European teachers’ concerns and experiences in responding to diversity in the classroom

There seems to be a higher challenge today for teachers across Europe and the USA to respond to an increasing diversity of students. Responding to diversity implies understanding individual student characteristics and matching differentiated teaching within an inclusive atmosphere to enable everyone to participation actively in all classroom activities (see e.g., Gay, 2000). Student diversity is seen as arising from three main sources: (a) A cultural one due to the impact of an increasing number of immigrants and increasing mobility within and across countries. Recent EU reports note that “Teachers may be confronted with different cultures, religions, and languages in a single learning environment” (Eurydice, 2002, p.48); “Teachers/ trainers are faced with socially, culturally and ethnically diverse pupils/trainees and challenges them to deal with more and more heterogeneous classes” (EC Directorate General for Education and Culture 2003, 35). (b) Both the above reports add a second major factor: the policy of mainstreaming of students with impairments or special needs, which calls “for the acquisition by teachers of specific skills, such as the ability to offer teaching geared to individual needs and adapt the curriculum accordingly” (Eurydice 2002, 47). One may add to this the wider democratic concerns on the entitlement of each student to reach his or her potential, whether as gifted or as having a different learning style: “It is unacceptable for any teacher to respond to any group of children (or any individual child) as though the children were inappropriate, inconvenient, beyond hope, or not in need of focused attention” (Tomlinson 2001, 21). “The teacher ... has to adapt or prepare the curriculum in such a way that the needs of all pupils, those with special educational needs, gifted pupils and their peers, are sufficiently met” (Meijer 2003, Para 3.2.2). (c) There is also a new concern about the difficulties that are faced in modern society by youths who fail to achieve adequate levels of literacy or drop out of school, together with an awareness of the multiplicity and complexity of competencies required in today’s society (Gregory and Kuzmich 2005). This concern has been strong in Europe but is also a worldwide concern: In the learning society, social stratification is increasingly based on a division between the haves and have-nots in terms of skills and qualifications. Dropping out from school, therefore, has much more lasting consequences than it had in the past, since it can mark an individual for life and greatly narrow the range of career choices open to them. Schools are at the centre of the learning society and life-long learning begins there. (EC 2001, Sect. 4.5, see also Eurydice 1994, UNESCO 2004)peer-reviewe

A search for transiting planets in the β\beta Pictoris system

The bright $(V=3.86)$ star $\beta$ Pictoris is a nearby young star with a debris disk and gas giant exoplanet, $\beta$ Pictoris b, in a multi-decade orbit around it. Both the planet's orbit and disk are almost edge-on to our line of sight. We carry out a search for any transiting planets in the $\beta$ Pictoris system with orbits of less than 30 days that are coplanar with the planet $\beta$ Pictoris b. We search for a planetary transit using data from the BRITE-Constellation nanosatellite BRITE-Heweliusz, analyzing the photometry using the Box-Fitting Least Squares Algorithm (BLS). The sensitivity of the method is verified by injection of artificial planetary transit signals using the Bad-Ass Transit Model cAlculatioN (BATMAN) code. No planet was found in the BRITE-Constellation data set. We rule out planets larger than 0.6 $\mathrm{R_J}$ for periods of less than 5 days, larger than 0.75 $\mathrm{R_J}$ for periods of less than 10 days, and larger than 1.05 $\mathrm{R_J}$ for periods of less than 20 days.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in A&

DTMp : a comenius 2.1 project to produce a differentiated teaching module for primary school trainee teachers

This work was supported by the EU through Comenius 2.1 granr no. 118096 for the DTMp Project.As European classrooms become more heterogeneous, the movement towards inclusive education becomes more urgent as well as more challenging. This paper describes the process of developing and running a proposal for a Comenius 2.1 project aimed at developing training materials for the preparation of pre-service teachers in responding to diversity in primary classrooms. The project, started in October 2004, has collected the concerns and experiences of responding to diversity of 35 teachers (5 each from 7 different countries) through semi-structured interviews, and produced the first draft of a multilingual handbook for trainees. The handbook in hard copy and web-based format, will be piloted in 2005-06 in the seven participating countries, namely Malta (coordinator), Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. This paper will focus on the process of trans-European sharing of research and development of the training course.peer-reviewe

Responding to student diversity : tutor's manual

The handbook was conceived during a meeting in Malta in 2003 among an international group of teacher educators spanning from Sweden to Malta and Greece and to the U.S. The concept was then worked out as a Comenius 2.1 Project DTMp (Differentiated Teaching Module – primary) over three years from 2004 to 2007 (see Box 1, p. viii, and www.dtmp.org). The DTMp Project team consisted of an even wider and more diverse group coming from seven EU countries, namely Malta (Coordinator), Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, Sweden, and United Kingdom. The background of each partner varied as well: one from an inclusive education concern, one from differentiated teaching, two from issues of disability and one from issues of disaffected students, one from socio-emotional development concerns, and one each from the pedagogy of language and mathematics. We also listened to teachers from the seven countries who were trying to reach out to the diversity of their children in the classroom, and you will find the text peppered with the experiences they related to us. We felt that this diversity enriched our teamwork and our products.peer-reviewe

Depression and play in early childhood

Contains fulltext : 132431.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 15 december 2014Promotor : Riksen-Walraven, J.M.A. Co-promotor : Burk, W.J.109 p

Passende competenties voor passend onderwijs Onderzoek naar competenties in het basisonderwijs

Contains fulltext : rapport-r2032.pdf (Publisher's version ) (Open Access