Special Lecture by Paul Dowling of the University of London
Osaka Kyoiku University on April 19 (Thursday) hosted a lecture at the Kashiwara Campus by Paul Dowling from the Institute of Education, University of London. The university is one of the institutions with which Osaka Kyoiku has entered an academic exchange agreement. Sponsored jointly by the International Center and the Department of English Education, the talk was attended by about 50 faculty members and students.
An eminent sociologist, Dowling is a proponent of the Social Activity Method (SAM) as a tool for sociologically describing information about pedagogic sites in a variety of contexts. He is also involved in the research and training of students. The lecture marked the second time he has spoken at our university.
Dowling’s subject on this occasion was ""The Social Activity Method and Analysis in Educational Research."" He explained about general and compartmentalized approaches by performing a data analysis that included two simple textual analyses and was based on the examples of studies conducted by his students in the doctoral program at the University of London. He then discussed the origins of the categories used in the analysis, and offered concrete examples related to SAM.
Dowling's well-thought out lecture presented a very sophisticated theory that the students present grasped as easily as the faculty, and everyone who attended listened keenly to the 90-minute talk.