Eight out of ten isn't good enough: challenging teachers' perceptions of assessment

One of the more challenging aspects of training teachers is demonstrating that assessment is a great deal more complex than simply marking students' work. It is necessary to show that assessment takes a number of forms, that it is used for a variety of purposes and that it must be applied in a systematic and structured way in order to be effective. This paper describes the techniques used at the Institute of Education, University of London, to encourage training teachers to look at assessment in a new way. The whole-year programme is outlined, but emphasis is placed on an introductory session held at the start of the course. Ostensibly a simple ice-breaking exercise, the game in fact demonstrates many of the pit-falls of assessment and brings to life terms which the trainees will encounter more formally later on in the course

Negation, 'presupposition' and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing

Biography

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Boston Universit

The Hero Who Overslept

"We all love a lie in, but the alarm clock is definitely ringing. The time has finally come to throw back the duvet and leap into this playfully unhinged show about finding the hero under the covers. It’s a sincere and heartfelt invitation to defy indifference and experience a new, tender love story for our long-neglected earth, one in which we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. In a never seen before mix of climate science, psychology, philosophy and surrealist dance, our unlikely heroes strive to remake themselves in preparation for an overdue remaking of the world. These quirky ‘Clark Kents’ of climate change will shake your inner snooze button awake, so come see a performance that stretches what’s possible in an hour but will be a lifetime in the living.

Interview with Robyn Davidson

In an interview with Tim Youngs, conducted on 8 July 2004, Robyn Davidson discusses her relationship to Australia and her peripatetic existence, which she compares with the movement of traditional nomads. Refusing an easy identification with them, she nevertheless admits having a romantic feeling for their lifeways. Modern forms of post-industrial rootlessness, she acknowledges, are not the same as ancient forms of nomadism, which are disappearing with globalisation, a process whose effects she plans to represent in a series of films. Reflecting on her travel books, Tracks and Desert Places, Davidson talks of how they are artefacts and their narrators creations. The construction of a persona affords her a welcome anonymity. Writing about a journey is to relive it but also creates a distance between the event and the writing. Davidson likens travel writing to the novel and she considers some of the characteristics of women's writing. Finally, developing some comments made in her introduction to the Picador Book of Journeys, Davidson talks about the future of travel writing

\u27Do We Still Quake?\u27: An Ethnographic and Historical Enquiry

Michele Tarter\u27s (2004) essay, on first generation Friends and their prophecy of celestial flesh, explores the striking bodily manifestations of their spiritual experience, particularly \u27quaking\u27. Reflecting on this, she writes: \u27it is precisely what we no longer do: quake\u27. Using interview data from a small group of British Friends I shall show that some twenty-first-century Friends certainly do quake. I use accounts of early quaking, a variety of Quaker commentators, and historical accounts of the understanding of the body, to show the ways in which current quaking is different, and differently understood, from that of early Friends