Negotiating school-university partnerships: Participants' voices in co-reform

Although many educators recognize the importance of voice, fostering voice in those who have traditionally been voiceless has been difficult. This article, like the program that it describes, tackles that challenge by having participants speak for themselves. Specifically, the participants speak about their involvement in the first year of an alternative teacher education project. In describing their involvement, the participants focus on their roles and relationships as well as the type of partnership and collaboration that emerged from this project.     

立法者与阐释者：大学专家在“校院合作”中角色之嬗变

大学专家进入中小学从事教育研究是一种“校阶合作”现象。长期以来,这种合作存在一种不平等的知识／权力关系。大学专家在此过程中控制着“权威性话语”,扮演着“立法者”角色,教师仅仅是其生产出来的知识的消费者和应用者。本文从一种新的认识视野,认为大学专家的话语和角色将发生变化,他们将秉持“解释性话语”,扮演“阐释者”角色,在与教师真诚地对话与交流中创建具有真正意义的“校院合作”关系。     

Providing Space for Teacher Renewal: The role of the facilitator in school-university partnerships

This article uses the process of a teacher renewal partnership programme to explore the role of the university academic as a facilitator of change. Responses to a series of interview questions relating to change were used to explore and examine the dimensions of the facilitator's role. Facilitators report that the role is complex, often uncertain and requires an understanding of the school and its culture and schools' and teachers' previous experiences in professional development programmes. The findings from this article suggest that an effective facilitator creates, for the teachers involved, a space for discussion, reflection and challenge and that this space provides for and legitimates teacher renewal.     

The evaluation of school-university partnerships that improve teaching and learning practices: A systematic review

This paper presents a systematic literature review of School-University Partnerships (SUPs) that aim to promote changes in teaching and learning practices. Our analysis focuses on the evaluation of such SUPs, throughout their development process (from Exploration to Implementation and Sustainability). Our results highlight the nonlinearity of such development processes. The evaluation of the SUPs mainly relied on qualitative approaches and occurred primarily during the Implementation phase. Furthermore, the evaluation instruments used have seldom been validated or reused within the research community. Future research can focus on the development of reliable evaluation instruments, useable throughout the lifecycle of SUPs, to guide their decision-making.     

Subjectivity,social change and the reform problematic

The theme of ‘new directions for research in relation to social justice and teacher education’ raises questions about not only the broad economic and cultural shifts which now frame education (what types of exclusions and unfairnesses are being created?), and not only about the changing construction of inequalities in education in the reshaped education institutions (what is social justice?). It also raises the very difficult issue of how older research and reform agendas meet, or fail to meet, the subjectivity of students today; and the problem of how adequately the (human) subject, subject formation and the historical specificity of human subjects is now considered in the reform agendas. This paper will illustrate some of these questions by drawing on a seven-year longitudinal, qualitative study, now nearing completion, of students going through school. It will argue for the continued utility of this form of more traditional academic research, in addition to the types of action-directed and ‘partnership’ research that are commonly seen as the task of ‘teacher education’ now. From this study of the current generation of students at school, the paper will point to some continuities and some shifts regarding how winners and losers are being created through schooling today. It will also revisit the old issue for researchers and reformers in education, about who is speaking to whom and with what effects.     

Learning through networks: trust,partnerships and the power of action research

In England school teachers and head teachers are faced with a myriad of challenges in coping with the pressures of managing the dynamic and diverse institution which is their school within an imposed, centralized, standards-driven change agenda. It could be argued that many of the national policies and initiatives over the last 15 years have directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously undermined the traditional autonomy of teachers. As a consequence, many feel little ownership of a curriculum that is regularly policed through national pupil assessment at ages 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18, school inspections and competency frameworks related to role specification, and are consequently insecure in making decisions about pedagogy. As part of governments' drive to ensure the effective and efficient implementation, they have been inundated also with demands to attend professional development courses dealing with imposed initiatives, but have little time or energy for reflection on their practice and reflection on the impact that imposed change is making on pupils, motivation, learning and achievement. It was in this context that the Primary Schools Learning Network was formed through negotiated partnerships between a group of self-selecting schools, the local education authority (district), and the Centre for Research on Teacher and School Development at the University of Nottingham. Its aim was to give ownership for development back to teachers through collaborative action research with a view to improving schools and raising pupil attainment.     

Building Expertise: a process perspective on the development or change of teachers’ beliefs

Based on a process perspective of expertise development, eight experienced teachers were interviewed about their beliefs about student learning, i.e. the way they developed their beliefs, and to what extent they have changed and intend to further change these beliefs. Learning or expertise development by teachers appears to be highly personalised or subjective, and rarely based on enhanced reflection. Primarily, dissatisfaction about the actual situation and, subsequently, attempts to improve that situation encourage teachers to develop or change their beliefs. As is the case with most teachers the change which occurs is gradually based on cumulative experiences, although also a radical change of beliefs on the basis of key‐experiences may not be excluded. It is predominantly personal motives which seem to determine teacher learning. It is argued that collaborative learning by teachers should be promoted in schools, though individually initiated learning by teachers may also had to improvements that can be implemented by colleagues.     

BRAC in Afghanistan: Building South-South partnerships in teacher training

Training paraprofessionals such as teachers is one of many significant challenges facing Afghanistan??s educational system. This case study focuses on the innovations offered in that regard by BRAC, a large NGO based in Bangladesh that brought its many years of development experience to Afghanistan in 2002 and established itself there as the premier change agent on multiple developmental fronts. Through the use of structured and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, classroom observations, and extensive document analysis, the authors conclude that by successfully modifying its teacher training programme in Bangladesh, BRAC has been able to develop an approach to teacher training in Afghanistan that may become a showcase example of effective South-South partnership in education. The article concludes by urging adoption of BRAC??s innovations in teacher training and recruitment by other developing nations facing similar challenges.     

Mentoring the Mentor: Professional development through a school-university partnership

Governments worldwide have invested in teaching standards and performance benchmarks to improve teacher preparation and teacher quality that impacts student achievement. As a means of addressing these imperatives, the Australian government has recently encouraged formal partnerships between tertiary providers, schools and education systems in delivering teacher education and professional development, in particular for mentors. This article documents challenges and initial findings of the first year of a school-university partnership involving an Australian regional university and K-12 teacher-mentors located in rural schools. It describes the design and implementation of a contextualised professional development model, using participatory action research to build teacher capacity for mentoring and foster a culture of collaborative inquiry. The model discussed reflects a systematic approach to constructing knowledge, skills and roles essential to effective mentoring.     

Beyond individual behaviour change: the role of power,knowledge and strategy in tackling climate change

Individual behaviour change is fast becoming a kind of ‘holy grail’ to tackle climate change, in environmental policy, the environmental movement and academic literature. This is contested by those who claim that social structures are the main problem and who advocate collective social action. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to better understand why environmentally concerned citizens choose one of these two types of engagement. Our focus is on the role of experiences of and/or convictions about power in shaping this choice. Within the framework of an explorative qualitative study, we engaged in in-depth interviews with 12 young environmentally concerned citizens. On this basis, five main findings are elaborated. Firstly, powerlessness is shown to be a crucial experience, whatever the respondents’ engagement. Secondly, ‘strategy scepticism’ seems to be a more important obstacle for engagement than ‘climate scepticism’. Thirdly, many respondents express significant resistance towards being ‘conditioned’ by awareness-raising campaigns. Fourthly, a ‘gap’ is observed between respondents’ analysis and their strategy proposals. Finally, we underscore another important gap between concrete and abstract levels in respondents’ discourses. All these findings disclose paradoxical aspects of the role of power in shaping the concerned citizens’ engaged choices.     

The curriculum change process: Participants,strategies, and tactics

This investigation focuses on the participants, strategies, and tactics involved in the curriculum change process in higher education. Using the exploratory case study approach in three accredited graduate schools of business, the study identifies and describes the roles of two groups of participants: internals, (faculty, administration, students), and externals (trustees, alumni, community leaders, unions). Two basic strategies, the empirical rational and the power coercive, are found to be important approaches to curriculum change. A typology of factors is used to describe the specific methods used to implement (or resist) curriculum change. It was expected that the participants, strategies, and tactics involved in the curriculum change process in graduate schools of business would be unique. The findings suggest that strategies and tactics employed in higher education are quite similar to those employed in other organizations with respect to the process of change.     

An analysis of the rhetoric and practice of educational partnerships in the UK: an arena of complexities,tensions and power

The article presents a critique of the discourse of ‘systematic review’ in education, as developed and promoted by the EPPI‐Centre at the University of London. Based on a close reading of the exhortatory and instructional literature and 30 published reviews, it argues that the approach degrades the status of reading and writing as scholarly activities, tends to result in reviews with limited capacity to inform policy or practice, and constitutes a threat to quality and critique in scholarship and research. The claims that are made for the transparency, accountability and trustworthiness of systematic review do not therefore, it is argued, stand up to scrutiny. The article concludes that systematic review is animated, not just by dissatisfaction with the uncertainties of educational research (a dissatisfaction that it shares with the ‘evidence‐informed movement’ with which it is associated), but by a fear of language itself.     

Challenging assumptions about values,interests and power in further and higher education partnerships

This article raises questions that challenge assumptions about values, interests and power in further and higher education partnerships. These topics were explored in a series of semi-structured interviews with a sample of principals and senior higher education partnership managers of colleges spread across a single region in England. The data suggest that common assumptions evident in the literature and professional discourse about the hegemony of higher education institutions in partnerships with further education and sixth form colleges may be misplaced. Questions are also raised about an exclusive focus upon shared values in educational partnerships, and it is suggested that greater clarity about the focus of educational partnerships can explain how successful partnerships can negotiate which values and interests are shared and which are not – an approach that can be a useful modus operandi in the increasingly competitive educational markets in which universities and colleges operate.     

Promoting and/or evading change: the role of student-staff partnerships in staff teaching development

ABSTRACT

While a large body of research considers factors enabling or constraining academic development in colleges and universities, comparatively little scholarship has considered the roles students might play in supporting positive change in staff teaching practices. This article explores one potential avenue by which such change might play out, considering the extent to which participation in a student-staff partnership programme supported by a central teaching and learning institute might encourage shifts in staff teaching. Drawing on data gathered via focus groups and online reflective prompts, we find that participating in pedagogical partnership can support a range of developments in staff teaching practices, though these changes might not always be pronounced or uniformly positive. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

态势、规则及主体性：论阐释的本质

阐释的本质是基于文本与意义间的敌对态势,运用规则暴力,锚定主体性,实现意义生成路径的优化。意义与文本间的敌对态势构成意义确证自我身份的主要手段,形塑了阐释运行的逻辑方向及其合法地位。规则暴力在破碎文本的抽象结构的同时再生了意义的可能场域,规范了阐释的生成机制。主体性锚定强化了其主体责任,保持了文本的基础性观看作用,导引了阐释的具体方向。阐释应该强化在敌对态势、暴力规则双重作用下主体性的责任担当,促进意义的动态增殖。     

新时代文化强国建设的主体性探析

党的十八大报告把文化建设纳入我国社会发展的总体布局,构建起了中国特色社会主义建设五位一体的总体布局。这不仅彰显了文化建设在中国特色社会主义建设中的重要地位,也说明了文化强国建设与中国站起来、富起来、强起来实践逻辑的一脉相承。当前,在实现社会主义现代化和中华民族伟大复兴的紧要关头,更应发挥文化在中国特色社会主义建设中凝心聚力的作用。新时代文化强国建设具有强烈的时代性、紧迫性和使命感,人民是文化强国的建设者、参与者和享受者。因此,从多维层次去关注文化强国建设的人民主体性,能充分体现人民强、国家强、文化强的文化发展逻辑,反映党以人民为中心的治国理政先进理念。     

Teachers and Teaching: Subjectivity,performativity and the body

It has become almost commonplace to recognise that teaching is an embodied practice. Most analyses of teaching as embodied practice focus on the embodied nature of the teacher as subject. Here, we use Butler's concept of performativity to analyse the reiterated acts that are intelligible as—performatively constitute—teaching, rather of the teacher as subject. We suggest that this simultaneously helps explain the persistence of teaching as a narrow repertoire of actions recognisable as ‘teaching’, and the policing of conformity to teaching thus embodied. However, like performatively accomplished subjectivity, this repertoire is unstable and ambiguous, and thus open to change and disruption. Moreover, teacher subjectivities may lead them to mobilise these possibilities of disruption.