Monica
According to the university newspaper, female professors at NTNU are now paid more than male professors (on average). I am not fully convinced this is good news. Discrimination based on gender is not right, even if is in favor of women…but there might be a number of other reasons to explain the data.
Alla mia nonna, che oggi compie 92 anni! Che ha visto un mondo senza aerei, senza TV e senza Internet; che ha ancora voglia di stupirsi e scoprire il mondo; che e’ sempre stata con me quando ho avuto bisogno. Oggi vorrei essere con lei.
Aspettiamo l’autobus sotto una pioggia battente. A 200 mt dal capolinea ha gia’ dieci minuti di ritardo. Biglietto 4 (dico quattro) EURO. Al lavoro mi aspettano solo problemi. Oggi il mio “VivaLaScandinavia” si e’ fatto molto flebile.
in its issue of October 16th, Nature is reporting on budget cuts to Italian university “…In an attempt to boost its struggling economy, Italy’s government is focusing on easy, but unwise, targets…It is a dark and angry time for scientists in Italy, faced as they are with a government acting out its own peculiar cost-cutting philosophy…” (read here) …Very depressing reading!
Ancora una volta mi tocca dire “Viva la Scandinavia” (…Va be’, sta arrivando l’inverno e dobbiamo pur convincerci in qualche modo di quanto siamo fortunati a vivere in Norvegia!)
Lunedi’ io e Veronica dobbiamo parlare dell’Italia alla sua classe e com’e’ essere bambini in Italia. Ma come si spiega a questi bambini cresciuti con Pippi Calzelunghe, ribelle e indipendente, cosa vuol dire crescere con Pinocchio…sempre con una fata turchina o un grillo parlante a dirti cosa e’ giusto e cosa non e’ giusto fare…e non divertirti troppo se no ti crescono le orecchie da somaro!! Qualche volta bisogna dirlo ”viva la scandinavia!!!”
Stop at the library and have a look at the beautiful midnight pictures by Renato Roque, a Portuguese photographer enchanted by the midnight sun on Trondheim fjord. The project is also available at http://www.renatoroque.com/12pm/12pm.html
I have been teaching for many years project based courses at the university and I see that pre- and elementary schools are facing similar challenges. When we go beyond a notion of learning as acquisition of factual knowledge or of specific techniques, we are facing difficult questions like: what is a good learning experience? How we promote growth of individuals and of the complex social networks they belong to? How do we create contexts to promote learning? How do we assess learning?
Difficult questions…it is much easier to think that we can measure learning with “universal” tests of some type! But can we? How dangerous is it to refuse addressing these challenging questions?
testing, benchmarking, ranking, etc. etc.
If you feel uneasy with these buzzwords and you think they do not tell the whole story, you might find interesting the book “Beyond quality …”. Though it refers mainly to early childhood education, its message is much wider.
Some food for thoughts …In more than 40 years the pre-schools of Reggio have never been evaluating themselves against some easy measurable predefined criteria, nor they have “tested” their children. …Still they are an example worldwide.
