Professional discourse, quality assurance and a practice integrated pre-service teacher education course: The Open University PGCE

The Open University (UK) Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme is a distance learning pre-service course in teacher education which integrates learning in the practice setting with university-based learning. This programme, which has flexible start and finish points and either training or assessment only routes, uses a web-based Needs Analysis process to reflect on prior experience and to determine individualized university and practice-based curriculum and assessment and is set in the context of an external regulatory framework which demands that teacher education courses in England fulfil certain national requirements and that student-teachers meet identified standards or competences. These requirements and standards are inspected by the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) and the outcomes of inspection lead to a 'Quality Grade' which determines government funding. This PGCE course, therefore, presents a radically flexible, practice integrated programme which faces both internal, University based quality assurance processes and procedures and 'high stakes' external inspection. This paper reflects on the tensions between quality compliance and quality assurance in practice integrated learning and suggests that quality assurance processes which open up a discourse of personal and professional development and which might support the exploration of dissonance between and within practices can improve, rather than merely maintain, programme quality

A new paradigm for teacher education: supported, open teaching and learning at the Open University

In this paper we draw on our experience over the last twelve years with three large scale distance education programmes for UK teachers to suggest factors which need to be considered by those embarking on large scale distance learning teacher education programmes. We focus on three programmes: a pre-service programme in initial teacher education, the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE); and two in-service programmes, the Learning Schools Programme (LSP) and TeachandLearn.net. which have made been significant in promoting access, entitlement and diversity. We suggest that in each case the programme structure and design was influenced by the interplay of a number of factors: the nature of teacher professionalism; current policies and priorities; financial constructs; technological tools and the regulatory framework. A number of themes emerge from analysis of participant data together with evaluation evidence back from institutions and individuals participating in these programmes. These can be identified as: (1) linear versus modular structures; (2) the importance of broking between the university and the school settings; (3) interactions of programme elements; (4) the role played by contemporary forms of ICTs. We draw together our experiences and research data for these programmes to suggest characteristics of the next generation of teacher education programmes

Building the foundations of professional expertise: creating a dialectic between work and formal learning

Recent critiques of management and teacher education curricula and teaching pay particular attention to the disconnection between the de-contextualised, formal knowledge and analytical techniques conveyed in university programs and the messy, ill-structured nature of practice. At the same time research into professional expertise suggests that its development requires bringing together different forms of knowledge and the integration of formal and non-formal learning with the development of cognitive flexibility. Such complex learning outcomes are unlikely to be achieved through a 'knowledge transmission' approach to curriculum design. In this article we argue that in many ways current higher education practices create barriers to developing ways of knowing which can underpin the formation of expertise. Using examples from two practice-focused distance learning courses, we explore the role of distance learning in enabling a dialogue between academic and workplace learning and the use of 'practice dialogues' among course participants to enable integration of learning experiences. Finally, we argue that we need to find ways in higher education of enabling students to engage in relevant communities of expertise, rather than drawing them principally into a community of academic discourse which is not well aligned with practice

Vacíos del ser y del saber en el Quijote

Desde la ambigua postura cervantina hacia la verosimilitud, el Quijote está invadido de vacíos, imposibilidades, paradojas y metalepsis que desempeñan una función profundamente creativa en la novela. En este ensayo se explora cómo Cervantes, valiéndose de tradiciones de pensamiento paradójico, presenta vacíos ontológicos y epistemológicos como una plenitud de ser y saber. Así descubre y desarrolla el equívoco "modus operandi" de la ficción. From its ambiguous stance towards verisimilitude, the Quixote is full of voids, impossibilities, paradoxes and metalepses that play a profoundly creative role in the novel. This essay explores how Cervantes, drawing upon traditions of paradoxical thinking, presents ontological and epistemological voids as a plenitude of being and knowing. He thus exposes and develops the equivocal workings of fiction

Boundaries, bricolage and student-teacher learning

This thesis explores the learning opportunities that are presented to student-teachers as they talk about teaching and learning with their school-based mentor and part-time university-based tutor. Against the backcloth of endemic complexity in initial teacher education, the study asks what these conversations tell us about student-teacher learning. What each of these participants talk about, the sources they draw on and the levels of agreement, disagreement or contradiction evident in their conversations with one another are issues that are central to developing an understanding of this research problem and to this thesis. The thesis adopts an activity theoretical approach, complemented by a social learning theory perspective, to investigate the way that boundaries between university study and the classroom as a site for work-based learning are seen as learning assets. The research is in two phases, the first in the form of a scoping questionnaire which attempts to identify the level of perceived contradiction by student-teachers on a PGCE course and the second in the form of four case studies. A variety of data-gathering tools and methods inform the studies and, in particular, content analysis is used to examine and report on conversations which centre around one taught lesson in each case. The study reveals understandings about the way that learning opportunities are presented to student-teachers. When teaching is presented as a process of bricolage and when provenance is not fully articulated, opportunities for expansive and systemic learning are restricted. The thesis argues that by looking at student-teacher learning systemically, with a focus on dissonance, student-teacher learning can be enhanced. It concludes with recommendations for the Open University PGCE programme team

The Temporal Nature of the Acute Stress Response and its Impact on Explicit Learning

Acute stress is commonly experienced by many throughout their lives. Given the demanding lifestyle of many career paths, it\u27s important to gauge the influence of these stressors upon cognitive performance. The present dissertation focus\u27 upon explicit learning in attempts to explore one avenue of the stress-cognition relationship. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) was used as a lab stressor for Experiments 1 and 2, in which participants are asked to give a speech and complete a difficult math task in front of 2 evaluators trained to monitor non-verbal behavior. Experiment 1 investigates the dynamic stress response during the minutes following stress, and how changes in the physiological response influence cognitive task performance. Stress was measured cardiovascularly, hormonally and as a self-reported appraisal of the situation. Findings from Experiment 1 revealed a time point 55 min following stress in which participants\u27 task performance was enhanced compared to a non-stressed comparison condition. These results suggest explicit task performance can be facilitated given a sufficient length of time following stress. Experiment 2 was designed in attempts to replicate the delayed RB task enhancement following the TSST, and given suggestions from the extant literature, explore if this task enhancement is attributed to enhanced working memory (WM). WM was assessed using an n-back task. Results confirmed the delayed RB task enhancement 55 min after stress, however no effect was present for n-back task performance. Experiment 3 was designed to understand if the RB task enhancement extended for a number of hours following stress. Additionally, cold-pressor stress was used to assess if the delayed task enhancement was stressor specific. In this task, participants were asked to submerge their hand in ice-water for up to 3 min. Results revealed a marginal task enhancement following a similar delay as Experiments 1 & 2, however the enhanced task performance did not remain hours later. Taken together the present experiments suggest a time frame following a delay from stress in which explicit learning and more specifically RB category learning is enhanced, however it doesn\u27t seem as if this effect is due to the impact of stress on WM

Norma social y ética privada: el adulterio femenino en Cervantes

Contrary to what has often been assumed, honor plays, more than an involuted literary subgenre, respond to a widely documented social reality of wife murders. Delving into a vital problem of his times, Cervantes differs from many other contemporary writers in that he explores the causes of women’s adultery in a very complex domain of affective dysfunctionalities that are usually ignored from the postulates of honor, which privileges above all the unquestionability of marriage as an institution. Quite remarkably, in El celoso extremeño blame is distributed among all the characters except the «adulteress» herself. Although something similar occurs in El curioso impertinente, critics have most often either blamed or belittled Camila, without taking seriously her subjectivity or her exceptional capacity for love and survival. It turns out that she is the only character in this story whose actions are coherent. In these and other Cervantine texts we see that marriage possesses no absolute value and that in certain circumstances a woman’s adultery is more than justifiable.Contrario a lo que se ha asumido con frecuencia, los dramas de honor no son patrimonio mayoritario de la literatura sino que responden a una realidad social ampliamente documentada. Metiéndose de lleno en un problema vital de su tiempo, Cervantes se distingue de otros muchos escritores de la época ya que suele explorar las causas del adulterio femenino en un contexto muy complejo de disfuncionalidades afectivas que normalmente se ignoran desde los postulados de la honra que privilegia ante todo la incuestionabilidad de la institución matrimonial. En El celoso extremeño se distribuye la culpa por todos los personajes salvo la propia «adúltera». Aunque algo parecido ocurre en El curioso impertinente, la crítica, con frecuencia, se ha conformado con culpar o minimizar a Camila sin apreciar su subjetividad ni sus excepcionales capacidades de amor y supervivencia. Resulta que ella es el único personaje de esta historia coherente en sus acciones. En los textos cervantinos vemos que el matrimonio no posee valores absolutos y que en ciertas circunstancias es más que comprensible y justificable el adulterio por parte de la mujer

Building the Foundations of Professional Expertise: creating a dialectic between work and formal learning

Recent critiques of management and teacher education curricula and teaching pay particular attention to the disconnection between the de-contextualised, formal knowledge and analytical techniques conveyed in university programmes and the messy, ill-structured nature of practice. At the same time, research into professional expertise suggests that its development requires bringing together different forms of knowledge and the integration of formal and nonformal learning with the development of cognitive flexibility. Such complex learning outcomes are unlikely to be achieved through a ‘knowledge transmission’ approach to curriculum design. In this article we argue that in many ways current higher education practices create barriers to developing ways of knowing which can underpin the formation of expertise. Using examples from two practice-focused distance learning courses, we explore the role of distance learning in enabling a dialogue between academic and workplace learning and the use of ‘practice dialogues’ among course participants to enable integration of learning experiences. Finally, we argue that we need to find ways in higher education of enabling students to engage in relevant communities of expertise, rather than drawing them principally into a community of academic discourse which is not well aligned with practice

Policing the corporate image: A case study of in-house security governance and the management of risk in a mass private property in Canada.

\u27Mass private properties\u27 such as shopping malls, hotel complexes, and large educational, manufacturing and industrial sites increasingly operate as sites of public and social life. Since private interests reign over the policing of these spaces, public life that was once protected and controlled by the state is now policed by private institutions. These changes have resulted in a significant rise in the number of private security personnel employed in Canada, where there are now more than twice as many private security agents as there are public police officers. This development has expanded the ambit of authority held by the \u27private police\u27 and those institutions that employ them. This paper is concerned with the nature, scope and extent of \u27security governance\u27 in mass private spaces, specifically through the use of in-house, or proprietary, systems of governance. Findings suggest that actuarialism, and the associated practices related to risk management, are enacted in order to reduce loss and to prevent, spread and minimize risk. Moreover, such strategies may be linked with other techniques that are designed in order to promote a particular image, or profile, of mass private spaces.Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2003 .H88. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 42-03, page: 0830. Adviser: Daniel O\u27Connor. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2003