1.3.1 Introduction

You can find a lot of information about education on the internet.

To find this information you might choose to use:

• search engines and subject gateways;

• books and electronic books;

• databases;

• journals;

• encyclopedias;

• news sources;

• reports;

• official publications;

• statistics;

• internet resources.<
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1.1.6 Keeping up-to-date

How familiar are you with the following different ways of keeping up to date with information; alerts, mailing lists, newsgroups, blogs, RSS, professional bodies and societies?

• 5 – Very familiar

• 4 – Familiar

• 3 – Fairly familiar

• 2 – Not very familiar

• 1 – Not familiar at all

Introduction

This unit will help you to identify and use information in education, whether for your work, study or personal purposes. Experiment with some of the key resources in this subject area, and learn about the skills which will enable you to plan searches for information, so you can find what you are looking for more easily. Discover the meaning of information quality, and learn how to evaluate the information you come across. You will also be introduced to the many different ways of organising yo
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Acknowledgements

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6.1 Knowledge and society

At the foreground of this final part of the unit is one of its more important themes – that knowledge is something held, developed and perpetuated both by and in the context of communities, societies and cultures. Newton's declaration to Hooke (above
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5.2 Scientists as a community of practice

Science has been described as involving observation, description, categorisation, investigation, experimentation and formation of theoretical explanations for naturally occurring phenomena – activities performed by scientists using scientific methods.

Jacob Bronowski (1973) said, ‘That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer’ – an apt way to put it, as with science, we set off from a starting point of curiosity and inc
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4.2 Knowing mathematics

How much mathematics do you think you know? You may feel that you know quite a lot, or that you are ‘out of practice’ and have forgotten much of it; or perhaps you were never very secure in your mathematical knowledge and feel that you did not achieve complete understanding. Primary teachers are expected to have a confident knowledge of mathematics. You are not expected to reach such a level for this unit, but you do need to know a fair amount. All the mathematics that children go on to d
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4.1 From awareness to understanding

In this section the mathematical content is more obvious as we talk explicitly about what it means to know and to think in mathematics. We will also address your own personal knowledge in the subject.

Like any other activity, doing and learning mathematics involves:

• using and adapting existing knowledge;

• acquiring and constructing new knowledge through thinking and learning;

• building up links that enable known t
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2.5 Communicating with language

It has been suggested that our ‘linguistic competence’ (Chomsky, 1965) consists simply of the ability to construct ‘well-formed sentences’. The sociolinguist Del Hymes (1979) considered this notion to be far too narrow, and proposed the term ‘communicative competence’ to account for speakers’ ability to use language appropriately. Communicative competence lets us know when to speak and when not to speak, how to take turns in conversations and how to start and end them, and how t
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2.3 ‘English’ as a school subject

In official UK curricula, language appears as a curriculum subject under a range of labels. In all four UK countries – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – the curricula for the 3–5 years age range (ACCAC, 2000a; DENI, 1997; QCA/DfEE, 2000; SCCC, 1999) include the word ‘language’ in the subject title. In the formal school curriculum, the subject is known as ‘English’ or ‘English Language’ (ACCAC, 2000b; CCEA, 2004; DfEE/QCA, 1999a; SOED, 1991). Wales, Northern Ire
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2.2 Language and shopping

The concept of self-service has reduced the use of spoken language dramatically, and nowadays shopping transactions may involve no more than the exchange of a few words. However, uses of literacy in shopping are probably increasing, as the next Activity shows.

Activity 3: Shopping and literacy

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2.1 Language in everyday life

Language is an ever-present feature of human life. In the developed world in particular, we are surrounded by language. Radio and television provide a soundtrack to the lives of many people. Written language is part of everything from cereal packets and street signs, to relatively new technologies such as email and text messaging. If you were completely alone, far away from any other people or any kind of human contact, how long would it be before words came into your head, perhaps because of
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1.4 Subject knowledge

Subject knowledge is a critical factor at every point in the teaching process: in planning, assessing and diagnosing, task setting, questioning, explaining and giving feedback.

(Alexander et al., 1992, paragraph 77)

Subject knowledge, which lies at the heart of this unit, comes in different forms. One well-known typology (Shulman, 1986) identifies three kinds:

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1.3 Language, mathematics and science in the unit

Because of the schooled culture we have grown up in, we are likely to recognise language, mathematics and science as distinct ‘ways of knowing’. The words ‘language’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘science’ probably prompted you to think first of the school curriculum, where they are often treated very separately from each other. One of the intentions of the unit is to explore and develop your understandings of these three subjects, which means that, inevitably, we will spend some time de
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1.2 What the unit is about

This unit is about the ways in which we come to know and make sense of the world, in particular how we do this using the media of language, mathematics and science.

There are many possible theoretical positions which can be taken towards early years curricula. Some people, for example, think of children as ‘empty vessels’ which can be ‘filled’ with knowledge that is transmitted to them by adults. This view has been associated with a behaviourist approach to teaching and l
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