Medical Curriculum at Selected Colleges: Foundations and Integrated Presentation of Basic Medical Sciences Distribution over Pre-Clerkship Period

Overview and statistics on the medical curriculum at Arizona, Emory, FIU, Rochester, and Vermont.

Meet the phallic teacher: curriculum design and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure that needs to be negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction.These observations are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Gender issues in elementary mathematics teaching materials: a comparative study between China and Australia

International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) cross-national studies (FIMS, SIMS and TIMSS) show that gender differences in mathematical achievements and attitudes have decreased considerably over thirty years (Hanna, 2000), however, mathematics is still historically stereotyped as a male domain with crucial evidence supporting this belief (Forgasz, Leder, & Kloosterman, 2009). Previous research showed that gender differences in mathematics participation,performance and achievement existed widely in the majority of English speaking countries, specifically favouring boys (Forgasz, 1992; Hyde, Fennema, & Lamon, 1990; Tiedemann, 2000). Hyde, Lindberg, Linn, Ellis and Williams (2008) pointed out that the stereotype that females lack mathematical ability persists and is widely held by parents and teachers.Mathematics teaching materials play an important role in mathematics teaching and learning. The contents within mathematical teaching materials are rational, and deliver both explicit and implicit information. The explicit information refers to mathematics knowledge that students can learn from textbooks, while the latter one, also named as hidden curriculum, contains social and cultural messages. Hidden curriculum is a side effect of education. It has deep and long-term influences on students’ construction of math-gender stereotype that impact their future mathematicallearning (Zhang & Zhou, 2008). Therefore, this study will investigate Chinese andAustralian elementary mathematics teaching materials to explore the messages of gender equity and inequity delivered through hidden curriculum including names, images and problem-solving contexts. Based on the findings, practical implications concerning the promotion of equitable gender environments within elementary mathematics teaching materials from a cross-cultural perspective will be discussed.

Meet the phallic teacher: designing curriculum and identity in a neoliberal imaginary

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers’ everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a three year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an environment where feminist and poststructuralist work of the late 20th century seems to have lost traction. These observations made here are based on empirical research in a Victorian school, combined with autoethnographic writing and other materials connecting teachers’ and researchers’ lives to the broader cultural postfeminist debate. The paper makes room for an absent subject, the teacher, marginalised in neoliberal discourses of curriculum and critiques the masculinist hegemony of outcomes and standards-based education. This provides us with new ways to challenge increasingly dominant current paradigms and to conceptualise a different future in which the standpoints of teachers are privileged in curriculum theory and curricular innovation.

Experimental studies on comparison of microwave curing and thermal curing of epoxy resins used for alternative mould materials

In this present work attempts have been made to study the glass transition temperature of alternative mould materials by using both microwave heating and conventional oven heating. In this present work three epoxy resins, namely R2512, R2515 and R2516, which are commonly used for making injection moulds have been used in combination with two hardeners H2403 and H2409. The magnetron microwave generator used in this research is operating at a frequency of 2.45 GHz with a hollow rectangular waveguide. In order to distinguish the effects between the microwave and conventional heating, a number of experiments were performed to test their mechanical properties such as tensile and flexural strengths. Additionally, differential scanning calorimeter technique was implemented to measure the glass transition temperature on both microwave and conventional heating. This study provided necessary evidences to establish that microwave heated mould materials resulted with higher glass transition temperature than the conventional heating. Finally, attempts were also made to study the microstructure of microwave-cured materials by using a scanning electron microscope in order to analyze the morphology of cured specimens.