Professional Learning Portfolios for Argumentation in School Science

This paper reports on the use of portfolios in a continuing professional development programme to advance teachers’ skills in their pedagogy of argumentation. The programme adopted a cyclical process of expert input- teacher practice- sharing practice, in order for professional learning to include reflective analysis of growing accomplishment. Accomplishment was initially defined according to previous research and development on the teaching of argumentation, but was redefined during the programme as teachers shared practice and discussed their achievements. Portfolios were used to help teachers apply their learning, collate evidence of their accomplishment and share reflective analysis of practice with other colleagues on the programme. The paper includes extracts of two teachers’ portfolios; these provide evidence of each teacher’s developing accomplishment in the teaching of argumentation. Portfolios are idiosyncratic and are constructed according to an individual teacher’s motivations, interpretations and situations. Teachers need structure and guidance in creating purposeful portfolios that enhance reflective practice

Friends at Mid-Century

The Isaac T. and Lida K. Johnson Lectureship, made possible by their gift, was created by the Executive Committee of the Five Years Meeting in its sessions of April, 1940. The creative minute of the Executive Committee is in part as follows: It is the duty of the Executive Committee to determine the use of this money and the Central Committee submits this recommendation: (1) that the gift be made a continuing memorial to these dear friends and (2) that the memorial be in the form of a lectureship for the Five Years Meeting, and, as it may direct, to be known as the Isaac T. and Lida K. Johnson Lectureship. It is further recommended that these lectures shall within the jurisdiction of the Executive Committee, be restricted to the field of Christian scholarship and the Christian message and its application to life. It is the confident expectation of the Executive Committee that not only the constituency of the Five Years Meeting, but all of Quakerism will be enriched by the successive messages made possible by this gift.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/quakerbooks/1072/thumbnail.jp

“Reread me backwards”: Deciphering the Past in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day

Set during the midst of the London Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day revolves around a narrative of espionage, but unlike many novels from the spy genre, it refuses to disclose all of its secrets. Instead, the novel’s dense and complex language, which so effectively expresses the dislocating effects of a city under attack, resists an easy or uncomplicated reading. This article examines the motif of reading within the novel, which manifests when its protagonist, Stella Rodney, learns her lover Robert is a Nazi spy. In her efforts to locate proof of his defection, Stella becomes caught in a recurrent but indeterminable task of rereading past events, a movement which attempts to remember the past but also foregrounds a fundamental inability to ever wholly resolve its enigmas. When Stella fails to read her past for lost clues, she is prevented from viewing the events of her life as a coherent and meaningful narrative. The novel’s difficult language reflects this lack of resolution, refusing to assimilate the events it depicts into a straightforward account. With its wartime setting as a disorienting backdrop, The Heat of the Day undermines the purpose of reading as the discovery of sense and meaning, producing instead only more questions and mysteries

Entering the Door

How do physical limitations affect the mind, and how can you overcome them? Imagine one day you wake up bound by physical limitations. What can you do? My research helps someone realize that having limitations isn’t the end of the world.I myself have restrictions, yet I am defying the odds.My art became integral to helping me overcome limitations; because of this, my thesis research educates others on the reality of living with limitations by helping them connect with their own struggles