Teacher beliefs have been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather than on insights from modern linguistics, and for its focus on lower order thinking. A growing body of literature on grammar teaching promotes the opposite, arguing for more linguistic conceptual knowledge and reflective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an important role in the national development of a new curriculum. This study explores current Dutch teachers’ beliefs on the use of modern linguistic concepts and reflective judgment in grammar teaching. To this end, we conducted a questionnaire among 110 Dutch language teachers from secondary education and analyzed contemporary school textbooks likely to reflect existing teachers’ beliefs. Results indicate that teachers generally appear to favor stimulating reflective judgement in grammar teaching, although implementing activities aimed at fostering reflective thinking seems to be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguistics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from linguistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.
We developed and tested a teaching case and teaching note on the challenges that a small sustainable fashion brand faces when implementing a circular business model. We target bachelor and master students of international business, entrepreneurship, strategic management, circularity/sustainability courses. This teaching case challenges students to think about how circular business models can contribute to sustainability and highlights opportunities and barriers to adopting circular strategies. The case is based on publicly available sources and interviews with sustainable fashion brand Kuyichi. The main learning objectives for students are: 1) to understand the concept of circular economy (CE) and how circular business models differ from linear business models; 2) demonstrate in what way circular business models can contribute to sustainability; 3) evaluate rental and/or resale business models and the challenges and opportunities involved; 4) make recommendations on adopting circular strategies or business models that support the transition to a circular economy. The teaching note highlights academic and practitioner literature, such as circular business models (Bocken et al., 2016; Circle Economy, 2021; Lüdeke-Freund, Gold, Bocken, 2019), strategies (Konietzko et al., 2020), transition theory (Geels, 2002; Nambisan and Baron, 2013), organizational inertia (Sydow et al., 2009) and dynamic capabilities (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2004; Teece et al., 1997), and makes suggestions for classroom discussion and assignments. The teaching case and note will be published as a free case with The Case Centre. We are grateful for the support of the Dutch Research Council, RAAK.PRO03.038, that made the development of this case possible.
Over the past 15 years the Web has transformed the ways in which we search for information and use it. In more recent years, we have seen the emergence of a new array of innovative tools that collectively go under the name of 'Web 2.0', in which the information user is also increasingly an information producer (i.e., prosumer), by sharing or creating content. The success of Web 2.0 tools for personal use is only partially replicated in the professional sphere and, particularly, in the academic environment in relation with research and teaching. To date, very few studies have explored the level of adoption of Web 2.0 among academic researchers in their research and teaching activity. It is not known in what way how and how much Web 2.0 is currently used within research communities, and we are not aware of the drivers and the drawbacks of the use of Web 2.0 tools in academia, where the majority of people is focused either on research or on teaching activities. To analyse these issues, i.e. the combined adoption of Web 2.0 tools in teaching and research, the authors carried out a survey among teaching and researching staff of the University of Breda in The Netherlands. This country was chosen mainly because it is on the cutting edge as far as innovation is concerned. An important driver in choosing the Breda University's academic community was the fact that one of the two authors of this survey works as senior researcher at this university. The purpose of our survey was to explore the level of adoption of Web 2.0 tools among the academic communities. We were interested in investigating how they were using these tools in the creation of scientific knowledge both in their research and teaching activity. We were also interested in analysing differences in the level of adoption of Web 2.0 tools with regard to researchers' position, age, gender, and research field. Finally, in our study we explored the issue of peer reviewing in the Web 2.0 setting. In particular, we investigated whether social peer review is regarded by researchers as a viable alternative to the current closed peer review system (single-blind or double blind). We approached about 60 staff members, but only 12 faculty members completed the survey fully. This means that our results can only be regarded as exploratory, but we still believe that they represent a complementary perspective with respect to previous studies.
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