Riding the dragon: developing inter‐agency systems for supporting children

‘Better inter‐agency working’ has been the oft‐quoted remedy to many reviews of services to support vulnerable children and young people, and yet outside the realms of tightly focused specialist teams it seems to be very difficult to achieve. Georgina Glenny here reviews three case studies of interdisciplinary and inter‐agency working to examine some of the reasons for the difficulties and some of the factors that contribute to success. Her findings suggest that, however ‘loose‐knit’ they are, members of children's services can work together effectively if they feel themselves to be part of a common project served by an inclusive communication system. In the successful case studies the ‘common project’ was defined by an agreed central purpose to guide action within a defined geographical locality. Central to achieving this purpose was a carefully managed series of communication feedback loops to ensure good quality information was being shared at all levels. With this communication system in place the complex system of relationships and actions that resulted could be reflected upon and continually tweaked to ensure that ‘project purpose’ was achieved or at least ‘worked towards’ in a managed way.     

Between school and working life: Vocational teachers’ agency in boundary-crossing settings

This paper investigates agency among vocational teachers with reference to boundary-crossing between school and working life. Our study utilised interviews with sixteen Finnish vocational teachers. Adopting a narrative analysis approach, we found that the teachers had a variety of forms of exercising agency in terms of decisions deliberately taken, and the discourse and actions following these decisions. These forms were: (i) restricted agency, (ii) extensive agency, (iii) multifaceted balancing agency, (iv) situationally diverse agency, and (v) relationally emergent agency. The exercising of agency was intertwined with the main resources and constraints emerging from the teachers’ sense of their professional self, their awareness of their relationships to workplace personnel, and their views of the professional tasks determined by the school. Depending on its nature and direction, agency appears to create diverse conditions for teachers’ productive work in boundary-crossing settings, for developing education and for remaking the work practices of workplaces.     

Girls in education: citizenship,agency and emotions

Education has been expected to maintain status quo through regulation of citizens, but also to contribute to social change and emancipation. In a collective ethnographic project we have proposed that these contradictions manifest themselves in everyday life at school through tensions between control and agency. Girls encounter practices whereby their use of space is curtailed, their embodiment is controlled and their voice is frequently considered inappropriate. Limitations encountered by girls when striving for independent individuality and citizenship generate a range of emotions. Girls enter educational spaces with the expectation of attaining rational individuality as learners. They often bestow great expectations on schooling and long to attain the position of an abstract independent individual and a citizen capable of exercising agency. In this process they enter a ‘transpositional’ space that frequently reminds them of their gender, as Victoria Foster suggests. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study and subsequent life history interviews on transitions of girls in ethnography.     

Multi‐directional creative transfer between practice‐based arts education and work

In this article we examine how 19 students in creative arts disciplines in two universities experience work in not‐for‐profit and public sectors. We explore the notion of transfer from university education and suggest that ‘creative transfer’ is taking place, often in more than one direction. Students draw on their life‐wide experiences as they deem appropriate in new situations and also vicarious learning from university settings. The extent to which creative transfer happens is, we suggest, tempered by relational affordances between the individual, the people they encounter, the opportunities they perceive in new situations and the value or reward perceived in the new work environment. These findings have implications for supporting students in practice‐based learning and work settings and we provide some recommendations for maximising the potential for multi‐directional transfer.     

Acting as accountable authors: Creating interactional spaces for agency work in teacher education

In this paper, relying on the sociocultural framework of learning, we report on the results of an ethnographically-grounded investigation of agency work among nine pre-service teachers: The main objective is to determine how agency emerges and is constructed in situated discourse practices within the context of a teacher education program embedded in the collective inquiry approach. Our study identifies the forms of agency that emerged in the collective discussions of the classroom community, evidencing pre-service teachers’ transformative agency, relational agency and epistemic agency. This study also shows that the negotiation and framing of agency, and acting as accountable authors, involves changes in teacher-student positions, such as crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries, as well as recognizing and crediting this crossing of boundaries. The methods and conditions for supporting students’ agency work in teacher education are discussed.     

The work of women teachers in primary literacy education: knowing and doing

This paper provides a retrospective account of three decades of my work as a literacy educator and researcher. Taking key insights from feminist sociologist, Dorothy Smith, including women's standpoint, the everyday world as problematic, institutional capture, a sociology for the people, I revisit my research on literacy, poverty and schooling. I argue that understanding better the effects of what we do in educational institutions, through collaborative research with teachers, can lead us to generate positive alternative equity‐driven practices.     

Family values and primary schools: an investigation into family‐related education

Within the context of the changing nature of family life within contemporary Britain, this article is concerned with the introduction of education on family relationships into the Personal, Social and Health Education curriculum. It draws on a research project that, through observations and interviews, investigated how three teachers portrayed ‘family’ within the classroom and how a sample of their pupils reacted to the images and values that were presented. The evidence presented suggests that the subject matter is complex and sensitive, and that careful thought needs to be given to both content and delivery if this area of values education is to be effective.     

Children,families, and feminism: Perspectives on teaching

Feminist theorists are raising questions about assumptions still common in the fields of family and child development which are relevant to early childhood educators. This article discusses why content and pedagogy work together in feminist classrooms and reviews research on the stages that many students and instructors move through as they learn about ways in which women continue to struggle for equal status in modern American society.     

Private foundations,philanthropy, and partnership in education and development: mapping the terrain

There has been increasing interest on the role of private foundations in education finance and delivery. We argue that this is due to a macro-policy context of stagnating levels of official development assistance for education and an uncritical acceptance of a logic of neutrality and the efficiency and effectiveness of of partnerships and philanthropy. This paper reports on the results of a literature review on private foundations in education and development. It found significant contestation against the claims of neutrality, efficiency, effectiveness. It also identifies salient methodological and substantive issues for the development of a research agenda on the issue.     

Extra‐credential experiences and social closure: Working‐class students at university

Human capital theorists perceive of educational expansion as beneficial to individuals, corporations and national economies, while social closure theorists have claimed that inflation of credential requirements maintains traditional status inequalities. In this paper I argue that status inequalities are not only maintained by credential inflation, but also the inflation of extra‐credential experiences. As undergraduate degrees become more common, access to employment and further education opportunities increasingly depend on extra‐curricular and ‘enriching’ educational experiences. Using qualitative data from a longitudinal study of working‐class university students in Canada, I will address the mechanisms by which they have gained or were denied access to such experiences. The data suggest that working‐class students’ relative lack of financial resources and social networks are barriers to the development of extra‐credential experiences, which in turn leads to the change of educational and career plans for some.     

The governance of families in India: education,rights and responsibility

This paper examines the shifting relations between the family and the state in Indian education policy. It charts how family resources, responsibility, and participation have been variously called upon by the state across three historical conjunctures of education reform: the decades of post-independence planning for school expansion and nation-building after 1947; the global development era of economic liberalisation and decentralisation in the 1990s and early 2000s; and the present turn to a rights-based approach in the context of intensified educational marketisation, as marked by the 2009 Right to Education Act (RTE). Across these periods, we identify an enduring paternalism of welfare governance alongside strategies for devolving state responsibility in matters of school education. The analysis situates the conditions of family responsibility for education under the contemporary RTE, in which parents are expected to be ‘morally’ compelled to meet the state's education goals. Through this analysis, we bring to the fore the politics of family governance in education policy, a politics that is largely overlooked by, despite being central to, research on education and international development.     

Accounting for structure and agency in ‘close-up’ research on teaching,learning and assessment in higher education

This paper examines research into teaching, learning and assessment (TLA) in higher education in terms of structure and agency. It argues that although issues of structure and agency are seen as crucial in social theory, they are very little discussed in research into TLA in higher education and that a consideration of structure and agency raises some important questions about this research and the quality of the explanations that it generates. It is therefore time to reconsider this research from the standpoint of structure and agency so that more sophisticated approaches to researching, and generating explanations of, teaching, learning and assessment in higher education can be developed.     

Shyness‐Sensitivity and Social,School, and Psychological Adjustment in Urban Chinese Children: A Four‐Wave Longitudinal Study

This study examined reciprocal contributions between shyness‐sensitivity and social, school, and psychological adjustment in urban Chinese children. Longitudinal data were collected once a year from Grade 3 to Grade 6 (ages 9–12 years) for 1,171 children from multiple sources. Shyness‐sensitivity positively contributed to social, school, and psychological difficulties over time, with the most consistent effects on peer preference and loneliness. Social and school adjustment negatively contributed to the development of shyness‐sensitivity. The initial levels of shyness‐sensitivity and social and school adjustment moderated the growth of each other, mainly as a resource‐potentiating factor. The results indicate the significance of shyness‐sensitivity for adjustment and the role of adjustment in the development of shyness‐sensitivity in today's urban Chinese society.     

中国家庭子女教育成本与投资分析

对人的教育投入,主要来自于家庭和国家,而家庭的投入占有很大比例。随着教育改革的深化和市场经济体制的确立,家庭对子女教育的投入比例越来越大。确立家庭对子女教育的投资理念和机制,是现代健康家庭生活所必需的,对国家宏观教育规划也有着积极支持 的作用。     

School placement and conductive education: the experiences of education administrators

A placement at the National Institute of Conductive Education (NICE) in Birmingham for children with motor disorders is strongly preferred over mainstream or special schools by some parents, but it has been noted that this is usually refused following the current statementing process. Although funding constraints have been articulated, Angela Morgan, a Research Fellow at the Wolverhampton University Policy Research Institute, and Kevin Hogan, also at the University of Wolverhampton, contend in this article that other explanations are possible, as variability remains in placement decisions. The experiences of education administrators working within the special educational needs departments of local education authorities who make the ultimate decision regarding school placement have hitherto been unexplored. This study offers findings from an exploratory qualitative study, which suggests that administrators are working from disparate understandings of conductive education within an arena fraught with conflict. Recommendations derived from the study include further in-service training for education administrators and prior training for individuals seeking a career in education administration to enhance collaborative working partnerships between administrators and parents.