scholarly journals Retheorising national assessment of the narrative mode for historical causal explanation in England

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Edward Carroll

In history curriculum design in England, currently at least two loci of authority – the history teachers’ ‘extended writing movement’ and the national awarding body Pearson Edexcel – present somewhat contrasting portrayals of the narrative mode for the purposes of historical causal explanation. Nonetheless, both loci suggest they are reappropriating academic knowledge for the purposes of secondary schooling in a fashion similar to what Basil Bernstein (1986) dubs ‘recontextualisation’. As a practising history teacher, I provide a phenomenological critique of Pearson Edexcel’s specifications for the national GCSE and A-level examinations from the perspective of the extended writing movement’s realisation of the Bernsteinian model, with a specific focus on the narrative mode for the purposes of historical causal explanation. In order to characterise the status of historical narrative in the academic field of production, I draw on analytic philosophies of history, theories of history by practising historians and historical explanations from one historiography: the Salem witch trials. Finally, I make recommendations for future reforms in national history examinations in England: constant revaluation with reference to academic knowledge; the avoidance of specific yet unsustainable claims about the discipline of history generally; and the abandonment of a genre-led assessment in favour of an epistemology-led alternative.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Norshahida Sarifuddin ◽  
Zuraida Ahmad ◽  
Ahmad Zahirani Ahmad Azhar ◽  
Hafizah Hanim Mohd Zaki ◽  
Amelia Wong Azman ◽  
...  

In line with the current global focus on sustainability and the well-being of the planet, becoming a professional engineer nowadays requires more than simple mastery of technical skills. Considering that engineers are required to have a deep sense of responsibility not only for humankind but also for the environment, engineering education and practices must be reformed substantially to prepare engineers that will contribute to sustainable development. This necessitates updating conventional engineering programs (CEE) to incorporate Humanizing Engineering Education (HEE). Although HEE is an old practice of individual engineers and other organizations outside the academic field, it is relatively new in academic engineering. While the definition of what truly merits being considered HEE remains debatable, many engineers believe that their work involves a humanitarian aspect. To streamline the development of HEE, there is a need for developing guidelines and frameworks for a comprehensive model. Ideally, that framework should integrate humanizing pedagogy in the new curriculum design. The objective of the paper is to share the experience of the authors in designing a new curriculum for a Materials Engineering Programme (MEP) that is embedded with Humanitarian Engineering (HE), which is among the main elements of HEE. Data collection was through interviews, qualitative surveys, reports from the stakeholders, accreditation bodies and benchmarking with other Higher Learning Institutions (HLI). An extensive scholarly literature review was executed to identify shortcomings in CEE and how it could be reformed by integrating it with HEE. The Sejahtera Academic Framework (SAF); a strategic framework for academic programmes developed by the university, was used as a reference to customize MEP to better meet students’ needs. Since the proposed model applies a new emerging concept, it inevitably raises challenges related to different levels of understanding among course implementers and perceptions of external stakeholders. Moreover, the developers had to consider the limitations imposed by the university's policies and structures while acknowledging the availability of finite resources (i.e. time, money, equipment, and expertise).


Deadly Virtue ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 194-212
Author(s):  
Heather Martel

This chapter explains how the story of Fort Caroline underpins the history of American white supremacy through a review of the scholarship on the history of race, placing the category “elect” into a historical continuum with whiteness. As with the status of the elect, whiteness seemed to be fixed and visible: apparent in their handsome, masculine bodies; in their stable, obedient, and moral families; and in their wealth and status. When Calvinist predestinarian logic enters the historical narrative of American race, it becomes possible to see it was the virtue of grace that made whites construct their own identities as naturally moral, trustworthy, and worthy of liberty.


2010 ◽  
pp. 144-162
Author(s):  
Victor M. Hernández-Gantes

Online education is becoming an important component ofcareer and technical education (CTE) in teacher preparationand at the graduate level. In the midst of such growth, andin response to questions about quality compared with traditional learning, there is a consensus that onlinecourses and programs should be designed based on the needs of adult learners. However, much of the literature inonline CTE lacks implicit connections to emerging notions ofadult development and learning. This article provides an overview of the status of online education in CTE at the postsecondary level, discusses related issues and current research focus, and highlights adult learning developmentsand the implications for curriculum design, instruction, anduse of technology. The article concludes with an outline of emerging trends bridging adult learning and onlineeducation relevant to career and technical education.


Author(s):  
R.J. Hankinson

During the Hellenistic period (323–31 bc), there arose, largely in Alexandria, a profound debate in medical methodology. The main participants were the Empiricists, committed to an anti-theoretical, practical medicine based on observation and experience and the various Rationalists, such as Herophilus, Erasistratus, and Asclepiades, who held that general theories of physiology and pathology were both attainable and essential to proper medical understanding and practice. Dispute about the nature of scientific inference and the status of causal explanation mirrored and to some extent conditioned the contemporary debate between Stoics and sceptics about epistemology.


Author(s):  
Victor M. Hernández-Gantes

Online education is becoming an important component of career and technical education (CTE) in teacher preparation and at the graduate level. In the midst of such growth, and in response to questions about quality compared with traditional learning, there is a consensus that online courses and programs should be designed based on the needs of adult learners. However, much of the literature in online CTE lacks implicit connections to emerging notions of adult development and learning. This article provides an overview of the status of online education in CTE at the postsecondary level, discusses related issues and current research focus, and highlights adult learning developments and the implications for curriculum design, instruction, and use of technology. The article concludes with an outline of emerging trends bridging adult learning and online education relevant to career and technical education.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Fatih Yazici

The ongoing changes in history education in support of diversity have an effect on Turkey even if on a limited scale. Although the current history curriculum in Turkey promotes the identity transmission instead of respecting different identities, it also has some goals such as “teaching the students about basic values including peace, tolerance, mutual understanding, democracy, and human rights, and making them sensitive about maintaining and improving these values”, which is compatible with the contemporary understanding of history education. However, it must be noted that the attitudes and perceptions of teachers are as important as their presence in curriculum in terms of reaching the aims of history education. The aim of this study was to reveal preservice history teachers’ attitudes towards identity differences. Identity Attitudes Scale (IAS), which was developed by Yazici (2016) to measure the attitudes towards identity differences, was conducted on 314 preservice history teachers. Preservice teachers’ attitudes towards identity differences in terms of gender, and their ethnic, religious and political identities were examined using t-test and one-way variance analysis. As a result, it was found that the variables had effect on preservice teachers’ attitudes at varying rates.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Kuru

This article aims to present a history of International Relations (IR) that looks at the role of three big American foundations (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations) in the development of IR as an academic field in continental Europe. Its framework goes beyond the usual disciplinary history narratives that focus on IR’s US or UK trajectories, pointing instead to American foundations’ interwar and early post–World War II influence on French and German IR. The cases emphasize US foundations’ interactions with European scholars and international scholarly organizations as major factors shaping IR’s developmental pathways. This study offers a way to consider foundations’ role in IR’s gradual academic institutionalization by connecting disciplinary historical approaches to disciplinary sociology. Its sociologically conscious position underlines the significance of American philanthropies in a historical narrative and recognizes the relevance of transnational dynamics by going beyond usual emphases on ideas and national contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gideon Boadu ◽  
Debra Donnelly ◽  
Heather Sharp

The Ghanaian senior high-school history curriculum encourages teachers to guide students to explore, question and construct historical interpretations, rather than accept established historical narratives. This study investigates how those teachers conceive and implement the curriculum intent by exploring their pedagogical reasoning and classroom practices. The project described in this paper draws from a range of investigative instruments including in-depth interviews, classroom observations, post-lesson interviews and teachers’ planning paperwork from 15 public senior high schools in Ghana’s Central Region. This research found that teachers’ pedagogical reasoning was consistent with constructivist educational theory as well as responsive to the history curriculum, but that their stated understandings did not align with classroom practice. The findings indicate limited constructivist strategies in history lessons, as most teachers were didactic in approach and tended to teach history as a grand narrative.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1666-1673
Author(s):  
Julie R. Gralow ◽  
Fredrick Chite Asirwa ◽  
Ami Siddharth Bhatt ◽  
Maria T. Bourlon ◽  
Quyen Chu ◽  
...  

In recognition of the rising incidence and mortality of cancer in low- and middle-resource settings, as well as the increasingly international profile of its membership, ASCO has prioritized efforts to enhance its engagement at a global level. Among the recommendations included in the 2016 Global Oncology Leadership Task Force report to the ASCO Board of Directors was that ASCO should promote the recognition of global oncology as an academic field. The report suggested that ASCO could serve a role in transitioning global oncology from an informal field of largely voluntary activities to a more formal discipline with strong research and well-defined training components. As a result of this recommendation, in 2017, ASCO formed the Academic Global Oncology Task Force (AGOTF) to guide ASCO’s contributions toward formalizing the field of global oncology. The AGOTF was asked to collect and analyze key issues and barriers toward the recognition of global oncology as an academic discipline, with an emphasis on training, research, and career pathways, and produce a set of recommendations for ASCO action. The outcome of the AGOTF was the development of recommendations designed to advance the status of global oncology as an academic discipline.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Raymond N. Fru

<p><em>It is no secret that history education in many parts of the world is</em><em> </em><em>facing immense challenges. This academic discipline has never been under more pressure to justify its place in the curriculum of many educational systems. While some systems such as South Africa have overtly downplayed the importance of the discipline through unfavorable curriculum implementations over the years since the dawn of democracy, other systems like Lesotho have adopted more covert strategies to systematically out-phasing history education in the secondary and high schools. The result in the case of Lesotho is that the subject is very unpopular in secondary and high schools as the number of schools teaching the subject has dwindled drastically over the years. The situation is exacerbated by poor Junior Certificate (JC) examination results for the few schools that teach the subject. </em></p><p><em>Against this backdrop, this article engages the discourses around the status of history education in the context of Lesotho from a student teacher’s perspective. While many studies have focused on the role of students, government departments and school administrations in explaining the negative position of history education, the stance in this article is that the role of the history teacher is as vital and cannot be undermined. Teachers’ understanding of the objectives of history teaching and their attitudes towards the discipline has important implications for the way the discipline is perceived by students and the public. As a result, this article presents findings ofa study conducted with some novice history teachers in Lesotho on their understandings of the objectives of history teaching especially in a Lesotho context. Such understandings are then used as a basis to theorise the status of the discipline, but also to reflect on the future of history education in Lesotho.</em></p>


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