This study examines personal and emotional metaphors of prospective economics teachers about the roles they themselves as teachers and their pupils would play by analysing their drawings and responses to open questions. This is a longitudinal study that analyses the evolution of future instructors using two periods: before and after their teaching practicum. Metaphors are categorised into four classes: behaviourist/transmissive, cognitivist/constructivist, situative/socio-historical, and self-referential. The categories for emotions are primary or social and positive, negative, or neutral. (...) The results show that the highest percentage of metaphors for the teacher’s role in both questionnaires were cognitivist/constructivist. Comparison of the findings before and after the teaching practicum revealed no changes in most of the participants’ metaphors and associated models. The analysis also reveals that among those who change, the tendency is to evolve towards more pupil-centred metaphors and associated models. The most common pupil metaphors are behaviourist and cognitivist, increasing after the practicum. Finally, most of the emotions expressed are positive and social, also increasing after the practicum. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is a movement that teaches reasoning and argumentative skills to children of all ages. This book looks at the progress that P4C has made in the UK in addressing issues of literacy, critical thinking, PSHE, education for sustainable development and wider issues such as bullying. Chapters identify the different theories and practices that have emerged and discuss the necessity for a reflective approach that P4C brings to education. The book highlights how this movement can fit into (...) the early years, primary and secondary curriculum and the challenges and rewards that come with it. Chapters include: The Evolution of Philosophy for Children in the UK Pedagogical Judgement Negotiating meaning in classrooms: P4C as an exemplar of dialogic pedagogy The impact of P4C on teacher educators Being and becoming a philosophical teacher This will be an invaluable guide for all those interested in P4C and studying courses on Early Childhood Studies, Education Studies and Initial Teacher Training courses. (shrink)

Research in science education has recognized the importance of history and philosophy of science (HPS), and this has facilitated the evaluation of science textbooks. Purpose of this chapter is to review research based on analyses of science textbooks that explicitly use a history and philosophy of science framework. This review has focused on studies published in the 15-year period (1996–2010) and has drawn on the following major science education journals: International Journal of Science Education, Journal of Research in Science (...) class='Hi'>Teaching, Science Education, and Science & Education. Based on HPS-related criteria, 52 articles were selected for review, and of these 28 were published in Science & Education, which clearly shows the importance of HPS for this journal. Selected articles were classified in the following subject areas depending on the textbooks analyzed: university biology textbooks (n = 2), university chemistry textbooks (n = 14), university physics textbooks (n = 17), and primary, secondary, and high school textbooks (n = 19). Results obtained revealed the following: (a) Most biology, chemistry, physics, and school science textbooks lack a history and philosophy of science perspective; (b) most of the textbooks analyzed were published in the USA and to a much lesser extent in other countries; (c) few studies provided details of the procedure and reliability of the application of criteria/rubric for analyzing textbooks; (d) some of the topics analyzed in the textbooks were nature of science, atomic structure, Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, special theory of relativity, and evolution; (e) textbooks avoided including controversial and difficult aspects of different topics (e.g., concepts of force, weight, heat, temperature, origin of the quantum hypothesis, oil drop experiment, Millikan’s data supported Einstein’s photoelectric equation but not his theory); and (f) various science topics provide an opportunity to illustrate the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, and still very few textbooks referred to this important aspect. As textbooks do refer to laws and theories while referring to historical content, it is concluded that HPS is already “inside” the science curriculum provided textbook authors make an effort to scrutinize the historical reconstructions while dealing with the different topics. (shrink)

« The students’ results are quite satisfactory, but I need to do more and more for the development of their knowledge and the evolution of my practices ». Leo is a secondary school teacher in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) who is being followed in a case study and a mentorship that focuses on the connection between his epistemological beliefs, his conceptions of teaching and learning, and his practices. This follow-up is part of a post-doctoral (...) fellowship in Quebec, which focuses on the idea that teachers’ relationship to knowledge is a part of their habitus that influences their practices. How then can Leo’s relationship to knowledge and epistemological/pedagogical beliefs explain his need to « do more and more »? What impact do they have on his practices? What teacher/researcher mentoring should be considered? Filmed observations of his SHS teaching, post-observation interviews and mentoring sessions were analyzed. We note an evolution in her practices, moving from a quantitative to a qualitative relationship with academic knowledge. (shrink)

Educated Papua New Guineans’ conceptual ecologies need to accommodate competing and conflicting traditional ethnoscientific, Western religious and modern scientific paradigms. Papua New Guinea is a constitutionally self-declared ‘Christian country’ and evolution is a controversial issue. The upper secondary school biology syllabus contains a terminating unit on evolution but the curriculum is of expatriate design and the rapid localisation of senior educational positions makes the views of indigenous teaching personnel a high research priority, particularly in the light (...) of the current upgrading of secondary teacher training to degree level. This paper presents data arising from a study of trainee primary and secondary science teachers’ views towards evolution education. Primary science trainees were found to exhibit a poor awareness of the centrality of evolution to modern biology. For secondary science trainees, it was found that exposure to upper secondary school biology, in spite of adding little to students’ knowledge about evolution, was associated with their increasingly positive attitudes towards evolution education, as was the dual acceptance of evolution and religious belief. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 116-133 [Access article in PDF] Writing and the Disembodiment of Language Tony Jackson I AS IS WELL KNOWN, the study of writing in relation to speech played an important part in opening the door to poststructuralist theory, especially in the seminal works of Jacques Derrida. 1 Taking off from his rereading of Saussurean structuralism, Derrida famously made the deconstructive case that reversed and (...) then dissolved the ancient understanding of writing as the secondary, parasitic representation of the authentic signs of spoken language. But the question may well be asked: How will our understanding of writing and speech change if we take off from a nonrelativistic theory of representation? For it is from a thoroughly relativized theory of signs that poststructuralist theory and its derivatives all one way or the other begin. We will look at this in more detail below, but for now suffice it to say that this kind of theory always takes it that representation precedes the real in a fundamental way. No natural relationship exists between any sign and its referent. Given this fundamental disjunction as a foundation, the various theories lead to the practical work of explaining how signification does manage to occur. For example, meaning is a function of logocentrism in Derrida; desire in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory; discourse in theory after Foucault; ideology in the various new historicisms; and so on. In contrast to these understandings of representation, cognitive linguistics—I will use this broad term to include findings from the related but differentiated subfields of cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, cognitive rhetoric—claims that at least on a very fundamental level semantics always precedes any actual manifestation of language, which is to say meaning precedes representation. This is because a foundational [End Page 116] level of universal concepts arises from biologically determined percepts. According to this view, crucial, general kinds of meaning are a function not of discourse or power but of the evolution of the human organism in the ecosystem of the third planet from the sun. 2In order to see how the cognitive linguistic arguments run, we will take an example from George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Lakoff brings in the work of cognitive anthropologist Eleanor Rosch in order to explain the way categorization functions in our perceptual interaction with the world. Rosch's findings, obtained through empirical studies using standard scientific methods, strongly suggest that human experience in its most general sense is "preconceptually structured" by our innate ability to categorize according to base-level prototypes (p. 270). Humans, even children as young as two years old, have a kind of gestalt cognitive process that tends to be oriented toward certain objects and features of the world, such that these objects and features—called cognitive reference points or prototypes—are universally "known," apart from culture and language. An example of this would be the response to primary colors as opposed to secondary colors. Rosch showed that even members of cultures lacking words for the primary colors found it easier to learn names for those colors than for secondary colors (pp. 40-41). We are, it appears, cognitively attuned to the primary colors. Further, we are cognitively constructed so as to sort colors automatically by gradations away from or closer to the primary colors. Culture will of course teach us certain beliefs about colors, but we do not "learn" to respond and operate on this basic level of perception.In the next step of the argument, we find that our "basic-level concepts correspond to [this] preconceptual structure" (p. 270). That is, in considering ourselves as linguistic creatures, we find that thinking or conceptuality also operates according to prototypes. Again, this is held to be true only of specifiable basic-level concepts. Though concepts that arise in cultural life may possibly "impose further structuring on what we experience," nonetheless, "basic experiential structures are present regardless of any such imposition of [learned] concepts" (p. 271). Evolutionarily, language would have to emerge after these innate perceptual structures. Language as a representation would also depend heavily on prototype categorization, not... (shrink)

Overview * Part I: Introduction * Philip Appleman, Darwin: On Changing the Mind * Part II: Darwin’s Life * Ernst Mayr, Who Is Darwin? * Part III: Scientific Thought: Just before Darwin * Sir Gavin de Beer, Biology before the Beagle * Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population * William Paley, Natural Theology * Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Lamarck, Zoological Philisophy * Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology * John Herschell, The Study of Natural (...) Philosophy * William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology * Alfred Russel Wallace, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type * Part IV: Selections from Darwin’s Work * The Voyage of the Beagle * o Chapter I. St. Jago-Cape de Verd Island o Chapter XVII. Galapagos Archipelago * On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection * o I. Extract from an unpublished Work on Species, by C. Darwin, Esq.... o II.of Letter from C. Darwin, Esq., to Prof. Asa Gray, Boston, U.S., dated Down, September 5th, 1857 * An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species, previously to the : Publication of This Work The Origin of Species * o Introduction o Chapter I. Variation under Domestication o Chapter II. Variation under Nature o Chapter III. Struggle for Existence o Chapter IV. Natural Selection o Chapter VI. Difficulties on Theory o Chapter IX. On the Imperfections of the Geological Record o Chapter XIII. Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs o Chapter XIV. Recapitulation and Conclusion * The Descent of Man * o Introduction o Chapter I. The Evidence of the Descent of Man from Some Lower Form o Chapter II. On the Manner of Development of Man from Some Lower Form o Chapter III. Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals o Chapter VI. On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man o Chapter VIII. Principles of Sexual Selection o Chapter XIX. Secondary Sexual Characters of Man o Chapter XX. Secondary Sexual Characters of Man-continued o Chapter XXI. General Summary and Conclusion * Part V: Darwin’s Influence on Science * THE VICTORIAN OPPOSITION TO DARWIN * o David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics o Adam Sedgwick, Objections to Mr. Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of Species o Sir Richard Owen, Darwin on the Origin of Species o Fleeming Jenkin, Review of the Origin of Species * VICTORIAN SUPPORTERS OF DARWIN * o Joseph Dalton Hooker, Flora Tasmaniae o Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Relations of Man to the Lowe Animals o Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology o Alfred Russel Wallace, The Debt of Science to Darwin * DARWIN AND THE SHAPING OF MODERN SCIENCE * o Scientific Method in Evolution o National Academy of Sciences, Evolution and the Nature of Science o Richard Dawkins, Explaining the Very Improbable o Lewis Thomas, On the Uncertainty of Science o Noretta Koetge, Postmodernisms and the Problem of Scientific Literary o Richard Dawkins, Science and Sensibility o The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis o Peter Bowler, The Evolutionary Synthesis o The Human Genealogy o Adam Kuper, The Chosen Primate o Ian Tattersall, Out of Africa Again... and Again? o Stephen Jay Gould, The Human Difference o Punctuated Equilibrium o Stephen Jay Gould, [On Punctuated Equilibrium] o Niles Eldredge, The Great Stasis Debate o Rethinking Taxonomy o Kevin Padian, Darwin’s Views of Classification o David L. Hull, Cladistic Analysis o Kevin Padian and Luis M. Chiappe, Cladistics in Action: The Origin of Birds and Their Flight o Evolution as Observable Fact o James L. Gould and William T. Keeton with Carol Grant Gould, How Natural Selection Operates o Peter r. Grant, Natural Selection and Darwin’s Finches o John A. Endler, Natural Selection in the Wild * Part VI: Darwinian Patterns in Social Thought * COMPETITION AND COOPERATION * o Richard Hofstadter, The Vogue of Spencer o Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth o Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid o Martin A. Nowak, Robert M. May, and Karl Sigmund, The Arithmetics of Mutual Help * NATURE AND NURTURE * o Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis o Stephen Jay Gould, Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determination o Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh, The New Creationism: Biology under Attack * EVOLUTION AND GENDER * o Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible o Nancy Makepeace Tanner, On Becoming Human o Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Descent of Woman o James Eli Adams, Woman Red in Tooth and Claw * EVOLUTION AND OTHER DISCIPLINES * o Edward O. Wilson, [On Consilience] o Randolph H. Nesse and George C. Williams, Evolution and the Origin of Disease o Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works o Steve Jones, The Set within the Skull * Part VII: Darwinian Influences in Philosophy and Ethics * John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy * Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Natural Selection as an Algorithmic Process * Michael Ruse Darwinian Epistemology * Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics * Julian Huxley, Evolutionary Ethics * Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, The Evolution of Ethics * Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals * Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue * Part VIII: Evolutionary Theory and Religious Theory * MAINSTREAM RELIGIOUS SUPPORT FOR EVOLUTION * o Pope John Paul II, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences o Central Conference of American Rabbis, On Creationism in School Textbooks o United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Evolution and Creationsim o The Lutheran World Federation, [Statement on Evolution] o The General Convention of the Episcopal Church, Resolution on Evolutionism and Creationism o Unitariuan Universalist Association, Resolution Opposing "Scientific Creationism" * FUNDAMENTALIST CREATIONISM * o Eugene C. Scott, Antievolution and Creationism in the United States o The Scopes Trial o Thomas McIver, Orthodox Jewish Creationists o Harun Yahya, [Islamic Creationism] o Seami Srila Prabhupada, [A Hare Krishna on Darwinian Evolution] o Institute for Creation Research, Tenets of Creationism o Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism o Thomas J. Wheeler, Review of Morris o Richard D. Sjolund and Betty McCollister, Evolution at the Grass Roots o Richard D. Sjolund, [Creationism versus Biotechnology] o Betty McCollister, [The Politics of Creationism] o Molleen Matsumara, What Do Christians Really Believe about Evolution? o National Center for Science Education, Seven Significant Court Decisions Regarding Evolution/Creation Issues * PERSONAL INCREDULITY AND ANTIEVOLUTIONISM * o Richard Dawkins, [The Argument from Personal Incredulity] o Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial o Eugenie C. Scott, Review of Johnson o Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box o Robert Dorit, Review of Behe o Michael Ruse, Darwin’s New Critics on Trial * SCIENTISTS’ OPPOSITION TO CREATIONISM * o American Association for the Advancement of Science, Forced Teaching of Creationist Beliefs in Public School Science Education o American Institute of Biological Sciences, Resolution Oposing Creationism in Science Courses o National Association of Biology Teachers, Statement on Teaching Evolution o National Academy of Sciences, Frequently Asked Questions about Evolution and the Nature of Science * FUNDAMENTALIST CREATIONISM AND THE VALUE OF SATIRE * o Michael Shermer, Genesis Revisted: A Scientific Creation Story o Philip Appleman, Darwin’s Ark * Part IX: Darwin and the Literary Mind * DARWIN’S LITERARY SENSIBILITY * o Charles Darwin, Autobiography o L. Robert Stevens, Darwin’s Humane Reading o George Levine, Darwin and Pain: Why Science Made Shakespeare Nauseating o Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots * DARWIN’S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE * o Lionel Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets o George Levine, Darwin among the Novelists o Joseph Wood Krutch, The Tragic Fallacy o Herbert J. Muller, Modern Tragedy o Philip Appleman, Darwin-Sightings in Recent Literature. (shrink)