Karen Taylor | Wellington College, Berkshire (original) (raw)

Papers by Karen Taylor

The Learning Principles at Ecolint, 2022

Current educational discourse frequently refers to the importance of developing independent learn... more Current educational discourse frequently refers to the importance of developing independent learners who are agents of their own learning. A significant body of research in education and a number of social science disciplines provides teachers with the tools and pedagogical methods to create a collaborative and inclusive classroom environment that will facilitate the metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness that students need to develop their agentivity. This paper examines ten fundamental principles of learning in relation to the notion of student autonomy in an inclusive classroom.

At Ecolint we see ourselves as a community of learners encompassing both children and adults and ... more At Ecolint we see ourselves as a community of learners encompassing both children and adults and we recognize the capacity of each individual to engage in a meaningful and personally challenging learning journey. We believe that a profound understanding of the conditions necessary for deep learning leads naturally to high quality teaching. Consequently, our classroom practice is based on ten evidence based principles of learning drawn from a wide range of current research in education, cognitive and social psychology and neurobiology, all of which contribute to deepen our understanding of how human beings acquire and retain knowledge to make meaning of their world. The Learning Principles are at the heart of all that we do; they inform both pedagogical practices and the relationship between teachers and students regardless of the curriculum framework or the age of the learner. The Learning Principles are about what takes place in the classroom and they inform teaching and learning at every stage of a child's development. The Learning Principles do not exist independently of one another; they are both interconnected and interrelated. In the end, they come down to five Ecolint Essentials or the Ecolint promise: Each student, in each classroom, should be able to say: My teacher... Knows me Checks what I already know and can do Teaches in lots of different ways Pauses to see if I understand Gives me choices

Children and Childhood: Practices and Perspectives, 2013

The Eighteenth Century is generally regarded by historians as ushering in the modern era. In this... more The Eighteenth Century is generally regarded by historians as ushering in the modern era. In this period of intellectual transition associated with Enlightenment thought, we see increasing emphasis on education as the means to transform both the individual and society. Madame d'Épinay and Madame de Genlis each produced influential pedagogical texts (Conversations d'Émilie, 1774 and Adèle et Théodore, 1782 respectively) in which they articulate pedagogical methods designed to promote the intellectual development of the child. In the Conversations, Madame d'Épinay uses speech and conversation as the means of teaching the child to exercise her faculties of reason and judgment. In doing so, she not only conveys basic principles of Enlightenment thought but also gives 'voice' to herself and her child. For Madame de Genlis, the foundation of the child's intellectual development rests on reading and writing, exercises that necessitate reflection and higher-order reasoning skills. Both writers emphasize the importance of adult role models in children's development and encourage the child to develop his or her own ideas. The ultimate goal for each author is to provide a pedagogical method that will prepare children to lead satisfying autonomous lives as adults. In addition, d'Épinay and de Genlis reveal the dynamics of gender in the process of adolescent intellectual development. This project draws from recent trends in feminist theory and developmental psychology to explore the gendered dynamics of adolescent cognitive development in eighteenth-century pedagogical literature.

Negotiating Childhoods, 2010

... The Influence of Early Modern Epistemology _____ 76 Darnton, R., The Kiss of Lamourette: Refl... more ... The Influence of Early Modern Epistemology _____ 76 Darnton, R., The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in ... Godlewska, A., Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt ...

Research Journal: International Education Theory and Practice, 2022

The aim of this article is to explore the historical origins of the modern concept of childhood a... more The aim of this article is to explore the historical origins of the modern concept of childhood as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and to argue that the notion of childhood as a separate stage of development during which families and institutions should encourage the development of the child as a full, autonomous individual was born in the eighteenth century. It will outline the historiography of childhood while drawing on evidence from pedagogical and children’s literature of the period to argue that the ‘discovery’ of childhood was largely an eighteenth-century phenomenon and one that is inherently connected to Enlightenment thought.

Early Modern Europe, 2006

... of the fourteenth century until the middle of the fifteenth, the cold plains of northern Euro... more ... of the fourteenth century until the middle of the fifteenth, the cold plains of northern Europe felt the ... the nature of political society owe much to the great writers of Renaissance Florence, such as ... cahiers for the Estate General of 1560, deputies of the duchy of Burgundy, meeting in ...

Research Journal, 2015

In her feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949), the French existentialist philosopher Simone de B... more In her feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949), the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote the famous words "one is not born but becomes a woman." Although she lived two centuries earlier, Louise d'Épinay's life (1726-1783) offers one of the clearest examples of what de Beauvoir meant. Madame d'Épinay's writings represent a woman in the process of defining herself-as an individual, an author, a parent and a teacher. In her Conversations d'Émilie (1774), a pedagogical work in the form of conversations between Émilie and her mother, the author uses dialogue as the means of teaching Émilie to exercise her faculties of reason and judgment. In doing so, she not only conveys basic principles of Enlightenment thought but also gives "voice" to herself and her child. Madame d'Épinay's autobiographical, epistolary novel, L'Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant (1951), similarly reveals the dynamics of silence and voice in a woman's life.

Negotiating Childhoods, 2020

This paper explores the relationship between the curricular material (the cahiers de géographie) ... more This paper explores the relationship between the curricular material (the cahiers de géographie) used at the Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr, a school for noble girls established by Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon in 1689, and the broader intellectual and cultural context from which it emerged. Saint-Cyr exposed its students not only to 'agreeable and useful' information, as geography was often termed at the time, but also to a manner of structuring knowledge that necessarily reflects aspects of empirical and epistemological thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The primacy of sense experience to the acquisition of knowledge permeates eighteenth-century thought. In his Essay Concerning Understanding (1690) Locke asserted that sense experience is the source of operations of the mind as well as our ideas. His influence in France is evident as Condillac, among others, built on Locke's theory in his Traîté des sensations (1754). The very structure of the cahiers, with their combination of map, accompanying text and list of terms, echoes precisely this mental process whereby a visual image should ideally lead to the exercise of memory and, finally, comparison and judgment as the demoiselle reflected upon the material contained within multiple cahiers.

Children and Childhood: Practices and Perspectives., 2013

Book Reviews by Karen Taylor

Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 2016

In his acknowledgements, Thomas S. Popkewitz explains that this work grew out of conversations fo... more In his acknowledgements, Thomas S. Popkewitz explains that this work grew out of conversations focused on the question of "'reason' as a historical problem" (p. ix). It is clear in reading this interesting collection of essays that, with varying degrees of explicitness, the authors are collectively challenging the legacy of Enlightenment thought on the historical method. However, the body of literature dealing with the problem of the Enlightenment that finds its origins in the work of scholars of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is a silent shadow that haunts this volume (to borrow the term used by Lynn Fendler in her excellent final chapter). I am thinking of Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) as an example. Fleck offers a means to understand the way in which scientific knowledge is conditioned by society and culture. The works of scholars such as Peter Burke (2000), Helen Longino (2002), and Karl Mannheim (1985) in the sociology of knowledge remind us of the importance of exploring the relationship between an idea and its situation or context. They urge us to consider the relationship of knowledge to power because the way in which we see the world is a result of power relations that we may not be aware of on a conscious level. Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge continues in this tradition while further elaborating on related themes introduced in a previous work by Popkewitz and collaborators Barry M. Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (2001), who emphasise the importance of interdisciplinary and comparative history "focused on issues of knowledge, cultural and social change" (p. xiii). This 2001 collective project is worthy of attention as it calls on historians of education but this could and should be a call to historians of all stripes to grapple deliberately with the problem of subjectivity in their research programs. In this recent work (2013), Popkewitz points to a distinction between the work of North American and European scholars. American scholarly work, he argues, has long been archive and data-driven (at least since the 1960s), as historians sought to legitimate their field as a science. He calls on American scholars of the history of education to situate their research in a more complex theoretical framework and to break free from traditional paradigms. Such an appeal is laudable and is successfully carried out in the chapters that make up this work. In Chapter 1, Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education, Popkewitz sets the stage for what is to come. He does this by calling on the reader "to consider