Affiliation policy rhetoric and reality in the Ghanaian higher education context

The present affiliation policy regime of Ghana’s higher education system has existed for more than two decades. However, empirical studies to examine the policy rhetoric and reality with regard to building quality assurance capacity in mentored institutions appear non-existent. This paper is based on an illustrative qualitative case study undertaken to examine the achievements and challenges of implementing the policy to build internal quality assurance capacities in mentored institutions. The study was guided by Institutional Theory using 12 key informant in-depth interviews and document reviews as data collection sources. The findings indicate a minimal achievement of the policy intent on internal quality assurance capacity building due to key implementation challenges such as a tripartite relationship structure; increasing cost on mentored institutions and increasing workload on mentor institutions. The study concludes that the gap between the policy rhetoric and reality in the studied mentored institutions appears undesirable and requires stakeholders’ attention.     

Dramatizing the Authentic Research of a Local Scientist to Urban Elementary Students Through Professional Theater

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do. We collected pre-and post-play questionnaire responses and drawings of scientists from third and fourth grade students who attended the play. We also interviewed five of the ten teachers whose students attended the play. Findings indicated that most of these teachers felt strongly that their students had learned about scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do as a result of attending the play. However, less than half of the student questionnaires and drawings of scientists indicated such growth as a result of the play. That being said, numerous students were able to tell us what they learned from the play and many questionnaire responses and drawings indicated such learning. Implications for partnerships between schools and university faculty from various disciplines in order to develop potentially impactful plays that portray authentic scientific research are discussed.     

Training in the public sector in a period of austerity: the case of the UK

This article examines what has happened to training in public sector organisations in the UK in a period of austerity. It draws on individual-level data collected over the period 2000–2012 and establishment-level data collected from employer surveys carried out between 2005 and 2012. To understand these data further, 75 qualitative interviews with public sector employers were carried out between mid-2010 and early 2012. This article finds that while training incidence remained relatively high in the public sector, establishment-level control over planning and funding fell faster than in the private sector. Nevertheless, the public sector ethos of serving the community along with the tradition of the public sector as a ‘good employer’ meant that the training system within public sector organisations remained largely intact, even when the availability or frequency of some courses was reduced. The result was that limited training funds were made to go further by reducing the frequency of courses, prioritising courses immediately relevant to front-line services, tightening the application of eligibility criteria among potential trainees and economising on training delivery – summed up by one respondent as ‘training smarter’.     

Impacting policy discourse? An analysis of discourses and rhetorical devices deployed in the case of the Academies Commission

Academisation of the English secondary school system has been extremely rapid and represents significant changes to the governance of the English school system. However, there has been a relative scarcity of attention to the rationales, rhetorics and discourses underpinning the academies programme. Seeking to address this gap, a poststructuralist discourse analytic lens is applied to 63 written submissions to the Academies Commission from a range of stakeholder groups, in order to map the different discourses and narratives drawn on in relation to academies and academisation. In setting out the various discourses identified, a cluster of discourses and rhetorical devices that produce the British education system as ‘in crisis’ are given especial attention. It is argued that these discourses provide the rationale and legitimisation for radical policy intervention as exemplified by the academies programme. The findings also provoke discussion concerning potential subjective agency in the promotion or otherwise of particular narratives and ‘conceptual emblems’ that inform the field of educational policy.     

The problem of gender categorisation: addressing dilemmas past and present in gender and education research

Developments in the field of gender theory as applied to education since the 1970s are briefly reviewed in order to highlight key challenges and debates around gender categorisation and identification in gender and education. We argue that conundrums of categorisation have haunted, and continue to haunt, the field of gender theory, and empirical applications (such as the case of education) in particular. We explain how we have attempted to address some of the conundrums arising in our own theoretical work, and analyse remaining challenges that we feel the field of education needs to address in order to advance theoretically. Identifying two key tensions underpinning this empirical dilemma of gender categorisation – the tension between agency and determinism in gender identification, and that between gender deconstruction and gender analysis – we seek to weave a path through some of these complex debates, and to indicate ways in which they may be addressed in future work. We argue that in order to avoid essentialism and reification of gender distinction, we need to apply a ‘three-fold’ analysis that incorporates three different elements in our categorisation of gender: spectator perspective; respondent perspective and social context.     

An Experimental Study of Scheduling and Duration of "Tier 2" First-Grade Reading Intervention

This study compared the effects on reading outcomes of delivering supplemental, small-group intervention to first-grade students at risk for reading difficulties randomly assigned to one of three different treatment schedules: extended (4 sessions per week, 16 weeks; n = 66), concentrated (4 sessions per week, 8 weeks; n = 64), or distributed (2 sessions per week, 16 weeks; n = 62) schedules. All at-risk readers, identified through screening followed by 8 weeks of oral reading fluency (ORF) progress monitoring, received the same Tier 2 reading intervention in groups of 2 to 4 beginning in January of Grade 1. Group means were higher in word reading and ORF at the final time point relative to pretest; however, the groups did not differ significantly on any reading outcome or on rates of adequate intervention response. Of potential covariates, site, age, free lunch status, program coverage rate, and tutor were significantly related to student outcomes; however, the addition of these variables in multivariate models did not substantially change results. Rates of adequate intervention response were lower than have been reported for some first-grade interventions of longer duration.     

Social origins,school type and higher education destinations

To what extent and why do social origins matter for access to higher education, including access to elite universities? What is the role of private and selective schooling? This paper uses the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to analyse the trajectories of a generation currently in early middle age. We find that the influence of social origins, especially parental education, remains when both a wide range of cognitive measures and school attainment are controlled. Attending a private school is powerfully predictive of gaining a university degree, and especially a degree from an elite institution, while grammar schooling does not appear to confer any advantage.     

‘You must be thinking what a lesbian man teacher is doing in a nice place like Dipane Letsie School?’: enacting,negotiating and reproducing dominant understandings of gender in a rural school in the Free State,South Africa

In this article I explore two questions – how does, Thatho, a transgendered life orientation teacher enact, resist and reproduce dominant understandings of gender and sexuality in terms of his own identity and practice; and what specific possibilities, challenges and resistances exist for a transgender educator in the rural. Using life-history research, I show that Thatho challenges essentialist assumptions of gender and identity as he enacts multiple masculinities. My article troubles the common typification of men solely as hegemonic, marginalised or subordinate when indeed the actual accounts of their lives are far more fluid than these rigid distinctions. Thatho's enactment of multiple masculinities talks to the ‘durability or survivability of non-hegemonic patterns of masculinity’ outlined by Connell and Messershmidt [2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19 (6): 829–859. doi:10.1177/0891243205278639], which in many ways characterises a well-crafted response to his own marginalisation and stigmatised sexuality. Yet, Thatho's narrative also suggests a significant flexibility in the gender order in Qwaqwa, which looks different from the sometimes inflexibility of rural society and in some research from the developed world and, perhaps, from some urban contexts in contemporary South Africa.     

The symbolic violence of setting: A Bourdieusian analysis of mixed methods data on secondary students’ views about setting

‘Setting’ is a widespread practice in the UK, despite little evidence of its efficacy and substantial evidence of its detrimental impact on those allocated to the lowest sets. Taking a Bourdieusian approach, we propose that setting can be understood as a practice through which the social and cultural reproduction of dominant power relations is enacted within schools. Drawing on survey data from 12,178 Year 7 (age 11/12) students and discussion groups and individual interviews with 33 students, conducted as part of a wider project on secondary school grouping practices, we examine the views of students who experience setting, exploring the extent to which the legitimacy of the practice is accepted or challenged, focusing on students’ negative views about setting. Analyses show that privileged students (White, middle class) were most likely to be in top sets whereas working‐class and Black students were more likely to be in bottom sets. Students in the lowest sets (and boys, Black students and those in receipt of free school meals) were the most likely to express negative views of setting and to question the legitimacy and ‘fairness’ of setting as a practice, whereas top‐set students defended the legitimacy of setting and set allocations as ‘natural’ and ‘deserved’. This paper argues that setting is incompatible with social justice approaches to education and calls for the foregrounding of the views of those who are disadvantaged by the practice as a tool for challenging the doxa of setting.