65 research outputs found
Toward an Ecology of Life-making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur
This essay advances Marxist feminism’s attention to social reproduction in order to account more fully for the relations that support life-making. The ecology of life-making is, I argue, an under-developed facet of social reproduction theory and an extension of its reach. I begin by clarifying social reproduction theory’s explanations of the value of reproductive labor time to life-making. I then turn to feminist political ecology’s attention to capital’s deregulation of life and to Native feminist onto-epistemologies as they expand the material history of capital’s theft of time and imposition of embodied debt. In the essay’s final section, I consider the writings of Meridel Le Sueur as theoretical contributions to a feminist ecology of life-making. I highlight literature’s capacity to render a history of life-making under capitalism as a complex and contradictory felt experience. From the 1930s through the last decades of the twentieth century, Le Sueur attended to the embodied debts incurred by capitalism’s theft of reproductive time and elaborated an ecology enriched by materialist and Indigenous thought. In countering capital’s fragmented temporalities, knowledges, and dependencies, her work exemplifies a timely feminist representation of life-making as critical re-membering and contributes to an ecology of life-making that more effectively addresses capital’s escalating squeeze on life
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Pedagogical approaches for technology-integrated science teaching
The two separate projects described have examined how teachers exploit computer-based technologies in supporting learning of science at secondary level. This paper examines how pedagogical approaches associated with these technological tools are adapted to both the cognitive and structuring resources available in the classroom setting. Four teachers participated in the first study, undertaken as part of the InterActive Education project in Bristol; all of them used multimedia simulations in their lessons. The second study presented was part of the wider SET-IT project in Cambridge; 11 teachers in eight schools were observed using multimedia simulations, data logging tools and interactive whiteboards. Teachers were interviewed in all cases to elicit their pedagogical thinking about their classroom use of ICT.
The findings suggest that teachers are moving away from only using ‘real’ experiments in their practice. They are exploring the use of technologies to encourage students to engage in “What If” explorations where the outcomes of ‘virtual’ experiments can be immediately accessed, for example through using a simulation. However, this type of activity can serve just as a mechanism for revealing – and indeed reinforcing – students’ informal conceptions if cognitive conflict is not generated or remains unresolved. The teachers in our studies used simulations, data logging, projected animations and other dynamic digital resources as tools to encourage and support prediction and to demonstrate scientific concepts and physical processes – thereby ‘bridging the gap’ between scientific and informal knowledge. They also integrated technology carefully with other practical activities so as to support stepwise knowledge building, consolidation and application.
Research of this kind has design implications for both curriculum-related activities and emerging computer-based learning technologies, in terms of helping us to understand how teachers capitalise upon the technology available in supporting students to construct links between scientific theory and empirical evidence
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