Whose space is it anyway? Learning about space to make space to learn

The significance of the environment in which children learn has long been recognised as one of the key elements that can have an influence on the experience and success of education. Usually understood from an adult perspective, here children’s views are interpreted on the educational space that was designed for them. These perspectives are illustrated through using Lefebvre’s Triad model. This includes the perceived, conceived and lived spaces, including the added dimension of time interpreted through an educational lens. The data demonstrates the value of children’s renegotiation of functional space through visual narratives. Deeper understanding of the uniqueness of individual children’s experiences offers opportunities to re-examine the space in alternate ways, which Lefebvre’s model has facilitated. Whilst recognising that the school space needs to be functional, the negotiation of space with children can be approached creatively and still support unique yet diverse pathways to learning.     

Globalization and Economic Restructuring in Ontario: From Industrial Heartland to Learning Region?

Recent contributions suggest that the current period is characterized by a paradoxical consequence of globalization in which the ever greater integration of national and regional economies into the global one accentuates, rather than minimizes, the significance of the local context for innovative activities. This paper sketches out the implications of this argument by drawing on the case of Ontario, Canada's largest province and industrial heartland. The restructuring triggered by the broader processes of globalization was accentuated after 1990 by Ontario's deeper integration into the North American economy following the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the US and its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement. These changes forced a number of critical responses on both firms and the government of the province, as they face the challenge of becoming more innovative and adopting the characteristics of learning regions. This experience is highly relevant to regions elsewhere that are attempting to shift their traditional industrial base to a more knowledge-intensive economy.     

Learning by ‘design’: how undergraduates in Singapore learn to become engineers

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the evolving norms and dispositions of creativity and enterprise of engineering students using data gathered from a newly established technology and engineering-focused university called ‘UniTech’ located in Singapore. Based on interviews with students, we seek to explain (1) what they learn, reject, adopt and appropriate; (2) the kinds of challenges they face and (3) the unexpected and serendipitous outcomes of their learning. Through an integrated engineering curriculum focusing on design, students learn to be technically competent, creative and entrepreneurial persons. This paper considers how the curriculum works as a set of formal procedures preparing students for a future ‘knowledge-based economy’ imagined to be technology-intensive, dynamic and filled with opportunities but also increasingly uncertain. We analyse how students at UniTech negotiate this design-focused curriculum where experiences of creativity, open-ended possibilities and holistic perspectives intersect with the national economic agenda of a knowledge-based economy.     

Learning from history? From Soviet collapse to the ‘new’ Cold War

Many moments in what we now rather lamely call the ‘end of the Cold War’ have been examined in detail. However, within the extraordinarily rich literature that has arisen over the past 25 years, little attention has been paid thus far to one very important problem: the part played by ‘history’ in shaping the way different actors tried to make sense of what was going on around them in a time of rapid transition.     

Why Are Cross‐Sectoral Forums Important to Actors? Forum Contributions to Cooperation,Learning, and Resource Distribution

Actors within an ecology of games in a polycentric governance system have to choose from a large number of forums they could participate in. This article analyzes why given types of forums are important to actors, as compared to other forums. It shows that functions of an ecology of games, such as cooperation, learning, and resource distribution, influence the importance that actors attribute to forums. The empirical analysis focuses on cross‐sectoral forums, a particular type of forum that is specialized in coordination among actors from different societal sectors, such as government, private interest, or science. Analysis of survey data from eight cross‐sectoral forums in Swiss habitat and land use governance and their 159 members shows that cross‐sectoral forums are comparatively important to actors that perceive their forum to contribute to learning and resource distribution.     

Doing is Learning: Analysis of an Unsuccessful Attempt to Adapt TEK/IK Methodology to Norwegian Sámi Circumstances

Abstract

This article describes a case where an attempt was made to introduce TEK/IK into a conflict between Sámi reindeer owners and environmental institutions. The conflict was brought on by the establishment of a national park in Southern Sámi areas in Norway. At first, the Sámi were in favour of the park, but later on their attitudes changed as the content of planned national park developed. The reindeer owners discovered that the size of the park would be reduced, leaving out what they thought were significant areas in need of protection. They saw the encouragement of increased tourism activities as a threat to reindeer herding and felt alienated by the number of representatives they received in the park management structures. On the basis of these observations reindeer owners protested, but were ignored. As researchers well-established in the Southern Sámi area, we were brought into conversations regarding the park as the local reindeer owners searched for ways of bringing new arguments into the process. At this point we thought TEK/IK represented an opportunity to add weight to Sámi perspectives. As the title of this article indicates, as push came to shove we did not succeed in making room for local participation in our TEK/IK project, despite these existing on-going relations. The article attempts to understand what happened. Our analysis is based upon a perception of TEK/IK as not one, but at least two co-constituted knowledge practices. The premise is that research failures are as important to publish as successes. Our joint ethnographic experience has methodological implications for future TEK/IK research.     

Insights into Transforming Regional Gender Relations—A Call for Space-Sensitive Dialogue to Enhance Regional Learning

The European Union (EU) constitutes a space that offers a wealth of opportunities for regional learning. This article addresses how the learning process takes place in an interregional project and how contextual factors affect the learning process. The work presented here draws upon theories on regional learning and the dissemination of management ideas, as well as taking agency and structure components into account. The internal project arenas are investigated in order to shed light on the learning process and how spatial relations play a critical role. A conclusion is that the learning process within EU financed projects will gain from developing the practice of reflection and space-sensitive dialogues. One challenge to be dealt with is the relationship between the metamessage of the project, and local variations and various gender narratives.     

Learning to love the republic: Jacobin propaganda and the peasantry of the Haute‐Garonne

The political societies, or Jacobin clubs, formed during the first years of the French Revolution undertook as one of their many projects the political and civic education of the peasantry. The political society of Toulouse, the large republican administrative centre of the south‐western department of the Haute‐Garonne, was particularly active in this mission. By 1790, society members had embarked upon a campaign of written propaganda, using both educational tracts and revolutionary almanacs. However, this initial method was of only limited effectiveness, due to the prejudices of urban society members with regard to the peasants, the widespread illiteracy and non‐comprehension of French in the countryside, and the difficulty of distributing written material to isolated villages at the end of the eighteenth century. The Jacobins of Toulouse attempted to conquer these obstacles through the composition of tracts in the local patois, the use of peasant‐oriented newspapers delivered to local, literate intermediaries, and finally, the sending of their own members into the countryside as political missionaries, armed with leaflets and a copy of the constitution. By the time political clubs were made illegal in 1795, the influence of Jacobin sociability had greatly facilitated a precocious political acculturation of rural communities, prefiguring their more complete politicisation during the course of the nineteenth century.     

Learning to Serve? Employment aspirations and attitudes of young working-class men in an era of labour market restructuring

Economic restructuring in cities in advanced industrial nations has, perhaps for the first time in more than a century, resulted in young working-class people facing poorer economic prospects than their parents did at the same age. For poorly educated and low-skilled young men, in particular, the decline in urban manufacturing employment means that their employment opportunities are limited and the possibilities of gaining and retaining relatively well-paid work have declined in the final decades of the twentieth century. As the socially-valued attributes of masculinity are so dependent upon economic participation, the loss of work for men is seen by many commentators as a crisis, and it has undoubtedly led to increases in poverty, as well as being associated with rises in suicide rates, especially among younger men. In this article, the author explores the ways in which young men on the verge of entering the labour market think about themselves and their employment opportunities. The article is based on interviews with low-achieving young men in Cambridge and Sheffield who were in the final year of compulsory schooling and beginning to think about their working lives.     

Do Richer Media Mean Better Learning? A Framework for Evaluating Learning Experiences in Museum Web Site Design

Museums and other cultural and heritage institutions have important roles to play in both formal and informal education. This paper argues that, while museum Web sites tend to showcase increasingly sophisticated multimedia content, rich multimedia do not necessarily mean better learning design and that, in the absence of actual learner performance data, it is necessary to look beyond the types of media used and consider the kinds of learning outcomes implied or explicit in order to assess the learning effectiveness of the design. Using models and theories from education, the paper analyses two sites and discusses how these models can be applied to create learning experiences that go beyond simple comprehension and recall of information.     

Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.     

Learning soft skills the hard way: Historiographical considerations on the cultural adjustment process of German-speaking émigré neuroscientists in Canada, 1933 to 1963

ABSTRACT

This article is a historiographical exploration of the special forms of knowledge generation and knowledge transmission that occur along local cultural boundaries in the modern neurosciences. Following the inauguration of the so-called “Law on the Re-Establishment of a Professional Civil Service” in Nazi Germany on April 7, 1933, hundreds of Jewish and oppositional neurologists, neuropathologists, and psychiatrists were forced out of their academic positions, having to leave their home countries and local knowledge economies and traditions for Canada and the United States. A closer analysis of their living and working conditions will create an understanding of some of the elements and factors that determined the international forced migration waves of physicians and clinical neuroscientists in the twentieth century from a historiographical perspective. While I am particularly looking here at new case examples regarding the forced migration during the National Socialist period in Germany, the analysis follows German-speaking émigré neurologists and psychiatrists who found refuge and settled in Canada. These individuals form an understudied group of refugee medical professionals, despite the fact that the subsegments of refugee neurologists and clinical psychoanalysts in the United States, for example, have been a fairly well-investigated population, as the works of Grob (1983), Lunbeck (1995), or Ash and Soellner (1996) have shown. This article is primarily an exploration of the adjustment and acculturation processes of several highly versatile and well-rounded German-speaking physicians, who had received their prior education in neurology, psychiatry, and basic brain research. They were forced out of their academic home institutions and had to leave their clinical research fields as well as their disciplinary self-understanding behind on the other side of the Atlantic.     

Learning from the RSPT mistakes: is reform still possible?

The political ramifications of the failed Resources Super Profit Tax have been widely documented, yet the causes of this political failure are more contested. Many accounts highlight the discursive power of business and the effectiveness of their campaign against the mining tax. Effective business activism certainly played its part, but this article argues that strategic failings on the part of government also influenced the outcome. This article highlights how the Labor government's failure to consult, to understand the political implications of federalism and above all its impact on the industry in the hope that future policymakers will learn from the mistakes of the mining tax debacle.     

The Role of Interactive Learning to Close the “Innovation Gap” in SME-Based Local Economies: A Furniture Cluster in the Basque Country and its Key Policy Implications

This paper identifies an “innovation gap” in the (in)efficient relation between innovation structures and production systems in SME-based economies and, by elucidating an implicit aspect of key theoretical contributions from Lundvall and Cooke, among others, sets the basis for a policy focus that may help reducing those margins of inefficiency. In this work, we identify three interdependent drivers of innovation: the “critical mass” of firms in a specific geographical location; the formation of “organizations” devoted to the creation and diffusion of knowledge and innovations; the ignition of “learning processes” within the production system that help catalyse significant innovations within the local economy. We suggest that the importance of processes of codified knowledge flows needs to be complemented by interactive flows of tacit knowledge that help overcoming the “innovation gap” that often exists between firms and knowledge institutions. Since this gap represents the inefficiency of the innovation structures, we suggest that it should be targeted by policy-makers and business associations as a central issue for innovation promotion through actions that intensify interactions and learning processes through bottom-up initiatives. These elements are analysed in a furniture cluster in the Basque Country and are highlighted on the basis of successful micro-territorial experiences.     

Media coverage of the Queensland drought rorts saga: Learning Fitzgerald lessons?

Many observers saw die performance of Queensland's main media group in pursuing the National Party government in 1989 over allegations of drought‐aid rorts, as an indication that the compliant and manipulated media identified by corruption commissioner, Tony Fitzgerald, QC, had shown new teeth in their watchdog role. But a close examination of die coverage shows that the way the media operate has changed little, and that there needs to be continuing concern about the effectiveness of a media system in which a parochial orientation leads not to closer scrutiny of decision‐making but to closer cooperation with decision‐makers as news sources.     

Learning mobility: high-school exchange programs as a part of transnational mobility†

Long-term high-school exchange is a popular way to go abroad for German youth (2.5% of 16-year-olds go abroad for 6–12 months). The ongoing research project is dealing with the long-term impact of high-school exchange programs on further mobility of the participants. Using an online survey among 3000 former exchange students and 30 qualitative focus interviews, it is shown that mobility reproduces itself. Six years after the exchange, about 80% of the respondents have been abroad again for a period of longer than six weeks. This is seen as part of a normalization of transnational social practices.     

Introduction to Star Artists

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