title: Learning as spirituality and nurture - Pacific indigenous peoples' perspectives of lifelong learning

authors: Vaioleti, Timote Masima

subjects: Pacific

abstract: This paper discusses characteristics of an adult education practice for peoples in the Pacific. There is no one Pacific way as the Pacific population is diverse consisting of many cultures, languages, social structures and differing colonial experiences. For many Pacific peoples learning is holistic, is driven by cultural motivation, which is often for the benefit of their extended families(the collective)rather than personal gains or self-actualisation. Learning is constantly intervened by spiritual matters, the same being true for most aspects of Pacific peoples’ day-to-day lives. Therefore spirituality is integral to learning at all levels formal and informal.

text: Learning as spirituality and nurture - Pacific indigenous peoples' perspectives of lifelong learning This paper discusses characteristics of an adult education practice for peoples in the Pacific. There is no one Pacific way as the Pacific population is diverse consisting of many cultures, languages, social structures and differing colonial experiences. For many Pacific peoples learning is holistic, is driven by cultural motivation, which is often for the benefit of their extended families(the collective)rather than personal gains or self-actualisation. Learning is constantly intervened by spiritual matters, the same being true for most aspects of Pacific peoples’ day-to-day lives. Therefore spirituality is integral to learning at all levels formal and informal.

year: 2012

title: Content-Based Language Learning in a Digital Library

authors: Wu, Shaoqun

subjects: computer science

abstract: Digital libraries have untapped potential for supporting language teaching and learning. This paper describes a new scheme for automating topic-specific language learning using a specially built digital library. Three exercises of different types are generated automatically from the library content: one that learners undertake individually, one in which learners collaborate in pairs, and one in which a group of learners compete. The system aims to foster content-based language learning, which greatly increases students’ motivation, fosters long-term recollection, and can be culturally situated in appropriate ways.

text: Content-Based Language Learning in a Digital Library Digital libraries have untapped potential for supporting language teaching and learning. This paper describes a new scheme for automating topic-specific language learning using a specially built digital library. Three exercises of different types are generated automatically from the library content: one that learners undertake individually, one in which learners collaborate in pairs, and one in which a group of learners compete. The system aims to foster content-based language learning, which greatly increases students’ motivation, fosters long-term recollection, and can be culturally situated in appropriate ways.

year: 2007

title: Putting Sylvia in her place: history, geographical theory and the “New” Education

authors: Middleton, Sue

subjects: Sylvia Ashton-Warner

abstract: New Zealander Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a teacher in remote rural Mori schools in the 1940s-1950s, became internationally renowned as a novelist and educational theorist. Earlier commentators portrayed her educational theory as in conflict with those of her time and place, but recent studies conceptualise them as enabled by it. While space/place has often been considered the preserve of the geographer and time that of the historian, Henri Lefebvre and others suggest that: “these issues need to be thought together rather than separately” and that macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis be engaged simultaneously. The author traces how conceptual, linguistic, sensory and intellectual resources of the global “New Education” movement extended into the tiny bush-encircled Mori communities in which Sylvia taught and wrote in the 1940s-1950s and surfaced in her writing. The article zooms in and out between the “the immensity of the global” (the New Education, the Second World War) and “the intimately tiny” (her classroom and home). The “data” include Sylvia's non-fiction education texts and official documents of her time: school curricula, education policy documents, Ministerial and Inspectors' reports. What Lefebvre terms a “Rhythm analysis” of Ashton-Warner's educational writing shows intermingled pulses of domestic life, routines of educational bureaucracy, cycles of nature, and cataclysms of world events. It is important for historians to study “the where rather than just the when with location and landscape central parts of the analysis”.

text: Putting Sylvia in her place: history, geographical theory and the “New” Education New Zealander Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a teacher in remote rural Mori schools in the 1940s-1950s, became internationally renowned as a novelist and educational theorist. Earlier commentators portrayed her educational theory as in conflict with those of her time and place, but recent studies conceptualise them as enabled by it. While space/place has often been considered the preserve of the geographer and time that of the historian, Henri Lefebvre and others suggest that: “these issues need to be thought together rather than separately” and that macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis be engaged simultaneously. The author traces how conceptual, linguistic, sensory and intellectual resources of the global “New Education” movement extended into the tiny bush-encircled Mori communities in which Sylvia taught and wrote in the 1940s-1950s and surfaced in her writing. The article zooms in and out between the “the immensity of the global” (the New Education, the Second World War) and “the intimately tiny” (her classroom and home). The “data” include Sylvia's non-fiction education texts and official documents of her time: school curricula, education policy documents, Ministerial and Inspectors' reports. What Lefebvre terms a “Rhythm analysis” of Ashton-Warner's educational writing shows intermingled pulses of domestic life, routines of educational bureaucracy, cycles of nature, and cataclysms of world events. It is important for historians to study “the where rather than just the when with location and landscape central parts of the analysis”.

year: 2011