How do teachers investigate scientific concepts in an Early Childhood Environment?

Early Childhood Educators have an important role to fulfil in aiding children's development and understandings in the science curriculum. There are many different views and opinions on how science can be taught in an Early Childhood environment, it is therefore our aim to investigate how teachers feel about teaching science concepts and promoting science in the early childhood centre. We aim to discover how everyday activities relate to the nature of science within our everyday lives. The science curriculum is important in Early Childhood settings as it provides children with various opportunities to explore the natural world. We are hoping to gain a deeper understanding of how teachers are guiding and encouraging children to make sense of their experiences. It is also important that we explore how Early Childhood Educators understand their own practice in teaching science concepts in their curriculum.

Description of project: We will be completing a small inquiry based task which will require us to compile data collected from interviews, recordings from teachers in long day and kindergarten settings around the Geelong region.

Methodology: ln order to undertake this research we will be using a socio cultural framework, focusing on language in the social environment and play (basing our ideas on the theories of Vygotsky). We will be undertaking narrative accounts to obtain data which will be collated from three different sources.

Ethical implications of projects: We do not foresee any significant risks to any participant in this study. The topic of the research is uncontroversial, and we will be taking measures to ensure anonymity or confidentiality where appropriate.

Building the perfect beast : scientific romance and Jewish representations 1880-1914

Various cultural mediums portrayed Jews in Britain in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Scientific romance harnessed past communicative 'discourses' such as history, folklore, theology, and mythology and was an innovative form of literature that heralded a new era in the construction of Jewish identity between 1880 to 1914.

Bush garden ethos in South Australia

The bush garden ethos in South Australia, notwithstanding the state's dearth of water, poor soils and Mediterranean climate, has been slow in evolving. Even today. the logical Mediterranean philosophical arguments of Trevor Nottle, expressed in Gardens of the Sun,' are passed over in favour of struggling or often over-watered gardens containing ubiquitous 'Iceberg' roses, an eclectic exotic collection of plants, and the odd umbrageous eucalypt.'

Communicating the ethos of corporate codes of ethics in the UK and the USA

Business ethics has been a consideration for corporations in the USA since at least the early 1960s, whilst in the UK this interest in business ethics appears to be just over 20 years old. In a survey of the top 500 companies operating in the private sector in the UK and the USA, it would appear that corporations operating in the UK have embraced the ethos of codes of ethics differently to their USA counterparts and that this difference may well be in line with their different adoption rates over the last 50 years of the need for business ethics in organizations. The USA seems to lead the UK in most areas, except when it comes to ethical audits and incorporating the ethics code into the strategic planning process. Could this omission in respect to strategic planning be the Achilles Heel of US business?

The perennial problem of police gratuities : public concerns, political optics, and an accountability ethos

Despite the perennial nature of the problem of gratuities in considerations of police ethics, many prior analyses of this issue have rested on anecdotal, piecemeal or hypothetical considerations.. This paper draws on a unique sample of actual complaint cases involving gratuities, providing evidence of a range of public concerns about the problem. Gratuities are analysed and contextualised by reference to the concept of conflict of interest, which draws attention to the potential for the performance of public duty to be tainted in fact or appearance. In either case, public trust in the integrity of the police is damaged, giving rise to "political optics" as a key problem with gratuities.  The paper argues that an accountability ethos must be developed to promote active responsibility and a preparedness to prioritise the public interest in policing.

A visual mining system for theme development evolution analysis of scientific literature

Theme development evolution analysis of literature is a significant tool to help the scientific scholars find and study the frontier problems more efficiently. This paper designs and develops a visual mining system for theme development evolution analysis to deal with the large number of literature information. The analysis of related themes based on sub-themes, together with the dynamic threshold strategy are adopted for improving the accuracy of system. Experiments results prove that correlations of themes obtained from the system are accurate and achieve better practical effect in comparison with that of our early work.

Breath and the truths of youth at risk : allegory and the social scientific imagination

The ways that we have invented for knowing young people are governmentalised. This governmentalisation produces powerful incentives to conform to the rule-bound and institutionalised knowledge practices that institutions, government departments, corporations, and NGOs understand as being capable of telling truths about young people and about risk. I argue that knowledge practices in the social sciences should trouble what counts as truth, as evidence, and the ways in which these truths can be produced.

These interests will be examined through a discussion of the ways in which Tim Winton's novel Breath can be read as an allegorical tale about the terror of being ordinary: and of the teenage years as being a time in a life in which the fear of being ordinary compels Winton's key characters to seek out, sometimes stumble upon that which promises to make their's a life less ordinary. Here risk is something that breathes energy and purpose into lifeworlds that are dominated by the institutionalised ordinariness of family, school, and work. As an allegorical tale told from the vantage point of hindsight, Breath unsettles what it is that the social sciences can tell us about youth (as becoming) and risk (as mitigated by prudential foresight).

Socio-scientific issues in education : innovative practices and contending epistemologies

In the past decade, we have seen the well-established discourse of environmental education (EE) supplanted by that of education for sustainability (EfS). In some ways this change in terminology has been no more than a slogan change, with the actual educational practices associated with EfS little changed from those qualified by EE (Campbell and Robottom 2008). Environment-related education activities under both terms frequently focus on socio-scientific issues – which serve as the chief organising principle for a range of related curriculum activities – and are shaped by the particular characteristics of these issues. Socio-scientific issues are essentially constituted of questions that are philosophical as well as empirical in nature. Socio-scientific issues consist in contests among dissenting social, economic and environmental perspectives that rarely all align, giving rise to debates whose resolution is not amenable to solely scientific approaches. Socio-scientific issues, then, exist at the intersection of differing human interests, values and motivations and are therefore necessarily socially-constructed. An adequate educational exploration of these issues requires a recognition of their constructedness within particular communities of interest and of the limitation of purely applied science perspectives, and, in turn, requires the adoption of curricular and pedagogical approaches that are in fundamental ways informed by constructivist educational assumptions – at least to the extent that community constructions of socio-scientific issues are recognised as being shaped by human interests and social and environmental context. This article considers these matters within the context of examples of environment-related practice drawn from two geographical regions. The article will argue that a serious scientific element is both necessary and insufficient for a rigorous educational exploration of socio-scientific issues within either the EE or EfS discourses, and will consider some implications for professional development and research in this field.