The impact of action learning: what difference are we making in the world?

Involvement in a number of action-learning programmes and associated development opportunities has led the Professional Development Centre Limited to question the relevance of a strict adherence to the ‘rules’ of action learning as described by Reg Revans. A deliberate focus of one such programme to a financial services organisation offered some insights into the challenges of introducing action learning into the field. Pressures on organisations of time and business expedients might make them believe that action learning is too slow a technique to offer real rewards. However, elements of the action-learning story do resonate in the workplace, key concepts that appear to ‘stick’ are listening, questioning and equality. The utilisation of these skills enhances leadership and organisational development and can still provide a useful set of actions to aim for. This is especially true in problem solving and the way in which respect and equality can re-create a different environment or development space.     

Neoliberal narratives and the logic of abstinence only education: why are we still having this conversation?

Given the lack of citizen or medical support for abstinence-only education, we ask how abstinence-education maintains such a stronghold in America and other Western democracies’ public policy and consciousness. Our response has three parts. In the first, we outline the disproportionately negative health outcomes of sex education experienced by female, impoverished, ethnic and racial minorities, and LGBT youth. Next we address prominent narratives in sex education. We use the work of Pierre Bourdieu as a frame to understand neoliberal narratives and the accrual of cultural capital. Next we address two specific narratives in sex education, both of which align with broad tenets of neoliberal thought: the first of these is a focus on individual responsibility at the expense of understanding broader social structures. The second questions the role of education in a democratic nation that privileges the private over the overall health of the citizenry. In closing, we highlight comprehensive alternatives to sex education that can better prepare healthy individuals and democracy.     

Teacher professionalism: why are we still talking about it?

It is now more than 10 years after the publication of the monograph, The Activist Teaching Profession, which, at the time, could be described as a call to action for the teaching profession. I reflect here on how far has the profession progressed in responding to that call to action. The idea of a ‘call to action’ could be seen to born out of industrial rather than professional discourses: 10 years ago different factors were shaping teachers’ professional practice and identity and a call to action was a metaphor and a strategy to mobilize teachers. In this paper, I identify the factors that are still influencing and shaping the teaching profession and argue that different times require different responses and that current thinking and debates around teacher professionalism circulate around professional learning. In this paper, I argue that the time for an industrial approach to the teaching profession has passed. I make the case for systems, schools and teachers to be more research active with teachers’ practices validated and supported through research.     

Agency and structure in academic development practices: are we liberating academic teachers or are we part of a machinery supressing them?

This text taps into an ongoing discussion about academic development. It challenges an image of academic development as precarious and liminal and explores academic development as powerful. Sources of power are described and put into the context of values, ideologies, and policies governing higher education of today. It is our hope that readers will be inspired to problematise their own academic development practices and to reclaim a phase in the history of the profession where members displayed more of a political awareness.     

Representations of teaching and standards-based reform: are we closing the debate about teacher education?

Since the mid-eighties, national organizations have been working together in an effort to reform schools and, more specifically, to reform teaching. Paralleling the movement toward developing curriculum standards for students, professional standards for teachers have also been developed for the purpose of teacher education program accreditation. The objective of this national coalition is to strengthen the teaching profession and raise its standards—eventually enhancing the quality of student learning—by redesigning teacher licensing and accountability requirements for teacher education programs, and engaging teachers in on-going professional development. In this study we address three specific questions: (1) what representations of teaching and teachers are portrayed in the professional teaching standards, their related policies and assessment? (2) how are standards-based reform policies affecting teacher education programs? (3) what representations or conceptions of teaching and teachers are currently reflected in teacher education programs in the context of this reform? To address these questions two states were selected as test cases. Reform documents, policies and practices, as well as interviews with key participants in the reform (e.g., teacher educators, state-level administrators) are described and analyzed, and constitute the evidential basis for this study. The patterns emerging from the data indicate that teacher educators’ degrees of resistance or cooperation with externally imposed frameworks is influenced by their conception of teaching, education and its purpose. Further, as teacher educators uncritically participate in the standards-based movement it becomes impossible for them to entertain alternative perspectives on teaching and education outside of the framework provided to them by the standards.     

Rhetoric and reality: are integrated schools in Northern Ireland really making a difference?

This article explores perspectives on the current contribution of integrated schools to society in Northern Ireland and asks whether there is a mismatch between what some expect from the schools and what they may be able to provide. It suggests that integrated education may for some be a magic panacea, whilst those leading the sector see the benefits of integrated education as emerging over a much longer and more realistic timeframe. Based on a series of interviews with principals and with other leaders, this article explores how integrated schools balance the practice and evaluation of integration with other conflicting priorities. It questions the extent to which the schools show variation and argues that greater coherence within the integrated sector might be helpful in the current climate.     

Exploring the antecedents of boredom: Do teachers know why students are bored?

In the current study, researchers explored if teachers can identify antecedents of students' boredom. First, an open-ended questionnaire was administered to 111 9th-grade students to explore their self-reported causes of boredom. Next, semi-structured interviews with 117 9th-grade teachers were used to examine the factors that teachers think make their students bored. Also, quantitative questions gauged teachers' agreement with students' responses. Our results revealed a high congruency as teachers identified most of the antecedents of boredom named by students. One notable incongruity, however, was that teachers did not mention themselves as antecedents of boredom unless they were explicitly asked about it.     

Can we Evaluate the Impact of a Critical Detail? The Role of a Type of Diagram in Understanding Optical Imaging

This paper describes an attempt at evaluating a potentially critical “detail” of teaching practice; that is, using a particular diagram to illustrate the imaging role of a converging lens. This “basic” diagram has been designed to contribute to help students overcome the well‐known “travelling image” syndrome. We conducted a comparative study with 125 students in all, at three academic levels: end of secondary school, degree students, and teacher training. The groups compared had previously been taught elementary optical imaging in a classical, uncontrolled manner, and were presented with two classical questions, commonly used to demonstrate students’ difficulties. In each group, one‐half of the students had a classic introductory diagram and the other half had the “basic” one. A positive reaction of students to the evaluated diagram was observed at a relatively high academic level (trainee physics teachers and degree students), in contrast with an apparent lack of effect at the end of secondary school. The paper ends with a discussion of the evaluation of a detail of practice in isolation, with respect to the distance between students’ actual and targeted levels of comprehension.     

How and why are educators using Instagram?

Social media are commonplace in many educators’ lives, but their Instagram activities have received no prior attention in the empirical literature. We therefore created and disseminated a survey regarding educators’ Instagram use. Analyses of 841 responses suggested participants were generally intensive users of Instagram who engaged in the exchange of both professional knowledge and wisdom, as well as affective support. In addition to identifying benefits to Instagram use, some participants offered critiques of Instagram’s professional utility. We discuss the implications of these findings for educators’ work in a digital era and the future of research on educators’ social media activities.     

Scholarship of teaching and learning: ‘what the hell’ are we getting ourselves into?

Academics must be encouraged to reflect on their teaching, to apply new pedagogies to support student learning and to report on the results of these actions, which really forms part of programmes relating to Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). However, there seems to be resistance among some academics to get involved in these programmes due to fear of change or discrimination. The purpose of this article is to highlight the perceptions of four academics from different engineering fields towards such a programme from a University of Technology in South Africa. A qualitative study is employed where a focus group interview was used to gather data which are correlated to the SoTL unicycle detailed in the article. A benefit of joining an SoTL programme includes ‘developing a teaching action plan’ while a key challenge relates to time concerns. An implication may be to stimulate awareness among non-participating academics about what an SoTL programme really engenders.     

How does the change of a single data point affect the variance,and why?

In this paper, we investigate an interesting question that came up when reading a problem in a school textbook: What happens to the variance of a dataset in the case of changing one single data point, and why? Some of the answers are not surprising but here we find the full answer and demonstrate the understanding of it suitable for school students.     

Educational development as a field: are we there yet?

This paper contributes to the critical engagement about educational development and its status as a field. The critique focuses in particular on our knowledge and the nature of our knowledge-building. The paper argues that unless we strengthen our knowledge base we will not emerge as a professional field able to engage rigorously and systematically with the problems of higher education. Drawing on social realist work that builds on the ideas of Basil Bernstein, a framework is offered for conceptualizing knowledge differentiation and the implications of different types of knowledge for knowledge-building. The paper concludes with suggestions on how educational development might strengthen its knowledge-building capacity.     

Online student evaluations of teaching: what are we sacrificing for the affordances of technology?

In the context of increased emphasis on quality assurance of teaching, it is crucial that student evaluations of teaching (SET) methods be both reliable and workable in practice. Online SETs particularly tend to raise criticisms with those most reactive to mechanisms of teaching accountability. However, most studies of SET processes have been conducted with convenience, small and cross-sectional samples. Longitudinal studies are rare, as comparison studies on SET methodological approaches are generally pilot studies followed shortly after by implementation. The investigation presented here significantly contributes to the debate by examining the impact of the online administration method of SET on a very large longitudinal sample at the course level rather than attending to the student unit, thus compensating for the inter-dependency of students’ responses according to the instructor variable. It explores the impact of the administration method of SET (paper based in-class vs. out-of-class online collection) on scores, with a longitudinal sample of over 63,000 student responses collected over a total period of 10 years. Having adjusted for the confounding effect of class size, faculty, year of evaluation, years of teaching experience and student performance, it is observed that the actual effect of the administration method exists, but is insignificant.     

In and out of the STEM pipeline – a longitudinal study of a misleading metaphor

ABSTRACT

The metaphor of the leaking pipeline is sometimes used to suggest that some students are lost for STEM as they advance through the educational system. This paper follows a cohort of upper-secondary school students with an interest in STEM from 18 months before their completion of upper-secondary until three years after their completion. Adopting a mixed-methods design, it follows the students' reflections and interests concerning their choice of higher education programme within and/or outside STEM. Only 22% of the students expressed the same interest during the whole period, and 56% changed between different groups of studies, e.g. between STEM and HEALTH. The students' trajectories showed that the leaking-pipeline metaphor is misleading because it suggests a linear and one-way movement, while there were students moving in as well as out of STEM trajectories. The students’ reflections showed identity issues at the level of ego identity, the personal identity and the social identity (Coté and Levine). Particular incidents in the students’ lives and in the outreach programme they were involved in sparked interests and reflections. These incidents should be considered as elements in a continuous reflection concerning who they are and where they would like to go rather than as critical moments.