bringing new methodologies into the analysis of children's pictures. This article analyses the art-making process of a selected drawing by a five-year-old boy. The study builds on previous findings regarding children's verbal discourses during the art-making…

Arts practices in unreasonable doubt? Reflections on understandings of arts practices in healthcare contexts.

PubMed

Broderick, Sheelagh

2011-09-01

This article suggests that the discourse on arts and health encompass contemporary arts practices as an active and engaged analytical activity. Distinctions between arts therapy and arts practice are made to suggest that clinical evidence-based evaluation, while appropriate for arts therapy, is not appropriate for arts practice and in effect cast them in unreasonable doubt. Themes in current discourse on "arts" and "health" are broadly sketched to provide a context for discussion of arts practices. Approaches to knowledge validation in relation to each domain are discussed. These discourses are applied to the Irish healthcare context, offering a reading of three different art projects; it suggests a multiplicity of analyses beyond causal positive health gains. It is suggested that the social turn in medicine and the social turn in arts practices share some similar pre-occupations that warrant further attention.

The organising vision for telehealth and telecare: discourse analysis

PubMed Central

Procter, Rob; Wherton, Joe; Sugarhood, Paul; Shaw, Sara

2012-01-01

Objective To (1) map how different stakeholders understand telehealth and telecare technologies and (2) explore the implications for development and implementation of telehealth and telecare services. Design Discourse analysis. Sample 68 publications representing diverse perspectives (academic, policy, service, commercial and lay) on telehealth and telecare plus field notes from 10 knowledge-sharing events. Method Following a familiarisation phase (browsing and informal interviews), we studied a systematic sample of texts in detail. Through repeated close reading, we identified assumptions, metaphors, storylines, scenarios, practices and rhetorical positions. We added successive findings to an emerging picture of the whole. Main findings Telehealth and telecare technologies featured prominently in texts on chronic illness and ageing. There was no coherent organising vision. Rather, four conflicting discourses were evident and engaged only minimally with one another's arguments. Modernist discourse presented a futuristic utopian vision in which assistive technologies, implemented at scale, would enable society to meet its moral obligations to older people by creating a safe ‘smart’ home environment where help was always at hand, while generating efficiency savings. Humanist discourse emphasised the uniqueness and moral worth of the individual and tailoring to personal and family context; it considered that technologies were only sometimes fit for purpose and could create as well as solve problems. Political economy discourse envisaged a techno-economic complex of powerful vested interests driving commodification of healthcare and diversion of public funds into private business. Change management discourse recognised the complicatedness of large-scale technology programmes and emphasised good project management and organisational processes. Conclusion Introduction of telehealth and telecare is hampered because different stakeholders hold different assumptions, values and world views, ‘talk past’ each other and compete for recognition and resources. If investments in these technologies are to bear fruit, more effective inter-stakeholder dialogue must occur to establish an organising vision that better accommodates competing discourses. PMID:22815469

Meeting the health and social needs of pregnant asylum seekers, midwifery students' perspectives: part 1; dominant discourses and midwifery students.

PubMed

Haith-Cooper, Melanie; Bradshaw, Gwendolen

2013-09-01

Current literature has indicated a concern about standards of maternity care experienced by pregnant women who are seeking asylum. As the next generation of midwives, it is important that students are educated in a way that prepares them to effectively care for these women. To understand how this can be achieved, it is important to explore what asylum seeking means to midwifery students. This article is the first of three parts and reports on one objective from a wider doctorate study. It identifies dominant discourses that influenced the perceptions of a group of midwifery students' about the pregnant asylum seeking woman. The study was designed from a social constructivist perspective, with contextual knowledge being constructed by groups of people, influenced by underpinning dominant discourses, depending on their social, cultural and historical positions in the world. In a United Kingdom University setting, during year two of a pre-registration midwifery programme, eleven midwifery students participated in the study. Two focus group interviews using a problem based learning scenario as a trigger for discussion were conducted. In addition, three students were individually interviewed to explore issues in more depth and two students' written reflections on practice were used to generate data. Following a critical discourse analysis, dominant discourses were identified which appeared to influence the way in which asylum seekers were perceived. The findings suggested an underpinning ideology around the asylum seeker being different and of a criminal persuasion. Although the pregnant woman seeking asylum was considered as deserving of care, the same discourses appeared to influence the way in which she was constructed. However, as the study progressed, through reading alternative sources of literature, some students appeared to question these discourses. These findings have implications for midwifery education in encouraging students to challenge negative discourses and construct positive perceptions of asylum seeking. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

"Getting Our Story Straight: Taking the scientific process out of science communication"

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hirschland, M.

2011-12-01

Conveying the implications and applications of our science is becoming more, not less difficult. With media and policy debates around scientific issues fraught with gridlock, misinformation and confusion, we must recognize that the scientific process itself often contributes more noise than clarity. For science to occupy more of a privileged and influential place in the public and policy discourse, this must change. From the perspective of a communications professional, this presentation offers solutions. Efforts to remedy this have disproportionately focused on training scientists to be "better" communicators. While this is necessary, it is far from sufficient in building the type of public trust and authority that really moves the credibility needle and our impact. By itself, a train the scientist approach actually complicates the issue by unleashing hoards of trained "science communicators", trumpeting disconnected, qualified, and sometimes contradictory messages. The result, from the public's perspective, is a focus on the sausage making elements of science, rather than the sausages - or the real consensus messages resulting from our work. What is required is much better coordination in terms of framing and amplifying clear messages and findings around areas where real consensus exists, and a similar focus on deemphasizing those that occupy the opinion tails. Other sectors including government, corporates and medical sciences understand and practice this to better effect in building public consensus. The correctives to this are threefold: -Recognize that the scientific process, while excellent for doing science, is an awful way to communicate clearly. Publicly airing out the debates that are part and parcel of a healthy scientific discourse is a sure recipe for confusion. -Create and bolster better coordination mechanisms for consensus message building and delivery. Professional associations can and must play a more central convening and shaping role when it comes to key message shaping, timing and delivery. -Better leverage the tools, lessons and expertise of the communications profession. Often, communication is thought of as something everyone either can or should do. Other institutions regularly engage highly skilled experts to help build and shape messages for intended results. Better leveraging this group and their body of knowledge will pay great dividends. All of these correctives are predicated on agreement that as a community we a) have a problem, b) can be disciplined and committed to promoting consensus views (as are those that seek to call into question our work), and c) are willing to examine our own incentive structures that push elements of scientific debate into the open that are better left behind closed doors. As long as scientists continue delivering multiple, and often competing messages, we should not be incredulous that non-scientists continue to doubt even those consensus views that have been hard won and remain squarely built on fact.

Teaching Explicitly and Reflecting on Elements of Nature of Science: a Discourse-Focused Professional Development Program with Four Fifth-Grade Teachers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Piliouras, Panagiotis; Plakitsi, Katerina; Seroglou, Fanny; Papantoniou, Georgia

2017-06-01

The nature of science (NOS) has become a central goal of science education in many countries. This study refers to a developmental work research program, in which four fifth-grade elementary in-service teachers participated. It aimed to improve their understandings of NOS and their abilities to teach it effectively to their students. The 1-year-long, 2012-2013, program consisted of a series of activities to support teachers to develop their pedagogical content knowledge of NOS. In order to accomplish our goal, we enabled teacher-researchers to analyze their own discourse practices and to trace evidence of effective NOS teaching. Many studies indicate the importance of examining teachers' discussions about science in the classroom, since it is teachers' understanding of NOS reflected in these discussions that will have a vital impact on students' learning. Our proposal is based on the assumption that reflecting on the ways people form meanings enables us to examine and seek alternative ways to communicate aspects of NOS during science lessons. The analysis of discourse data, which has been carried out with the teacher-researchers' active participation, indicated that initially only a few aspects of NOS were implicitly incorporated in teacher-researchers' instruction. As the program evolved, all teacher-researchers presented more informed views on targeted NOS aspects. On the whole, our discourse-focused professional development program with its participatory, explicit, and reflective character indicated the importance of involving teacher-researchers in analyzing their own talk. It is this involvement that results in obtaining a valuable awareness of aspects concerning pedagogical content knowledge of NOS teaching.

The negotiation of meaning and exercise of power in professional learning communities: An investigation of middle school science teachers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mclaughlin, Cheryl Althea

A professional learning community (PLC) typically consists of practitioners who systematically examine and problematize their practice with the intention of development and improvement. The collaborative practices inherent in PLCs mirror the way scientists work together to develop new theories, and are particularly valuable for science teachers who could draw from these experiences to improve the quality of student learning. Gaps in the science education literature support the need for research to determine how interactions within PLCs support science teacher development. Additionally, issues of power that may constrain or encourage meaningful interactions are largely overlooked in PLC studies. This qualitative study examines, from a Foucauldian perspective, interactions within a PLC comprising middle school science teachers preparing to implement reform curriculum. Specifically, the study analyzes interactions within the PLC to determine opportunities created for professional learning and development. Audiotaped transcripts of teacher interactions were analyzed using discourse analysis building tasks designed to identify opportunities for learning and to examine the exercise of power within the PLCs. The discourse analytical tools integrated theories of Gee (2011) and Foucault (1972), and were used to deconstruct and interrogate the data. The events were subsequently reconstructed through the lens of social constructivism and Foucault theories on power. The findings identified several processes emerging from the interactions that contributed to the negotiation of an understanding of the reform curriculum. These include reflection on practice, reorganization of cognitive structures, reinvention of practice, and refinement of instructional strategies. The findings also indicated that the exercise of power by entities both external to, and within the PLCs influenced the process of meaning negotiation among the science teachers. The consensus achieved by the teachers reflected knowledge constructed by science education discourses external to the PLC, which regulated understandings emerging from the interactions. Additionally, some teachers, through their actions, exercised power in ways that hindered rather than enhanced constructive dialogue in PLCs. The exercise of power by external institutions was nevertheless necessary to set the stage for the series of actions, the outcome of which facilitated constructive dialogue among science teachers who were implementing the reform curriculum.

Reproducing normative and marginalized masculinities: adolescent male popularity and the outcast.

PubMed

Phillips, Debby A

2005-09-01

Every day, in professional work and in our personal lives, we reproduce by words and behaviors particular understandings of life and how it works. This includes understandings about what is 'normal' and 'not normal' masculinity and who are 'normal' and 'not normal' boys and men. Being marginalized or outcast from the norm is rarely a free choice. The language that constructs normal and abnormal is not innocent and does not simply arrive in our minds transparently reflected in our behavior or in our client advice or student education. Examining words and behaviors from adolescent boys and from media sources, this research explores the role of cultural discourses in producing normative and marginalized masculinities. It builds upon recent scholarship that questions cultural prescriptions for masculinity and traditional male norms. Feminist, poststructural, psychoanalytic discourse analysis and multiple methods were used to explore links between cultural discourses of masculinity and performativity of masculinity. Practices of heterosexuality, homophobia, athleticism, economic privilege, toughness, and violence provided pathways toward achieving and/or maintaining status as the hegemonic masculine norm in adolescence. 'Popularity' signified the norm and 'outcasts' from the norm signified marginalized masculinities.

A Brief History of Knowledge Building

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scardamalia, Marlene; Bereiter, Carl

2010-01-01

Knowledge Building as a theoretical, pedagogical, and technological innovation focuses on the 21st century need to work creatively with knowledge. The team now advancing Knowledge Building spans multiple disciplines, sectors, and cultural contexts. Several teacher-researcher-government partnerships have formed to bring about the systemic changes…

`You Have to Give Them Some Science Facts': Primary Student Teachers' Early Negotiations of Teacher Identities in the Intersections of Discourses About Science Teaching and About Primary Teaching

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Danielsson, Anna T.; Warwick, Paul

2014-04-01

In the broadest sense, the goal for primary science teacher education could be described as preparing these teachers to teach for scientific literacy. Our starting point is that making such science teaching accessible and desirable for future primary science teachers is dependent not only on their science knowledge and self-confidence, but also on a whole range of interrelated sociocultural factors. This paper aims to explore how intersections between different Discourses about primary teaching and about science teaching are evidenced in primary school student teachers' talk about becoming teachers. The study is founded in a conceptualisation of learning as a process of social participation. The conceptual framework is crafted around two key concepts: Discourse (Gee 2005) and identity (Paechter, Women's Studies International Forum, 26(1):69-77, 2007). Empirically, the paper utilises semi-structured interviews with 11 primary student teachers enrolled in a 1-year Postgraduate Certificate of Education course. The analysis draws on five previously identified teacher Discourses: `Teaching science through inquiry', `Traditional science teacher', `Traditional primary teacher', `Teacher as classroom authority', and `Primary teacher as a role model' (Danielsson and Warwick, International Journal of Science Education, 2013). It explores how the student teachers, at an early stage in their course, are starting to intersect these Discourses to negotiate their emerging identities as primary science teachers.

From “Animal Machines” to “Happy Meat”? Foucault's Ideas of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power Applied to ‘Animal-Centred’ Welfare Discourse

PubMed Central

Cole, Matthew

2011-01-01

Simple Summary This paper considers some recent developments in ‘animal-centred’ welfare science, which acknowledges the sentience of ‘farmed’ animals, alongside the emergence of a market for ‘happy meat’, which offers assurances of care and consideration for ‘farmed’ animals to concerned consumers. Both appear to challenge the instrumental ‘machine’ model characteristic of ‘factory farming’. However, in both cases, this paper argues that these discourses of consideration for the well-being of ‘farmed’ animals work to appease and deflect ethical concerns while facilitating the continued exploitation of ‘farmed’ animals. Abstract Michel Foucault's work traces shifting techniques in the governance of humans, from the production of ‘docile bodies’ subjected to the knowledge formations of the human sciences (disciplinary power), to the facilitation of self-governing agents directed towards specified forms of self-knowledge by quasi-therapeutic authorities (pastoral power). While mindful of the important differences between the governance of human subjects and the oppression of nonhuman animals, exemplified in nonhuman animals' legal status as property, this paper explores parallel shifts from disciplinary to pastoral regimes of human-‘farmed’ animal relations. Recent innovations in ‘animal-centred’ welfare science represent a trend away from the ‘disciplinary’ techniques of confinement and torture associated with ‘factory farms’ and towards quasi-therapeutic ways of claiming to know ‘farmed’ animals, in which the animals themselves are co-opted into the processes by which knowledge about them is generated. The new pastoral turn in ‘animal-centred’ welfare finds popular expression in ‘happy meat’ discourses that invite ‘consumers’ to adopt a position of vicarious carer for the ‘farmed’ animals who they eat. The paper concludes that while ‘animal-centred’ welfare reform and ‘happy meat’ discourses promise a possibility of a somewhat less degraded life for some ‘farmed’ animals, they do so by perpetuating exploitation and oppression and entrenching speciesist privilege by making it less vulnerable to critical scrutiny. PMID:26486216

Policy discourse, people's internal frames, and declared aircraft noise annoyance: an application of Q-methodology.

PubMed

Kroesen, Maarten; Bröer, Christian

2009-07-01

Aircraft noise annoyance is studied extensively, but often without an explicit theoretical framework. In this article, a social approach for noise annoyance is proposed. The idea that aircraft noise is meaningful to people within a socially produced discourse is assumed and tested. More particularly, it is expected that the noise policy discourse influences people's assessment of aircraft noise. To this end, Q-methodology is used, which, to the best of the authors' knowledge, has not been used for aircraft noise annoyance so far. Through factor analysis five distinct frames are revealed: "Long live aviation!," "aviation: an ecological threat," "aviation and the environment: a solvable problem," "aircraft noise: not a problem," and "aviation: a local problem." It is shown that the former three frames are clearly related to the policy discourse. Based on this observation it is argued that policy making is a possible mechanism through which the sound of aircraft is turned into annoyance. In addition, it is concluded that the experience of aircraft noise and, in particular, noise annoyance is part of coherent frames of mind, which consist of mutually reinforcing positions and include non-acoustical factors.

Tell me what's wrong with me: a discourse analysis approach to the concept of patient autonomy.

PubMed Central

Nessa, J; Malterud, K

1998-01-01

BACKGROUND: Patient autonomy has gradually replaced physician paternalism as an ethical ideal. However, in a medical context, the principle of individual autonomy has different meanings. More knowledge is needed about what is and should be an appropriate understanding of the concept of patient autonomy in clinical practice. AIM: To challenge the traditional concept of patient autonomy by applying a discourse analysis to the issue. METHOD: A qualitative case study approach with material from one consultation. The discourse is interpreted according to pragmatic and text-linguistic principles and provides the basis of a theoretical discussion of different concepts of patient autonomy. RESULTS: The consultation transcript illustrates how the patient's wishes can be respected in real life. The patient, her husband and the doctor are all involved in the discourse dynamics, governed by the subject matter, namely her mental illness. CONCLUSION: We suggest a dynamic and dialogue-based conception of autonomy as adequate for clinical purposes. These perspectives, based on mutual understanding, take communication between patient and doctor as their starting point. According to this approach, autonomy requires a genuine dialogue, an interpersonal mode of being which we choose to call "authentic interaction". PMID:9873980

Sexuality and mental health nursing in Ireland: weaving the veil of socialised inhibition.

PubMed

Higgins, Agnes; Barker, Philip; Begley, Cecily M

2009-04-01

The World Health Organisation first identified, in 1975, the need for health professionals to be educated in the area of sexuality. Since then, studies exploring aspects of educational preparation of general nurses in relation to sexuality, found that there was an 'absence' of education in this area of practice. This paper reports findings on the educational discourses that shape mental health nurses' understandings of sexuality. Unstructured interviews were conducted with 27 consenting mental health nurses working in the Republic of Ireland. Data were analysed using the principles of Grounded Theory. Findings suggest that participants were exposed to a subtle network of legitimised sexual discourses during primary, secondary, and professional socialisation. These discourses provided participants with a view of sexuality that emphasised taboo, privatisation, pathology, and control. Social, political, or rights-based discourses that could have provided participants with the knowledge and clinical competence necessary to include sexuality in an open and confident manner within the horizons of nursing practice were absent. These findings challenge educators involved in curriculum development to rethink the fundamental philosophy that is shaping mental health nursing curricula. They also challenge educators to rethink their ideas around the meaning of 'absence' in relation to education.

Immigrants and Suffrage: Adding to the Discourse by Integrating State versus National Citizenship, Dual Domestic Residency, and Dual Citizenship

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Garcia, John A.

2012-01-01

This article builds upon the literature on immigrants and the vote by focusing on three legal and democratic principles: state versus national citizenship, dual domestic residency, and globalization/dual citizenship. It first delineates the discretion and powers that states can utilize to establish suffrage rights. The article next develops…

Toward a Model of Influence in Persuasive Discussions: Negotiating Quality, Authority, Privilege, and Access within a Student-Led Argument

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Engle, Randi A.; Langer-Osuna, Jennifer M.; McKinney de Royston, Maxine

2014-01-01

It is commonly observed that during classroom or group discussions some students have greater influence than may be justified by the normative quality of those students' contributions. We propose a 5-component theoretical framework in order to explain how undue influence unfolds. We build on literatures on persuasion, argumentation, discourse, and…

Building a Career in English: Users of English as an Additional Language in Academia in the Arabian Gulf

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buckingham, Louisa

2014-01-01

This study investigates how a group of 30 multilingual academics, all users of English as an additional language (EAL) working at a private university in Oman, acquired discourse community membership in their disciplines through publishing in English, and the strategies they use to sustain the level of literacy needed to disseminate their research…

Schools as Knowledge-Building Organizations: Thirty Years of Design Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Bodong; Hong, Huang-Yao

2016-01-01

In this article we review the Knowledge-Building literature, unpacking its conceptual framework, principle-based pedagogy, distinctive features, and issues regarding scalability and sustainability. The Knowledge-Building goal is to reframe education as a knowledge-creating enterprise, engaging students from the earliest years of schooling. Despite…

[Side Effects of Modernity : Dam Building, Health Care, and the Construction of Power in the Context of the Control of Schistosomiasis in Egypt in the 1960s and early 1970s].

PubMed

Brendel, Benjamin

2017-09-01

This article analyzes the modernization campaigns in Egypt in the 1960s and early 1970s. The regulation of the Nile by the Aswan High Dam and the resulting irrigation projects caused the rate of schistosomiasis infestation in the population to rise. The result was a discourse between experts from the global north and Egyptian elites about modernization, development aid, dam building and health care. The fight against schistosomiasis was like a cipher, which combined different power-laden concepts and arguments. This article will decode the cipher and allow a deeper look into the contemporary dimensions of power bound to this subject. The text is conceived around three thematic axes. The first deals with the discursive interplay of modernization, health and development aid in and for Egypt. The second focuses on far-reaching and long-standing arguments within an international expert discourse about these concepts. Finally, the third presents an exemplary case study of West German health and development aid for fighting schistosomiasis in the Egyptian Fayoum oasis.

The Rhetoric of Explanation: Explanatory Rhetoric from Aristotle to 1850.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Conners, Robert J.

1984-01-01

Follows the slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary references to overt persuasion from Aristotle's "Rhetoric" through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. (FL)

Four Dialogues and Metalogues about the Nature of Science.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roth, Wolff-Michael; McRobbie, Campbell J.; Lucas, Keith B.

1998-01-01

Analyzes and explores questions about the dialogic nature of beliefs and students' belief talk about the nature of science and scientific knowledge. Argues that students' discourse is better understood as a textual bricolage sensitive to conversational context. Contains 26 references. (DDR)

Power, discourse, and resistance: Poststructuralist influences in nursing.

PubMed

Holmes, Dave; Gagnon, Marilou

2018-01-01

Based on our respective research programs (psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, public health, HIV/AIDS, harm reduction) this article aims to use purposely non-conventional means to present the substantial contribution of poststructuralist perspectives to knowledge development in nursing science in general and in our current research in particular. More specifically, we call on the work of Michel Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari to politicize nursing science using examples from our empirical research programs with marginal and often highly marginalized populations. We discuss the concepts of power, discourse, and resistance to illustrate the essential contribution of poststructuralism to marginal, even "nomadic", nursing research. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Normal for an Asperger: notions of the meanings of diagnoses among adults with Asperger syndrome.

PubMed

Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Hanna

2012-04-01

This study explores the production of a counterhegemonic discourse of "autistic normalcy" among adults with high-functioning autism by analyzing notions of diagnosis. The discourse analyses are based on material from ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish educational setting. Study participants were 3 male and 9 female adults who had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. The notion of diagnosis comprises issues concerning coming out and knowledge production. The findings capture an ongoing reformulation process among people involved in the autistic self-advocacy movement when it comes to the meanings of Asperger syndrome and what it means to be a person with Asperger syndrome.

Building shared understandings in introductory physics tutorials through risk, repair, conflict & comedy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Conlin, Luke D.

Collaborative inquiry learning environments, such as The Tutorials in Physics Sensemaking, are designed to provide students with opportunities to partake in the authentic disciplinary practices of argumentation and sensemaking. Through these practices, groups of students in tutorial can build shared conceptual understandings of the mechanisms behind physical phenomena. In order to do so, they must also build a shared epistemological understanding of what they are doing together, such that their activity includes collaboratively making sense of mechanisms. Previous work (Conlin, Gupta, Scherr, & Hammer, 2007; Scherr & Hammer, 2009) has demonstrated that tutorial students do not settle upon only one way of understanding their activity together, but instead build multiple shared ways of understanding, or framing (Scherr & Hammer, 2009; Tannen, 1993a), their activity. I build upon this work by substantiating a preliminary finding that one of these shared ways of framing corresponds with increased evidence of the students' collaboratively making sense of physical mechanisms. What previous research has not yet addressed is how the students come to understand their activity as including collaborative sensemaking discussions in the first place, and how that understanding develops over the course of the semester. In this dissertation, I address both of these questions through an in-depth video analysis of three groups' discussions throughout the semester. To build shared understandings through scientific argumentation and collaborative sensemaking, the students need to continually make repairs of each other's understanding, but this comes with the risk of affective damage that can shut down further sensemaking discussions. By analyzing the discourse of the three groups' discussions throughout the semester, I show how each group is able to manage this essential tension as they each build and maintain a safe space to sensemake together. I find that the three groups differ in how soon, how frequently, and how deeply they engage in collaborative scientific sensemaking. This variability can be explained, in part, through differences in how the groups use hedging, irony, and other discourse moves that epistemically distance the speakers from their claims. This work highlights the connection between students' epistemology and affect in face-to-face interaction.

[Situations related to drug misuse in public schools in the city of São Paulo, Brazil].

PubMed

Moreira, Fernanda Gonçalves; Silveira, Dartiu Xavier da; Andreoli, Sérgio Baxter

2006-10-01

To explore situations, attitudes and behavior of public elementary school education supervisors concerning psychoactive substance misuse. The study was carried out in the city of São Paulo, Southeastern Brazil, in 2002. Data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire applied to eight key informants in the administrative area experienced in education supervision. Qualitative content analysis with ethnographic reference was conducted. Most discourses show that knowledge transmission is thought as essential for drug use prevention, though supervisors reported being ill-informed on this subject. The most frequent attitudes toward drug users are impotence and inability to act and sometimes a repressive attitude. These are motivated by misinformation and fear due to mistaken association of drug users and criminals. In situations indirectly related to drug abuse (family and behavior problems) more understanding and inclusive attitudes are reported, following the harm reduction paradigm. Theoretical capacity building of educators for preventive attitudes would support their skills developed through dealing with situations (in)directly related to drug abuse in schools. Thus, educators would feel more confident to make interventions for harm or risk reduction among drug users.

Engaging in vocabulary learning in science: the promise of multimodal instruction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Townsend, Dianna; Brock, Cynthia; Morrison, Jennifer D.

2018-02-01

To a science 'outsider', science language often appears unnecessarily technical and dense. However, scientific language is typically used with the goal of being concise and precise, which allows those who regularly participate in scientific discourse communities to learn from each other and build upon existing scientific knowledge. One essential component of science language is the academic vocabulary that characterises it. This mixed-methods study investigates middle school students' (N = 59) growth in academic vocabulary as it relates to their teacher's instructional practices that supported academic language development. Students made significant gains in their production of general academic words, t(57) = 2.32, p = .024 and of discipline-specific science words, t(57) = 3.01, p = .004 in science writing. Results from the qualitative strand of this inquiry contextualised the students' learning of academic vocabulary as it relates to their teacher's instructional practices and intentions as well as the students' perceptions of their learning environment. These qualitative findings reveal that both the students and their teacher articulated that the teacher's intentional use of resources supported students' academic vocabulary growth. Implications for research and instruction with science language are shared.

On the predictability of event boundaries in discourse: An ERP investigation.

PubMed

Delogu, Francesca; Drenhaus, Heiner; Crocker, Matthew W

2018-02-01

When reading a text describing an everyday activity, comprehenders build a model of the situation described that includes prior knowledge of the entities, locations, and sequences of actions that typically occur within the event. Previous work has demonstrated that such knowledge guides the processing of incoming information by making event boundaries more or less expected. In the present ERP study, we investigated whether comprehenders' expectations about event boundaries are influenced by how elaborately common events are described in the context. Participants read short stories in which a common activity (e.g., washing the dishes) was described either in brief or in an elaborate manner. The final sentence contained a target word referring to a more predictable action marking a fine event boundary (e.g., drying) or a less predictable action, marking a coarse event boundary (e.g., jogging). The results revealed a larger N400 effect for coarse event boundaries compared to fine event boundaries, but no interaction with description length. Between 600 and 1000 ms, however, elaborate contexts elicited a larger frontal positivity compared to brief contexts. This effect was largely driven by less predictable targets, marking coarse event boundaries. We interpret the P600 effect as indexing the updating of the situation model at event boundaries, consistent with Event Segmentation Theory (EST). The updating process is more demanding with coarse event boundaries, which presumably require the construction of a new situation model.

Sustaining Knowledge Building as a Principle-Based Innovation at an Elementary School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Jianwei; Hong, Huang-Yao; Scardamalia, Marlene; Teo, Chew Lee; Morley, Elizabeth A.

2011-01-01

This study explores Knowledge Building as a principle-based innovation at an elementary school and makes a case for a principle- versus procedure-based approach to educational innovation, supported by new knowledge media. Thirty-nine Knowledge Building initiatives, each focused on a curriculum theme and facilitated by nine teachers over eight…

Latina girls' identities-in-practice in 6th grade science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tan, Edna

Inequalities and achievement gaps in science education among students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds as well as between genders in the United States are due to not just access to resources, but also to the incongruence between identities of school science with identities salient to minority students. Minority girls are especially portrayed to be estranged from prototypical school science Discourse, often characterized as white, middle class, and masculine. This dissertation, based on a two-year ethnographic study in an urban middle school in New York City, describes the authoring of novel identities-in-practice of minority girls in a 6th grade science classroom. The findings indicate that minority girls draw from out-of-school identities salient to them to author novel identities-in-practice in the various figured worlds of the 6th grade science classroom. Through taking such authorial stances, minority girls exhibit agency in negotiating for wider boundaries in their school science participation and broker for hybrid spaces of school science where the school science Discourse was destabilized and challenged to be more inclusive of everyday funds of knowledge and Discourses important to the students. The findings also highlight the dialectic relationship between an individual students' learning and participation and the school science community-of-practice and the implications such a relationship has on the learning of both individual students and the collective community-of-practice. From year one findings, curricular adaptations were enacted, with teacher and student input, on lessons centering on food and nutrition. The adapted curriculum specifically solicited for nontraditional funds of knowledge and Discourse from students and were grounded strongly in relevance to students' out of school lives. The hybrid spaces collectively brokered for by the community-of-practice were transformed in three ways: physically, politically, and, pedagogically. Overall, the results from the study indicate that minority girls are not only successful in border crossing but in brokering for new worlds of science, and highlights the importance of incorporating nontraditional funds and Discourses and the important roles played by the community-of-practice as a whole to reshape the landscape of school science in genuine pursuit of the education goal "science for all".

Conditions of Democracy: Elementary Perspectives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

LeCompte, Karon N.

2006-01-01

Exposure to ideas helps young children articulate their own beliefs and sharpens their connections. Teachers can provide opportunities for children to advance their knowledge about democratic conditions through sustained discourse, or, as described in this article, purposeful class discussions followed by hands-on activities. The author describes…

Embracing Diversity: The Dual Role of Gay-Straight Alliances

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stonefish, Twiladawn; Lafreniere, Kathryn D.

2015-01-01

The social landscape has changed regarding public knowledge, perception, and acceptance of "alternative" sexual lifestyles. In recent years, public and political discourse around issues of non-heterosexual orientations has shifted significantly. Despite many legal milestones, society has not realized complete inclusion of individuals…

"International Education" in US Public Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parker, Walter C.

2011-01-01

This study focuses on the recent adoption of "international education" (IE) by US public schools. Theoretically, it conceptualises this phenomenon as a social movement and a dynamic arena of knowledge construction and contestation. Methodologically, it combines fieldwork, interviews and critical discourse analysis. The central finding is…

Discourse Model Representation of Referential and Attributive Descriptions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Onishi, Kristine H.; Murphy, Gregory L.

2002-01-01

Manipulated shared knowledge and focus on specific entities, the verb in the sentence, and whether the description was definite or indefinite. Each factor influenced interpretation of the description. Confirmed that changing verbs alone affected reference choice. Indicated that both referentially and attributively introduced entities are…

"Strengthening" Ontario Universities: A Neoliberal Reconstruction of Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rigas, Bob; Kuchapski, Renée

2016-01-01

This paper reviews neoliberalism as an ideology that has influenced higher education generally and Ontario higher education in particular. It includes a discourse analysis of "Strengthening Ontario's Centres of Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge" (Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities, 2012), a government discussion…

Burkean Tropes and Kuhnian Science: A Social Constructionist Perspective on Language and Reality.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schiappa, Edward

1993-01-01

Constructs a language-centered perspective toward the social-rhetorical construction of knowledge by juxtaposing Kenneth Burke's philosophy of language with Thomas S. Kuhn's philosophy of science. Discusses rhetoric's epistemic status and the social constructionist account of discourse production. (HB)

Language Comprehension and the Acquisition of Knowledge.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Freedle, Roy O., Ed.; Carroll, John B., Ed.

Thirteen papers given by language specialists are presented. These analyze special linguistic (semantic) problems that occur when interconnected strings of sentences constitute data base; they also analyze special psychological problems (of memory, inference, and motivation) that occur when human subjects are exposed to discourse materials in…

The Development of the Cohesive Use of Adversative Conjunctions in Discourse.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McClure, Erica; Geva, Esther

1983-01-01

Concludes that by grade four children have mastered the basic intrasentential use of both "but" and "although." Adds that not even by grade eight do children display knowledge of the intersentential rule of focus governing adult use of these conjunctions. (FL)

Food security and food insecurity in Europe: An analysis of the academic discourse (1975-2013).

PubMed

Borch, Anita; Kjærnes, Unni

2016-08-01

In this paper we address the academic discourse on food insecurity and food security in Europe as expressed in articles published in scientific journals in the period 1975 to 2013. The analysis indicates that little knowledge has been produced on this subject, and that the limited research that has been produced tends to focus on the production of food rather than on people's access to food. The lack of knowledge about European food insecurity is particularly alarming in these times, which are characterised by increasing social inequalities and poverty, as well as shifting policy regimes. More empirical, comparative and longitudinal research is needed to survey the extent of food security problems across European countries over time. There is also a need to identify groups at risk of food insecurity as well as legal, economic, practical, social, and psychological constraints hindering access to appropriate and sufficient food. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Emerging Phenomenon of Knowledge Management.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Broadbent, Marianne

1997-01-01

Clarifies the meaning of knowledge management and gives examples of organizations that overtly practice it. Outlines four steps in knowledge management: (1) making knowledge visible; (2) building knowledge intensity; (3) building knowledge infrastructure; and (4) developing a knowledge culture. Discusses managing people as assets, librarians as…

Collaborative Knowledge Building with Wikis: The Impact of Redundancy and Polarity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moskaliuk, Johannes; Kimmerle, Joachim; Cress, Ulrike

2012-01-01

Wikis as shared digital artifacts may enable users to participate in processes of knowledge building. To what extent and with which quality knowledge building can take place is assumed to depend on the interrelation between people's prior knowledge and the information available in a wiki. In two experimental studies we examined the impact on…

Radical Vernacular: Bacterial Architecture on Mars

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dade-Robertson, M.; Ramirez-Figueroa, C.; Zhang, M.

Our current speculative discourse on the colonisation of other planets tends to consider future buildings through the lens of hitech architecture. However, we suggest that developments in biotechnology will enable types of construction which are beyond even our current science fictions. The paper presents an argument for bioengineered building materials framed by the notion of constructing buildings on Mars. It introduces the concept of biomineralisation and its processes and applications, and focuses on the creation of calcium carbonate by certain strains of bacteria. We will suggest that by utilising this process in conjunction with synthetic biology (where bacteria are engineered to survive and respond to the environment on other planets) a building process emerges where the materials are adaptive and, to some extent, self-constructed in relation to their environments. The paper concludes by speculating about a building process involving the use of bioengineered bacteria to consolidate materials, found on the surface of Mars, to create materials and structures which are functionally graded.

The Elusive Goal of Nation Building: Asian/Confucian Values and Citizenship Education in Singapore during the 1980s

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chia, Yeow Tong

2011-01-01

The term "Asian values" became popular in the political discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. The most vocal proponents of Asian values are Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir and their deputies and government officials, as well as post-Tiananmen Chinese leaders. Most notable of all these three strands of the Asian values debate…

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (86th, Kansas City, Missouri, July 30-August 2, 2003). Minorities and Communication Division.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

2003

The Minorities and Communication Division of the proceedings contains the following 6 papers: "Can We Talk? Racial Discourse as a Community-Building Paradigm for Journalists" (Meta G. Carstarphen); "Can Cross Burning Be Constitutionally Proscribed?: Sixty Years of Hate Speech Rulings Culminating in 'Black v. Virginia'" (Roxanne…

Building Institutional Capacity in Rural Northern Ireland: The Role of Partnership Governance in the LEADER II Programme

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scott, Mark

2004-01-01

Throughout the 1990s, Europe's rural areas increasingly embraced local action and local development solutions to face the challenge of the continued re-structuring of the agricultural industry. In parallel, in both the EU and the UK, a policy discourse has emerged which envisages a fundamental shift in support policies for rural areas from a…

Discursive construction of polyphony in healthcare management.

PubMed

Hujala, Anneli; Rissanen, Sari

2012-01-01

The aim of the paper is to understand and define how the polyphony of management is constructed in interaction and to describe this through concrete management meeting cases. Polyphony refers to the diverse voices of various organization members, and how these voices are present, disclosed and utilized in management. The study is based on the social constructionist and discursive perspectives of management, which question the traditional, individualistic approaches of management. The issue was examined through a qualitative case study by analysing the micro-level management discourse in three healthcare organizations. Discursive practices that enhance or inhibit polyphony are often unnoticed and unconscious. Key moments of management discourse are an example of unconscious mundane practices through which members of organizations construct the reality of management. The empirical results are locally contextual. In the future, research will be able to apply the approach to diverse contexts as well as link micro-level discourses to the construction of broader health and social management discourses. The paper increases the understanding of how to enhance participation and staff contribution, and how to utilize the knowledge of all members of the organization. Both managers and other staff members are fully involved in the social construction of management. Micro-level discourse should be paid attention to in management work as well as in the education of managers and staff. The study increases the understanding of micro-level issues of management and challenges the conventional, taken-for-granted assumptions behind organization and management theories.

Recognising discourse causality triggers in the biomedical domain.

PubMed

Mihăilă, Claudiu; Ananiadou, Sophia

2013-12-01

Current domain-specific information extraction systems represent an important resource for biomedical researchers, who need to process vast amounts of knowledge in a short time. Automatic discourse causality recognition can further reduce their workload by suggesting possible causal connections and aiding in the curation of pathway models. We describe here an approach to the automatic identification of discourse causality triggers in the biomedical domain using machine learning. We create several baselines and experiment with and compare various parameter settings for three algorithms, i.e. Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forests (RF). We also evaluate the impact of lexical, syntactic, and semantic features on each of the algorithms, showing that semantics improves the performance in all cases. We test our comprehensive feature set on two corpora containing gold standard annotations of causal relations, and demonstrate the need for more gold standard data. The best performance of 79.35% F-score is achieved by CRFs when using all three feature types.

Mothering: an unacknowledged aspect of undergraduate clinical teachers' work in nursing.

PubMed

McKenna, Lisa; Wellard, Sally

2009-05-01

Clinical education is an important component of undergraduate nurse education, in which clinical teachers facilitate students' application of theoretical classroom knowledge into the clinical practice setting. Mothering as part of clinical teachers' work was a major finding from a larger study exploring clinical teaching work to identify what shaped their work and barriers to their work in clinical settings. The study used semi-structured interviews, informed by the work of Foucault. Maternal discourses emerged as a predominant one as participants presented their relationships with students describing examples of nurturing, protecting, supporting, guiding and providing discipline. The unexpected finding contradicted the dominant view of students as adult learners, and potentially positions them as dependent in their learning in clinical environments. Exploration of this discourse in the context of the study forms the basis of this paper. It is argued that the overall impact of maternal discourses on clinical teaching and learning is unclear but warrants more detailed investigation.

Disciplinary Literacy from a Speech-Language Pathologist's Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ehren, Barbara J.; Murza, Kimberly A.; Malani, Melissa D.

2012-01-01

Disciplinary literacy is an increasingly popular focal area in adolescent literacy. In disciplinary literacy, the discourse features of specific knowledge domains (e.g., literature, history, science, and math) assume major importance in understanding and constructing meaning in each discipline. Because language plays a significant role in…

Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom Applications.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Tom, Ed.

Noting that little in language can be understood without taking into consideration the wider picture of communicative purpose, content, context, and audience, this book address practical uses of various approaches to discourse analysis. Several assumptions run through the chapters: knowledge is socially constructed; the manner in which language…

Legitimation, Performativity and the Tyranny of a "Hijacked" Word

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clapham, Andrew; Vickers, Rob; Eldridge, Jo

2016-01-01

Outstanding education is a high-level policy narrative in England rehearsed by school leaders, politicians, policy-makers and inspectors alike. The "legitimacy" of knowledge, performativity and discourse-based analysis are mobilised to examine outstanding. The paper explores how informants in the English state secondary education sector…

Embodying Normal Miracles.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stormer, Nathan

1997-01-01

Treats the educational video, "Miracle of Life," as exemplary of pro-life discourse broader than abortion. States that bio-medical knowledge which makes the video's rhetoric possible presumes a social order system focused on reproduction. Considers rhetoric of bodies in Western culture, anatomy lesson as a rhetorical act, and politics of…

Asian American Education: Identities, Racial Issues, and Languages. Research on the Education of Asian Pacific Americans

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rong, Xue Lan, Ed.; Endo, Russell, Ed.

2011-01-01

Asian American Education--Asian American Identities, Racial Issues, and Languages presents groundbreaking research that critically challenges the invisibility, stereotyping, and common misunderstandings of Asian Americans by disrupting "customary" discourse and disputing "familiar" knowledge. The chapters in this anthology…

South African Adolescents' Constructions of Intimacy in Romantic Relationships

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lesch, Elmien; Furphy, Claire

2013-01-01

Localized understandings of adolescent romantic relationships are needed to expand our knowledge of the diversity of adolescent romantic experiences and to challenge negative discourses of adolescent heterosexual relationships. This study explored the constructions of intimacy of 20 adolescent men and women in romantic relationships from one…

Aging Students: Implications for Intergenerational Development in the Classroom.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Youngman, Deborah

1995-01-01

Outlines current knowledge about integrating older students into the postsecondary educational system, discusses a case study of an established natural learning environment, and presents models of education and development involving older students. A system involving the transposition of dialectical and discourse methods is proposed for moving…

Scholars, Intellectuals, and Bricoleurs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Papson, Stephen

2014-01-01

This essay explores three orientations to knowledge: the scholar, the intellectual, and the bricoleur. It argues that although the scholar and the intellectual are tied closely to the Liberal Arts and Humanities and dominate academic public relations discourse, both students and faculty increasingly use the practice of bricolage to gather and…

More Morphostasis than Morphogenesis? The "Dual Professionalism" of English Further Education Workshop Tutors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Esmond, Bill; Wood, Hayley

2017-01-01

An international repositioning of vocational teachers in relation to knowledge and the workplace is reflected in English Further Education through the terminology of "dual professionalism". Particularly in settings most closely linked to specific occupations, this discourse privileges occupational expertise that vocational educators…

Education Hubs and Talent Development: Policymaking and Implementation Challenges

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Jack T.

2014-01-01

The discourse on the internationalization of higher education emphasizes revenue generation while neglecting other diverse rationales pursued by governments and institutions. For countries that are seeking to venture into a knowledge economy or accrue greater competitive advantages under globalization, many policymakers view cross-border higher…

Institutional Belonging, Pedagogic Discourse and Music Teacher Education: The Paradox of Routinization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Froehlich, Hildegard

2007-01-01

Knowledge about discrepancies between institutional demands and pedagogical choices creates conflicts that are familiar to most experienced teacher educators. The reasons behind such discrepancies and their philosophical underpinnings have been addressed systematically in several disciplines. With a few notable exceptions, scholarship in music…

Toward Social Movement Activist Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gutierrez, Rhoda Rae; Lipman, Pauline

2016-01-01

In this article, we grapple with possibilities and dilemmas of activist scholarship in the struggle for education justice and political power. As activists and scholars, our social movement praxis seeks to produce knowledge that shifts the dominant neoliberal policy discourse, exposes racism inherent in neoliberal education policies, and supports…

Building capacity for knowledge translation in occupational therapy: learning through participatory action research.

PubMed

Bennett, Sally; Whitehead, Mary; Eames, Sally; Fleming, Jennifer; Low, Shanling; Caldwell, Elizabeth

2016-10-01

There has been widespread acknowledgement of the need to build capacity in knowledge translation however much of the existing work focuses on building capacity amongst researchers rather than with clinicians directly. This paper's aim is to describe a research project for developing a knowledge translation capacity building program for occupational therapy clinicians. Participatory action research methods were used to both develop and evaluate the knowledge translation capacity-building program. Participants were occupational therapists from a large metropolitan hospital in Australia. Researchers and clinicians worked together to use the action cycle of the Knowledge to Action Framework to increase use of knowledge translation itself within the department in general, within their clinical teams, and to facilitate knowledge translation becoming part of the department's culture. Barriers and enablers to using knowledge translation were identified through a survey based on the Theoretical Domains Framework and through focus groups. Multiple interventions were used to develop a knowledge translation capacity-building program. Fifty-two occupational therapists participated initially, but only 20 across the first 18 months of the project. Barriers and enablers were identified across all domains of the Theoretical Domains Framework. Interventions selected to address these barriers or facilitate enablers were categorised into ten different categories: educational outreach; teams working on clinical knowledge translation case studies; identifying time blocks for knowledge translation; mentoring; leadership strategies; communication strategies; documentation and resources to support knowledge translation; funding a knowledge translation champion one day per week; setting goals for knowledge translation; and knowledge translation reporting strategies. Use of these strategies was, and continues to be monitored. Participants continue to be actively involved in learning and shaping the knowledge translation program across the department and within their specific clinical areas. To build capacity for knowledge translation, it is important to involve clinicians. The action cycle of the Knowledge to Action framework is a useful guide to introduce the knowledge translation process to clinicians. It may be used to engage the department as a whole, and facilitate the learning and application of knowledge translation within specific clinical areas. Research evaluating this knowledge translation program is being conducted.

The art and learning patterns of knowing in nursing.

PubMed

Baixinho, Cristina Lavareda; Ferraz, Isabel Carvalho Beato; Ferreira, Óscar Manuel Ramos; Rafael, Helga Marilia da Silva

2014-12-01

Objective To identify the perception of the students about the use of art as a pedagogical strategy in learning the patterns of knowing in nursing; to identify the dimensions of each pattern valued in the analysis of pieces of art. Method Descriptive mixed study. Data collection used a questionnaire applied to 31 nursing students. Results In the analysis of the students' discourse, it was explicit that empirical knowledge includes scientific knowledge, tradition and nature of care. The aesthetic knowledge implies expressiveness, subjectivity and sensitivity. Self-knowledge, experience, reflective attitude and relationships with others are the subcategories of personal knowledge and the moral and ethics support ethical knowledge. Conclusion It is possible to learn patterns of knowledge through art, especially the aesthetic, ethical and personal. It is necessary to investigate further pedagogical strategies that contribute to the learning patterns of nursing knowledge.

[Ethics versus economics in public health? On the integration of economic rationality in a discourse of public health ethics].

PubMed

Rothgang, H; Staber, J

2009-05-01

In the course of establishing the discourse of public health ethics in Germany, we discuss whether economic efficiency should be part of public health ethics and, if necessary, how efficiency should be conceptualized. Based on the welfare economics theory, we build a theoretical framework that demands an integration of economic rationality in public health ethics. Furthermore, we consider the possible implementation of welfare efficiency against the background of current practice in an economic evaluation of health care in Germany. The indifference of the welfare efficiency criterion with respect to distribution leads to the conclusion that efficiency must not be the only criteria of public health ethics. Therefore, an ethical approach of principles should be chosen for public health ethics. Possible conflicts between principles of such an approach are outlined.

Health risks, social relations and class: an analysis of occupational health discourse in Finnish newspaper and women's magazine articles 1961-2008.

PubMed

Varje, Pekka; Väänänen, Ari

2016-03-01

In this article we examine the treatment of psychosocial risks in public occupational health discourse in Finnish newspaper and magazine articles between the 1960s and 2000s, using discourse analysis. Building on class theories, our aim is to investigate how class expectations have been linked with the redefinition of occupational health risks during this period. Our results suggest that as social relations at the workplace became problematised in the occupational health discussions after the 1970s, the image of the hierarchical and naturally conflictual organisation was replaced by idealised middle-class notions of smoothly functioning, harmonious organisations that offered rewarding work experiences. However, this same period since the late 1970s has also been characterised by increasing economic competition and neoliberal market ideology. We conclude that the concern about work-related psychosocial risks and health problems expressed in Finnish newspaper and magazine articles during the last three decades has been shaped in many respects by a collision between the dominant middle-class expectations of harmony and equality and the neoliberal production of competition and inequality. © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.

Ash salts and bodily affects: Witoto environmental knowledge as sexual education

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alvaro Echeverri, Juan; Enokakuiodo Román-Jitdutjaaño, Oscar

2013-03-01

This letter addresses the indigenous discourse on a set of plant species used by the Witoto Indians of Northwest Amazonia to extract ash or vegetable salt, obtained from the combustion of the tissues of vegetable species, filtering of the ashes, and desiccation of the resulting brine. It aims to demonstrate how the study of the human condition is carried out through a reading of natural entities. The method employed is the indexical analysis of a discourse uttered by the elder Enokakuiodo in the Witoto language from 1995 to 1998, in a verbal genre called rafue, one of several genres of the ‘language of the yard of coca’. The species used to extract ash salt are conceived of as coming from the body of the Creator and as an image of the human body. The rafue of salt performs, in words and gestures, a narrative of human affects and capacities by reading ecological, biological, cultural and linguistic indices from a set of plant species. This discourse on plant species is a discourse on the control and management of bodily affects and capacities, represented as ash salts, that are lessons about sexual development which the Creator left for humanity as a guide—a ‘sexual education’.

Toward a Pedagogical Description of the Pragmatic Competence of Native Speakers of English.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cots, Josep Maria

An approach to teaching second language learners the pragmatic aspects of communicative competence is discussed. The approach uses analysis of verbal interaction to explain four areas of skill and knowledge related to communicative competence: grammatical competence; sociolinguistic competence; discourse competence; and strategic competence. It…

Plug Into "The Modernizing Machine"! Danish University Reform and Its Transformable Academic Subjectivities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Krejsler, John Benedicto

2013-01-01

"The modernizing machine" codes individual bodies, things, and symbols with images from New Public Management, neo-liberal, and Knowledge Economy discourses. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of machines, this article explores how "the modernizing machine" produces neo-liberal modernization of the public sector. Taking…

Visual Literacy: An Institutional Imperative

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Metros, Susan E.; Woolsey, Kristina

2006-01-01

Academics have a long history of claiming and defending the superiority of verbal over visual for representing knowledge. By dismissing imagery as mere decoration, they have upheld the sanctity of print for academic discourse. However, in the last decade, digital technologies have broken down the barriers between words and pictures, and many of…

Discussing the Greenhouse Effect: Children's Collaborative Discourse Reasoning and Conceptual Change.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mason, Lucia; Santi, Marina

1998-01-01

Investigates fifth-grade students' conceptual changes toward the greenhouse effect and global warming due to sociocognitive interaction developed in small and large group discussion in an authentic classroom context during an environmental education unit. Classroom discussions led the children to integrate new scientific knowledge into their…

Performance Evaluation of an Online Argumentation Learning Assistance Agent

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Huang, Chenn-Jung; Wang, Yu-Wu; Huang, Tz-Hau; Chen, Ying-Chen; Chen, Heng-Ming; Chang, Shun-Chih

2011-01-01

Recent research indicated that students' ability to construct evidence-based explanations in classrooms through scientific inquiry is critical to successful science education. Structured argumentation support environments have been built and used in scientific discourse in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, no research work in the…