Student independence and teaching design

The work of the GRASP Project at the King Alfred's College has been concerned for five years with the relationship between designing, learning and teaching. This investigation has led to an increasing interest in teaching approaches which promote student independence in the context of design education and design training. The Department of Design and Technology in which the GRASP Project is located has over this period been faced with dramatic rises in staff-student ratios. This paper reveals the way in which a strong conceptual underpinning in design education combined with a well thought-through commitment to the GRASP model for achieving results has supported progress despite a worsening educational climate. It also reveals how this work has contributed to team building, around a shared sense of purpose. As such it should be valuable for others engaged in the forming of teaching teams in design and technology

Symbolic Boundaries and the Clinical Preparation of Teacher Candidates

The purpose of this essay is to make sense of the two divides in the clinical preparation of teacher candidates: (1) between professional knowledge and skilled practice, and (2) between university-based courses and school-based field experiences. This essay extends the work of Lamont and Molnár (2002) to conceptualize symbolic boundaries related to these two divides. Within this framework, a review of the research highlights three main implications. First, teacher education programs need to design teaching and learning experiences that allow teacher candidates to use the professional knowledge they have gained through their university courses across multiple educational settings. Second, such collaborative efforts, we argue, would help bridge the institutions’ approaches to teaching and learning and, therefore, send a more consistent message to teacher candidates about what constitutes professional knowledge and skilled practice in teaching. Third, a rapid and dramatic shift to online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic highlights these divides even further and pushes universities and PK-12 schools to reevaluate how teachers and teacher candidates are developing professional knowledge and skilled practice. Using symbolic boundaries as a framework for understanding existing divides – divides that are likely to shift and change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic – may help determine how to better prepare today’s teacher candidates for the challenges of classroom teaching

Evocation of the dramatic in David Rubadiri’s poetry

James David Rubadiri (1930-2018), poet, playwright, novelist, academic, diplomat, and political activist, is no stranger to many literary scholars in Africa and beyond. His popularity is not a result of his thespian skills—he acted Othello once—or skills in fiction writing (although he did try his hand at novel writing, producing No Bride Price), but mainly a result of his teaching and his skills in poetry. Although he is famous as a poet, his poetic harvest is rather minimal—his only collection, An African Thunderstorm and Other Poems, boasts only twenty-three poems. What the poems lack in numbers, they more than compensate for in the energy and beauty that they radiate, beauty that has seen most of them translated and anthologised around the world over the years. It is also this energy, the beauty of composition, and their tackling of relevant themes, which have made his poems the staple of many poetry classes in Africa and beyond. In this paper I analyse Rubadiri’s poems that appear in the collection An African Thunderstorm and Other Poems. I argue that the success of Rubadiri’s poetry is primarily based on his evocation of the dramatic, which is in turn reliant on his economic use of language, his descriptive skills, and his use of vivid and evocative images. These aspects do not only render the poetry enduring and memorable, but they also make the poems and the action in them spring to life, cementing the legacy of the poet as one of the accomplished poets of his generation in Africa. The discussion in this paper is divided into three parts. The first part examines how Rubadiri infuses a sense of the dramatic in poems that address issues of colonisation and blackness, the second part discusses how the poet evokes drama in poems about neocolonialism and postcolonial disenchantment, and the final section shows how Rubadiri’s use of imagery and  diction in poems about African life and the environment give the poems a vividness, sense of immediacy and a dramatic quality.Keywords: Rubadiri, Malawian poetry, style, language, evocative imagery, Africa,colonialis

Lessons from Brecht: a Brechtian approach to drama, texts and education

In this piece the authors seek to re-read Brecht in terms of his contribution to drama education and pedagogic thought, rather than viewing him in conventional terms as a cultural icon and ‘great practitioner’ of theatre. The authors believe that a Brechtian conceptual framework, with its emphasis on critical production and critical audiences, is still pertinent to the conditions of contemporary cultural production. A Brechtian framework is seen as a way of taking drama education beyond the conventional polarities where on the one hand it is seen as a process of moral and social education dealing with universal truths, or on the other hand, as a set of formal and critical techniques

From teaching practices to theory-building:Synthesising unviersity lecturers' experiences with international education

Since the Bologna Agreement 1999 we have witnessed a dramatic transformation in the European internal market for higher education and research. This is a regional variant of a global ‘internationalisation’, characterised by a dramatic increase in student mobility, the rapid expansion of English-medium education, and new regional or national policies catering for the provision of ‘internationalised’ university programmes. The change process has inspired a wealth of publications on internationalisation and policy-making, curricular innovation, and (new) pedagogic practices (e.g. Killick 2017, Leask 2015, Hudzik 2014, Hellsten/Reid 2008). This may prompt the critical reader to ask: What more is there to add?Departing from the position of a practice researcher, the current author retorts that now is the time when one can truly begin to grasp how, in a more practical sense, macro-level processes of ‘internationalisation’ have transformed actors’ performance of teaching and learning in university classrooms around the world. Building on a comprehensive literature review and empirical material collected between 2007 and 2018 the book Teaching practices in a global learning environment (Tange, forthcoming) documents how internationalisation is manifest in the structural factors conditioning academics’ teaching practice, the actual ‘doings’ and ‘sayings’ that lecturers engage in when performing international education, and the reflections on practice that motivate some actors to modify their pedagoges in response to a diverse student cohort. The theoretical framework builds on the practice theories of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1988), Theodore Schatzki (2002) and John Dewey (1997, 2011), which enables a consideration of field structures conditioning teachers’ action, concrete teaching and learning practices, as well as the possibility of change through ‘Learning by Doing’. The paper provides an overview of the key contents in Global teaching practices, including the four structural factors of policy, mobility, language and discipline, and the five teaching practices of education design, curricular context, classroom roles and routines, multicultural teamwork and exam performances. This motivates a reflection on how practices change, suggesting that the key word of ‘teaching practices’ be read both with reference to the concrete forms of action and interaction undertaken by international educators, and the change process involved when teachers attempt to accommodate learners in transition from diverse linguistic, educational, disciplinary and socio-cultural backgrounds. The author works from a position inspired by the principles of Grounded Theory. This means that any thematic perspective introduced in the book has been established based on experiences conveyed by 68 Danish and British university lecturers involved in the practice of international education. Subsequently, interview respondents’ experiences have been compared to the findings in previous empirical research, theories on internationalisation, language and education as well as document analyses of a variety of material, including institutional policies, course syllabi and staff biographies. Hence, any theory-building emerge from actors’ practical understandings and grounding in particular institutional, disciplinary and socio-cultural contexts

Volume 33, Number 07 (July 1915)

Developing Automatic Muscular Sense Let Money Making be Secondary Nervousness in Piano Playing (interview with Alberto Jonás) Musical Recollections of Four Score Years Thinking Practice Getting the Right Viewpoint in Teaching Music Needed Reforms in the Essentials of Piano Technic Question of Pianos Aim of Productive Practice Paths of Reform in Musical Education Interesting Civic Movement in Music Enriching the Means of Tone Production Aim Above the Mark! Present Day Pianist\u27s Goal Danger of Short Cuts in Music Music a Numan Necessity in Modern Life (symposium) Elements of Beauty in Rhythm How to Acquire Rapidity? Romance of Our National Anthem: The Dramatic Origin of The Star Spangled Banner Ten Hints for the Home Recital On Teaching the Fingering of Scales to Beginners Care of a Piano Emotional Aids to Technique How Berlioz Studied Instrumentation Need for Better Music for Moving-Pictures Twelve Ways of Cheating Yourself Through an Opera-glass Happy Musical Party Out-of-doors Composer Few Seasonable Styles Mis-matched Opera Heroes (a game) Musical Signs Charles Dickens and the Music of the Future Trying to Accomplish Too Much Test Points in Fine Scale-Playinghttps://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/etude/1614/thumbnail.jp

A curriculum for excellence review of research literature

Research suggests that the arts play significant part in the education of all pupils. The findings of numerous, wide-ranging studies indicate that the Expressive Arts fulfil a vital function in the development learners, meeting many of the outcomes described in the "Purposes of the Curriculum 3-18" diagram outlined on page 15 of "A Curriculum for Excellence". In the following review of recent research, it is evident that the arts provide meaningful contexts through which learners can actively participate in a wide range of learning experiences. It is evident that learning should take place in the arts: each separate discipline has its own knowledge and skills base. But learning also takes place through the arts. Because of the high level of active engagement and enjoyment experienced during good Expressive Arts lessons, learners gain a sense of achievement and increased self-esteem. Across the arts areas, learners are offered a very wide and varied range of experiences, enabling them to communicate in a number of ways, for example, orally, visually, through body language and through music. The collaborative nature of many arts activities enables learners to develop skills in working cooperatively with others, often in problem-solving, creative situations. The arts also offer many opportunities for learners to be pro-active and enterprising within meaningful and relevant contexts

Relationships in drama education : a pedagogical model

The pedagogical model proposed in this chapter has been developed as a result of the analysis of a wide range of data, gathered over a series of educational drama lessons with pupils aged 10-12 years in three Scottish Primary schools. The data comprised: interviews; observers' commentaries; pupils' evaluations; teachers' reflective journal entries and video recordings of the lessons. Close analysis of the data uncovered an overarching theme: that the nature of the relationships betweenthe participants in drama lessons, and between the participants and the learning contexts, afforded a climate in which learning (in its widest sense) can take place

Dear Jacques ... Lecoq in the twenty first century

This essay considers Jacques Lecoq's influence almost 20 years after his death. Arguing that Lecoq's pedagogy is largely as relevant today as it was when he was still alive, the author speculates whether Lecoq would have welcomed developments in the use of digital technology within live performance. The essay proposes that much of Lecoq's teaching with its emphasis on play, complicite, invention, imagination and the creative actor remains relevant to contemporary developments in site-specific, immersive and postdramatic theatre. The essay is constructed in the form of a posthumous letter to Jacques Lecoq