Temporary Anchors, Impermanent Shelter: Can the Field of Education Model a New Approach to Academic Work?

Through a discussion of three pedagogical instances--based on classroom discourse, student writing, and program development--the authors examine education as an academic field, arguing that its disciplinary practices and perspectives invite interdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinarity to bridge from the academy to issues, problems, and strengths beyond it. Interdisciplinarity--understood as temporary “groundlessness”--emerges as a means to apprehend and respond to problems that in the context of past frustrations and failures may seem insurmountable; the willingness to not-know inspires new paradigms, experiences, and relationships. Extra-disciplinarity highlights the many chords running between academe and the rest of the world. Using this framework, we discuss the featured pedagogical instances as small-scale models for changing the power structures that have historically silenced some perspectives and knowledges, thus opening these structures to new inputs and connections. We conclude that while this work has no guarantees and is never complete, we must keep trying to connect beyond our academic disciplines and ourselves, both to learn and to more effectively impact the world

Students as Leaders and Learners: Toward Self-Authorship and Social Change on a College Campus

In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development

Students as Leaders and Learners: Toward Self-Authorship and Social Change on a College Campus

In this article we present a case study of undergraduate students’ experiences in several leadership programs at Bryn Mawr College. Through a collaborative action research study, we identified three interrelated sets of practices in which student participants engage: discerning differences and bringing those differences into dialogue; revising their sense of themselves and becoming more serious students; and revising leadership relationships and creating community. We offer this study as an illustration of and commentary on Baxter Magolda’s theory of self-authorship and students’ development as leaders for social change — an illustration that highlights the close connection between self-development and leadership development

Steal This Classroom: Teaching and Learning Unbound

In college classrooms, an urban high school, a public library, a playground, and a women’s prison, Anne Dalke and Jody Cohen share scenes where teaching and learning take them by surprise; these are moments of uncertainty, sometimes constructed as failure. They weave through their own voices those of students and colleagues, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary forms of teaching and learning. Classrooms are sometimes “stolen” by the complex systems surrounding and permeating the activities that take place there; Jody and Anne explore ways to steal them back. Examining what is hidden but present in such moments can turn them into breakthroughs, powerful learning for educators and students—revealing how failure itself might not be what it seems. Anne and Jody try out alternative tales, exploring a pedagogical orientation that is ecological in the largest sense, engaging teachers and students in re-thinking learning and teaching in classrooms, and in their larger lives, as complex, enmeshed, volatile eco-systems. Not solving the contradictions, but abstracting from the immediate, they offer a dialogue, telling hard stories and funny ones, involving others’ stories in response, demonstrating the complex playfulness of collaborative and transdisciplinary work. They make concrete suggestions about how academic and other structures might open up; they also remain porous and interactive, inviting reader-participants to join in transfiguring what spaces of teaching and learning are and can be-and-do

Age-related differences in adaptation during childhood: The influences of muscular power production and segmental energy flow caused by muscles

Acquisition of skillfulness is not only characterized by a task-appropriate application of muscular forces but also by the ability to adapt performance to changing task demands. Previous research suggests that there is a different developmental schedule for adaptation at the kinematic compared to the neuro-muscular level. The purpose of this study was to determine how age-related differences in neuro-muscular organization affect the mechanical construction of pedaling at different levels of the task. By quantifying the flow of segmental energy caused by muscles, we determined the muscular synergies that construct the movement outcome across movement speeds. Younger children (5-7 years; n = 11), older children (8-10 years; n = 8), and adults (22-31 years; n = 8) rode a stationary ergometer at five discrete cadences (60, 75, 90, 105, and 120 rpm) at 10% of their individually predicted peak power output. Using a forward dynamics simulation, we determined the muscular contributions to crank power, as well as muscular power delivered to the crank directly and indirectly (through energy absorption and transfer) during the downstroke and the upstroke of the crank cycle. We found significant age × cadence interactions for (1) peak muscular power at the hip joint [Wilks' Lambda = 0.441, F(8,42) = 2.65, p = 0.019] indicating that at high movement speeds children produced less peak power at the hip than adults, (2) muscular power delivered to the crank during the downstroke and the upstroke of the crank cycle [Wilks' Lambda = 0.399, F(8,42) = 3.07, p = 0.009] indicating that children delivered a greater proportion of the power to the crank during the upstroke when compared to adults, (3) hip power contribution to limb power [Wilks' Lambda = 0.454, F(8,42) = 2.54, p = 0.023] indicating a cadence-dependence of age-related differences in the muscular synergy between hip extensors and plantarflexors. The results demonstrate that in spite of a successful performance, children construct the task of pedaling differently when compared to adults, especially when they are pushed to their performance limits. The weaker synergy between hip extensors and plantarflexors suggests that a lack of inter-muscular coordination, rather than muscular power production per se, is a factor that limits children's performance ranges