‘It's not bullying’, ‘It's just a joke’: Teacher and student discursive manoeuvres around gendered violence

Threats or harassment related to the enforcement of gender norms remain largely unchallenged in many schools. Possibilities for meaningful interventions have been undermined by an over-reliance on individual, psycho-pathologised understandings of ‘bullying’ and a reluctance to examine contextual and socio-cultural mechanisms of power. Poststructural feminist approaches offer an alternative view of gendered violence and its responses—one that focuses on the meanings that individuals and groups constitute through discourse around gender, violence and ‘bullying’. This article examines focus group data from teachers and students from one Australian school that experienced a significant event of gendered violence referred to as ‘Kick a slut in the head day’. Results demonstrate that participants minimised or dismissed the ‘seriousness’ of this event through employing particular ‘discursive manoeuvres’ drawn from hegemonic discourses of ‘bullying’. Teachers utilised essentialist discourses to illustrate that the incident was ‘not bullying’, while students suggested that it was a ‘joke’ or that the girl/s were deserving of the treatment. These findings suggest that ‘discursive manoeuvres’ are a helpful indicator for understanding contextual resistance to addressing gendered violence.     

‘Seeing the trees not just the wood’: steps and not just journeys in teacher action research

Either action research by teachers uses the approach as a methodology to examine pedagogical change in a single intervention or it is used as means of understanding a journey of change. In contrast, this paper examines the significant impact of using action research in a second cycle of learning in the same context and with the same participants. Employing a number of data-gathering tools (reflective journals, unit diaries, post-cycle reflective analyses, student interviews and observations) this paper examines the residual and emergent effects of cooperative learning on the participants in a second, sequential unit of track and field athletics taught a year after the first intervention. It suggests that learning was both academic and social, and that participants felt the unit built on their prior learning about track and field because it was progressive, motivational and student-centred. The paper concludes by suggesting that, in seeking to understand a teacher’s pedagogical and curricular change process, we need to intersperse research that focuses on the journey toward change with research that explores the individual processes of change.     

How ‘intercultural’ is education in Greece? Insights from policymakers and educators

Schools in Greece particularly in inner-city areas, have seen a considerable increase in the number of migrant students over the past two decades. In this article, we discuss the intercultural education policy, which was introduced in 1996, in response to the migration and diversity the country has seen since the mid-1980s. We explore how policymakers and other stakeholders in the field of education have defined the notion of interculturalism and its implementation in schools. Our discussions draw on two separate studies, which used very similar tools and methods to elicit information. The article provides new insights from educators about how to respond to Greece’s diverse student population. The results not only highlight gaps between government policy and school practice, differences between traditionalists and progressivists, but also show that Greece has still a long way to go, to leave behind its ethnocentric image and fully implement intercultural education within all public schools, not only in the so-called intercultural schools.     

Attribution in the classroom: How just is the just world?

Research in the area of attribution theory is reviewed which documents the tendency to explain whatever happens to someone else as a just consequence of his own personal characteristics, rather than the result of environmental circumstances. The ramifications of this tendency in teachers' perceptions of students are discussed, and suggestions are offered for guarding against this sort of attributional bias.     

How do teachers interpret and transform entrepreneurship education?

During the last decade, entrepreneurship education has become a central curricular topic in many locations in the world. In Sweden, entrepreneurship education was implemented in the curriculum for the first time in 2011, as something that should be included in all upper secondary school programmes. In this article, we focus on one of these programmes, the handicraft programme, investigating how entrepreneurship education is formulated in the latest curriculum and how teachers understand and transform such content in their teaching. Drawing on Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, we illustrate how entrepreneurship education in the Swedish curriculum has a ‘dual definition’, representing very different framing and classification, but still clearly belongs in a ‘market relevance’ discourse. This is expressed through the way in which the concept is transformed by teachers in their teaching. We also find that entrepreneurship education has low legitimacy among teachers, particularly when it is classified weakly. The weak framing and classification, taken together with the low legitimacy among teachers, are likely to lead to very different transformations of entrepreneurship education in different educational contexts. In the long run, this could have a negative effect on the equivalence of teaching at upper secondary school.     

To jump the wave or not: teachers’ perceptions of research evidence in education

This article presents a microanalysis of how a group of primary school teachers deals with research evidence in their work. Based on analysis of a group of Norwegian teachers’ interactions over issues of educational research and research-based knowledge, we find that teachers’ representations of educational research particularly center on the following issues: educational research being perceived as circular, ‘polyphonic’, and a matter of accommodation to their experience-based knowledge. These metaphors also shed light upon the dilemmas that arise when research evidence meets teachers’ more contextual knowledge. We conclude that teachers’ practice-based evidence may take new forms with an increased policy focus on research-based evidence, as well as bringing forth challenges for teacher work and professionalism.     

Getting ‘foolishly hot and bothered’? Parents and teachers and sex education in the 1940s

The reluctance of parents to provide sex education has been a problem for educators since the first attempts at the modernisation of sex education in the early twentieth century, yet the sexual needs, desires and fears of parents are rarely even mentioned in pedagogical debates. This article examines the intense anxiety and embarrassment felt by both parents and teachers when they tried to provide sex education in mid-twentieth-century England. The gendered sexual cultures of women and men and the way in which these shaped responses to the pubertal experience of girls and boys are described. Sex education was a rational progressive discourse; the response of sex educators to resistance and rejection of what they offered was to present ‘rational’ arguments explaining that these anxieties are unnecessary and can thus be abandoned. Waves of popular emotion concerning child sexual abuse since the 1980s demonstrate the continuing relevance of this fear and anxiety, emotions that shaped the course of sex education over the past century.     

Pre-service teachers’ epistemic perspectives about philosophy in the classroom: it is not a bunch of ‘hippie stuff’

Using epistemic perspectives as a theoretical framework, this study investigated Australian pre-service teachers’ perspectives about knowing, knowledge and children’s learning, as they engaged in a semester-long unit on philosophy in the classroom. During the field experience component of the unit, pre-service teachers were required to teach at least one philosophy lesson. Pre-service teachers completed the Personal Epistemological Beliefs Survey at the beginning and end of the unit. They were also interviewed in focus groups at the end of the semester to investigate their views about children’s learning. Paired sample t-tests were used to explore changes in epistemic beliefs over time. Significant differences were found for only some individual items on the survey. However, when interviewed, pre-service teachers indicated that field experiences helped them consider children as competent ‘thinkers’ who were capable of engaging in philosophy in the classroom. They reported predominantly student-centred perspectives of children’s learning, although a process of adjudication (exploring disagreements and evidence for responses) was lacking in these responses.     

Underperformance or ‘getting it right’? Constructions of gender and achievement in the Australian inquiry into boys’ education

The underachievement of boys has been a focus of intense concern in Australia for over 15 years. Historical analyses suggest that male students’ poor performance has traditionally been attributed to factors external to boys themselves (methods, teachers, texts), deflecting attention from the relationship between masculinity construction and successful engagement with school. This paper turns the focus back, addressing the ways in which gender itself was constructed within hearings held for the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into Boys’ Education. Discursive analysis demonstrates that witnesses to the Inquiry drew upon a series of gender binaries in representing male and female students, and accounting for their relative attainment. These binaries worked to associate masculinity with ‘authentic’ learning, such that the success of male students was naturalised even in the absence of achievement. Conversely, the association of femininity and ‘inauthentic learning’ worked to undermine female students’ demonstrated success. The role of these binaries in the reproduction of a paradoxical relationship between gender and achievement is discussed.     

‘One assessment doesn’t serve all the purposes’ or does it? New Zealand teachers describe assessment and feedback

Within the Asia-Pacific community, the New Zealand Ministry of Education has been one of few educational authorities to adopt an Assessment for Learning (AfL) framework and actively promote formative uses of assessment. This paper reports the results of a qualitative study in which eleven New Zealand secondary teachers in two focus groups discussed their conceptions of assessment and feedback. These data were examined to see how teachers defined and understood assessment and feedback processes to identify how these conceptions related to AfL perspectives on assessment. Categorical analysis of these data found teachers identified three types of assessment (formative, classroom teacher–controlled summative and external summative) with three distinct purposes (improvement, reporting and compliance, irrelevance). Feedback was seen as being about learning, grades and marks, or behaviour and effort; these types served the same purposes as assessment with the addition of an encouragement purpose. This study showed that although these New Zealand teachers appeared committed to AfL, there was still disagreement amongst teachers as to what practices could be deemed formative and how to best implement these types of assessment. Additionally, even in this relatively low-stakes environment, they noted tension between improvement and accountability purposes for assessment.     

Research and development work: developing teachers as researchers or just teachers?

This article focuses on the theoretical frame of action research and the teacher as researcher, working through a Norwegian Research Council‐funded project in a school that explored learning strategies for pupils’ subject and social development. Action research is here called research and development (R&D) work as the term envisages that research and development are being conducted at the same time. Additionally, the term reflects the fact that the research is conducted within the framework of activity theory and Engeström’s expansive learning circle in which work is termed R&D. The article describes the possibilities and challenges for both teachers and researchers cooperating in R&D projects. Reflection on observed teaching are presented as a central activity in development work, covering the form and content of reflective dialogues; quotations from teachers are provided to show how the teachers experienced observation and reflection. The article discusses whether teachers become researchers, or whether they only develop in their role as teachers. The close cooperation between teachers and researchers in this work is also presented as a model for further education for teachers in‐service and for the training of teacher students.     

‘You're not just learning it,you're living it!’ Constructing the ‘good life’ in Australian university online promotional videos

Online promotional videos on Australian university websites are a form of institutional branding and marketing that construct university experience in a variety of ways. Here we consider how these multimedia texts represent student lifestyles, identities and aspirations in terms of the ‘good life’. We consider how the ‘promise of happiness’ is deployed to appeal to perceived consumer desires within the local student market, as well as within the highly competitive global knowledge economy. These texts position university students as youthful, attractive, active and fun, and depict student life as being about leisure and pleasure. Such representations promote cultural and social entitlement to the ‘good life’ as if synonymous with choice, participation and success in higher education. Learning and scholarship are depicted as secondary activities. We also contend that claims to cosmopolitanism and consumerism are framed by racialised entitlements where Whiteness remains both a commodity and norm.     

Failing intercultural education? ‘Thoughtfulness’ in intercultural education for student teachers

This paper proposes a rethinking of intercultural education in teacher education, arguing that discussion of the intercultural education of student teachers tends to have the following two gaps: one, such discussion tends to overlook student teacher education as a context for teaching intercultural education, and two, it tends to ignore the self of the teacher educator. This paper aims to address both gaps. In doing so, the first task of the paper is to analyse student teacher education critically, as a structural, ideological context for intercultural education; the second task of the paper is to rethink the pedagogical relationship between a student teacher and a teacher educator, considering the self of the teacher educator in particular. The paper concludes by suggesting ‘thoughtfulness’ as a fruitful idea for the intercultural education of student teachers.     

Engineering design in the classroom: Is it good science education or is it revolting?

The changing emphasis of science education today includes a shift from a narrowly disciplinary view of science to a more socially and technologically situated perspective. This article reports on the implementation of engineering design projects in about two dozen U. S. secondary science classrooms, following an inservice professional development course conducted at a university engineering college. Using data from an evaluation of the project and three sociological themes—secrecy and ownership, social persuasion and the status of facts, and the relationship between money and science—I argue that technological design projects provide a sociologically fruitful approach for teaching new themes in science education. However, teachers must rethink the nature of their subject matter, something that may be difficult if their training was disciplinary in emphasis.     

How valuable is ‘short project’ placement experience to higher education students?

Much of the research into higher education and its role in work-based learning, and especially in supporting undergraduate students on placements, has focused on longer-term internships and sandwich courses. Research has also concentrated on subject areas that have traditionally been associated with the above, for example business, health and engineering. By contrast, the aim of this study was to gather data from students on a much shorter period of placement categorised as a ‘short project’. In addition, the data recovered was from students studying within the social sciences paradigm, undertaking an undergraduate degree in education studies (not teacher training). The social sciences and humanities more generally have not been discussed to any great extent within the context of research on placement or work-based learning; the subject area of education studies is not covered by previous research. The results suggest that even a relatively short period of structured placement can be of significant benefit to students and provide them with an opportunity to assess their career direction and gain valuable experience. The article also considers to what extent this type of placement can be applied to other subject areas within higher education.     

What is global education and where is it taking us?

Global education began as a movement to reform education and society in the 1960s and 1970s, through the work of educationalists, NGOs and also intergovernmental organisations. The global approach seeks to break with a curriculum that is grounded in subject knowledge and national culture. Instead, it seeks to explore alternative rationales for education and alternate futures. A second wave of global or international education occurred from the 1990s alongside discussion of globalisation, which brought the movement into mainstream education. One of the characteristics of global/international education is its ambiguity. It seeks to break with the past curriculum, but it is not always clear what will take its place. For some, preparing young people for the global market is foremost, while others aim to facilitate the child's sense of himself or herself as a personal being. What is common to both is a desire to challenge the boundaries that previously gave meaning to education (especially theoretical knowledge and culture) and a search for meaning and opportunity in the projection of power beyond national boundaries. We conclude by questioning whether children are adequately prepared to act as global citizens without an education based on academic knowledge and an ethical framework that is culturally grounded.