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Origins of reflective practice

Humans have probably always reflected as they walked the earth, and for over 2,000 years philosophers such as Socrates, who became famous for his adage, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, was just one of many who advocated that people should reflect on their existence. In addition, the concept of contemplation and its awareness-raising effects has long been a part of many great religions and philosophical studies where we humans are encouraged to practise mindfulness. In more modern times, perhaps the two most famous philosophers associated with the concept of reflection are John Dewey (1933) and Donald Schön (1983), in that order. In fact, Dewey first discussed reflection in terms of student learning (rather than for teachers), as he suggested that routine thinking and decisionmaking by students in educational settings limit their ability to learn critically. He later extended this idea of routine decisionmaking to teaching, and maintained that teachers can become slaves to routine decision-making if they do not engage in reflection. When explaining such reflection, he first discussed what it is not, and for this, he asserted that it is not just mulling over something or engaging in what I would call ‘navel-gazing’. Instead, Dewey maintained that reflection should be systematic and intentional. Dewey (1933, p. 9) defined such reflection as, ‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it and the further consequences to which it leads.’

Source: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/2024- 03/Farrell_Reflective_Practice_Final.pdf

Read the text and answer question.

Origins of reflective practice

Humans have probably always reflected as they walked the earth, and for over 2,000 years philosophers such as Socrates, who became famous for his adage, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, was just one of many who advocated that people should reflect on their existence. In addition, the concept of contemplation and its awareness-raising effects has long been a part of many great religions and philosophical studies where we humans are encouraged to practise mindfulness. In more modern times, perhaps the two most famous philosophers associated with the concept of reflection are John Dewey (1933) and Donald Schön (1983), in that order. In fact, Dewey first discussed reflection in terms of student learning (rather than for teachers), as he suggested that routine thinking and decisionmaking by students in educational settings limit their ability to learn critically. He later extended this idea of routine decisionmaking to teaching, and maintained that teachers can become slaves to routine decision-making if they do not engage in reflection. When explaining such reflection, he first discussed what it is not, and for this, he asserted that it is not just mulling over something or engaging in what I would call ‘navel-gazing’. Instead, Dewey maintained that reflection should be systematic and intentional. Dewey (1933, p. 9) defined such reflection as, ‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it and the further consequences to which it leads.’

Source: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/2024- 03/Farrell_Reflective_Practice_Final.pdf

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Social media restrictions for under-16s even if no ban, minister says

    The government is committed to implementing social media restrictions for under-16s but ministers must "make sure it works" before introducing changes, the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has told the BBC. The government is consulting on an outright ban, as well as other measures designed to stop teenagers accessing addictive and harmful material.

    Phillipson's comments came after junior education minister Olivia Bailey said the government would "impose some form of age or functionality restrictions" even if it stopped short of a ban. Campaigners have called for an Australia-style ban on children using social media, but there are questions about how effective the prohibition has been.

    Monday saw the latest stand-off between the government and House of Lords over the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would give ministers the power to introduce sweeping restrictions on social media usage. Peers have repeatedly pushed the government to press ahead with a ban, voting in favour of opposition amendments on four occasions.

    The government proposed further amendments to the bill on Monday in an effort to end the deadlock, including one which would give ministers the power to implement a ban in the future but stops short of introducing as quickly as the Lords had called for. MPs supported the government's changes to the draft law by 272 votes to 64, with the bill now returning to the Lords for what looks to be the final consideration before it receives royal assent and becomes law.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y7d2zx63jo

Read the text and answer question

Social media restrictions for under-16s even if no ban, minister says

    The government is committed to implementing social media restrictions for under-16s but ministers must "make sure it works" before introducing changes, the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has told the BBC. The government is consulting on an outright ban, as well as other measures designed to stop teenagers accessing addictive and harmful material.

    Phillipson's comments came after junior education minister Olivia Bailey said the government would "impose some form of age or functionality restrictions" even if it stopped short of a ban. Campaigners have called for an Australia-style ban on children using social media, but there are questions about how effective the prohibition has been.

    Monday saw the latest stand-off between the government and House of Lords over the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would give ministers the power to introduce sweeping restrictions on social media usage. Peers have repeatedly pushed the government to press ahead with a ban, voting in favour of opposition amendments on four occasions.

    The government proposed further amendments to the bill on Monday in an effort to end the deadlock, including one which would give ministers the power to implement a ban in the future but stops short of introducing as quickly as the Lords had called for. MPs supported the government's changes to the draft law by 272 votes to 64, with the bill now returning to the Lords for what looks to be the final consideration before it receives royal assent and becomes law.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y7d2zx63jo

Why women make way less than men do in more religious places

By Stephanie Pappas

   Why is there a persistent wage gap between men and women? Turns out, religion may play a big role in the disparity.

   New research finds that the wage gap is 8 percentage points wider in the five most religious states than in the five most secular, with women making 18% less than men in the least religious states and 26% less in the most religious. What's more, the gender gap is projected to vanish in 28 years in the most secular states, compared with a stunning 109 years in the most religious. "If they're in a religious community, our children are not going to know a world in which they're paid equitably," said Traci Sitzmann, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado, Denver. "It's a little bit scary." 

Religion and wages

  Sitzmann and her colleague Elizabeth Campbell, an assistant professor of work and organizations at the University of Minnesota, were interested in exploring the impacts of religiosity on workforce issues. They started with a global view. Using data from 140 countries, they compared the likelihood of citizens answering "yes" to the question, "Is religion important in your daily life?" with the gender wage gap in those countries as of 2013, the most recent global data available. They found a striking association: The more religious a country, the greater the wage gap. In nations where more than 95% or more people said religion was important in their daily lives, such as Pakistan and the Philippines, women earned around 46% as much as men.

   In countries where fewer than 20% of people said religion was important to them in daily life, such as Sweden and Estonia, women averaged around 75% of men's wages. The United States had moderately high religiosity and women in the U.S. earned 66 cents for every dollar men earned, Sitzmann told Live Science.

  The effect held true for all major world religions, Sitzmann said. It didn't matter if most believers in a country were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or adherants to a folk religion. The wage gap was still greater in countries where religion played a major role in daily life.

   The researchers then turned to Gallup survey data on religious service attendance and the importance of religion in daily life in the 50 U.S. states. In the U.S. data, the researchers looked only at full-time wages so as not to skew the results due to women working fewer hours.

   They again found that the more religious the state, the greater the wage gap. (Mississippi, Alabama, Utah, South Dakota and South Carolina were the most religious states; Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Nevada were the least.) The researchers found that religiosity explained 17% of the variability in the gender wage gap between states. To ensure that the wider economy or levels of conservatism weren’t responsible for the difference, the researchers then looked at year-over-year data between 2008 and 2018 and found that the association between religion and wages still held. The gender gap is shrinking over time in the U.S., they found, but it is shrinking faster in secular states compared with religious ones. At current rates, it will take more than a century for the gap to close in the most religious states.

   According to the workplace data analysis company PayScale, women make 81 cents for every dollar men make as of 2020. This analysis compares median salaries for men and women, and does not control for factors like seniority, years experience and education, all of which can be impacted by gender discrimination and gender role expectations.

The pathway to a wage gap

   Sitzmann and Campbell found three reasons for this difference in wages between secular and religious regions. The more religious a country or state, the more that society differentiated the roles of men and women. In other words, women in more religious societies are expected to put family first. The researchers measured this by looking at how many babies women have, how many women work at all, access to abortion and family-friendly work policies. In more religious societies, women have more children, participate less in the workforce, have less access both to abortion and to policies that help balance work with family. 

  Religious societies are also more likely to sexually objectify women, the researchers found. They measured this by looking at regional Google Trends for the search terms "pornography" and "rape." Both were correlated with religiosity, and both were correlated with the gender wage gap.

   Finally, religious societies are also less likely to promote or accept women in leadership positions. "We've got the Pope saying, 'the door is closed, women are not allowed to be leaders in the church,'" Sitzmann said, referring to Pope Francis' 2013 statement on female priests in the Catholic Church. "That sets the stage for a very strong norm."

   She and Campbell found that in more religious societies, women have less representation in politics and in organizational leadership. They also have lower educational attainment and less legal equality.

Closing the gap

  Finally, the researchers conducted experiments to confirm that it was indeed religion, and not some closely related concept like conservatism, that explained the results. They set up an online game in which 91 participants, about half women and half men, acted as managers who had to allocate wages to employees based on performance reviews. All of the participants saw the same performance reviews, but in some cases the employee was named Patricia Anderson and in others was called Michael Taylor.

   Before seeing the performance reviews, some participants saw a description of the mock company they were working for that described it as faith-based. Others saw a description that focused on the company's dedication to communication and community.

   Those who were primed to believe they were working for a religious company allocated 3% more to the male employee compared with the female employee. In contrast, those who thought the organization was secular allocated 6% more to the female employee.

   But there was a way to reverse the inequality. When the researchers told people in the mock religious company that one of the company values was that women needed to be involved, and that the company had a strict anti-sexual-harassment policy, it wiped out the gender wage gap, according to their research paper published Oct. 27 in the Academy of Management Journal.

   This was a heartening result, Sitzmann said, because it suggests that simply being aware of expectations for gender equality will help make people behave more equitably. 

Adapted from: https://www.livescience.com/religious-states-wider-gender-pay-gap.html

Why women make way less than men do in more religious places

By Stephanie Pappas

   Why is there a persistent wage gap between men and women? Turns out, religion may play a big role in the disparity.

   New research finds that the wage gap is 8 percentage points wider in the five most religious states than in the five most secular, with women making 18% less than men in the least religious states and 26% less in the most religious. What's more, the gender gap is projected to vanish in 28 years in the most secular states, compared with a stunning 109 years in the most religious. "If they're in a religious community, our children are not going to know a world in which they're paid equitably," said Traci Sitzmann, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado, Denver. "It's a little bit scary." 

Religion and wages

  Sitzmann and her colleague Elizabeth Campbell, an assistant professor of work and organizations at the University of Minnesota, were interested in exploring the impacts of religiosity on workforce issues. They started with a global view. Using data from 140 countries, they compared the likelihood of citizens answering "yes" to the question, "Is religion important in your daily life?" with the gender wage gap in those countries as of 2013, the most recent global data available. They found a striking association: The more religious a country, the greater the wage gap. In nations where more than 95% or more people said religion was important in their daily lives, such as Pakistan and the Philippines, women earned around 46% as much as men.

   In countries where fewer than 20% of people said religion was important to them in daily life, such as Sweden and Estonia, women averaged around 75% of men's wages. The United States had moderately high religiosity and women in the U.S. earned 66 cents for every dollar men earned, Sitzmann told Live Science.

  The effect held true for all major world religions, Sitzmann said. It didn't matter if most believers in a country were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or adherants to a folk religion. The wage gap was still greater in countries where religion played a major role in daily life.

   The researchers then turned to Gallup survey data on religious service attendance and the importance of religion in daily life in the 50 U.S. states. In the U.S. data, the researchers looked only at full-time wages so as not to skew the results due to women working fewer hours.

   They again found that the more religious the state, the greater the wage gap. (Mississippi, Alabama, Utah, South Dakota and South Carolina were the most religious states; Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Nevada were the least.) The researchers found that religiosity explained 17% of the variability in the gender wage gap between states. To ensure that the wider economy or levels of conservatism weren’t responsible for the difference, the researchers then looked at year-over-year data between 2008 and 2018 and found that the association between religion and wages still held. The gender gap is shrinking over time in the U.S., they found, but it is shrinking faster in secular states compared with religious ones. At current rates, it will take more than a century for the gap to close in the most religious states.

   According to the workplace data analysis company PayScale, women make 81 cents for every dollar men make as of 2020. This analysis compares median salaries for men and women, and does not control for factors like seniority, years experience and education, all of which can be impacted by gender discrimination and gender role expectations.

The pathway to a wage gap

   Sitzmann and Campbell found three reasons for this difference in wages between secular and religious regions. The more religious a country or state, the more that society differentiated the roles of men and women. In other words, women in more religious societies are expected to put family first. The researchers measured this by looking at how many babies women have, how many women work at all, access to abortion and family-friendly work policies. In more religious societies, women have more children, participate less in the workforce, have less access both to abortion and to policies that help balance work with family. 

  Religious societies are also more likely to sexually objectify women, the researchers found. They measured this by looking at regional Google Trends for the search terms "pornography" and "rape." Both were correlated with religiosity, and both were correlated with the gender wage gap.

   Finally, religious societies are also less likely to promote or accept women in leadership positions. "We've got the Pope saying, 'the door is closed, women are not allowed to be leaders in the church,'" Sitzmann said, referring to Pope Francis' 2013 statement on female priests in the Catholic Church. "That sets the stage for a very strong norm."

   She and Campbell found that in more religious societies, women have less representation in politics and in organizational leadership. They also have lower educational attainment and less legal equality.

Closing the gap

  Finally, the researchers conducted experiments to confirm that it was indeed religion, and not some closely related concept like conservatism, that explained the results. They set up an online game in which 91 participants, about half women and half men, acted as managers who had to allocate wages to employees based on performance reviews. All of the participants saw the same performance reviews, but in some cases the employee was named Patricia Anderson and in others was called Michael Taylor.

   Before seeing the performance reviews, some participants saw a description of the mock company they were working for that described it as faith-based. Others saw a description that focused on the company's dedication to communication and community.

   Those who were primed to believe they were working for a religious company allocated 3% more to the male employee compared with the female employee. In contrast, those who thought the organization was secular allocated 6% more to the female employee.

   But there was a way to reverse the inequality. When the researchers told people in the mock religious company that one of the company values was that women needed to be involved, and that the company had a strict anti-sexual-harassment policy, it wiped out the gender wage gap, according to their research paper published Oct. 27 in the Academy of Management Journal.

   This was a heartening result, Sitzmann said, because it suggests that simply being aware of expectations for gender equality will help make people behave more equitably. 

Adapted from: https://www.livescience.com/religious-states-wider-gender-pay-gap.html