‘Being yourself’: everyday ways of doing and being gender in a ‘rights-respecting’ primary school

This paper engages with some everyday ways of doing and being gender which proceed from a dominant liberal rights policy and practice discourse within one English ‘rights-respecting’ primary school in England. Drawing on three ethnographic vignettes of data from different spaces within the school, it utilises a Butlerian analytic to interrogate the kinds of subjects that children are entitled and obliged to be as they take up different subject positions proposed to them in the school. The paper engages with this empirical data, to foster and ignite critical sensibilities, especially as these relate to ‘taken-for-granted’ discourses of children’s rights which presume the participation of all children regardless of their differently gendered subjectivities. This analysis puts in question the universal, normative and essentialising effects of the category of the rights-respecting child as always unproblematic and forever productive.     

Educating human nature: ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in early Confucian moral education

This study examines early Chinese moral education—its curriculum, objectives and the philosophical assumptions underlying them—in its classical Confucian expression. It analyzes early Confucian debates on moral psychology, the Confucian moral curriculum consisting of model emulation, cultural practices and canonical instruction, and the methods and aims of Confucian statecraft. The study reveals how ancient Confucians integrated these components into a coherent discourse on moral education and its implementation for the related purposes of cultivating virtuous people and benevolent rulers. It explains why different early Confucians argued that ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ must interrelate suitably not only for people to develop morally and prosper collectively, but also to moderate the ruler’s power by subjecting it to alternative sources of authority. This examination demonstrates that, contrary to modern criticisms of traditional Confucian culture and unlike contemporary uses of moral education in China, classical Confucian moral education was understood to serve aims quite different from either bolstering an autocracy or political indoctrination.     

Guys and ‘the rest of us’: tales of gendered aptitude and experience in educational carework

A history of framing the teaching of young children as a matter of ‘natural’ female aptitude has led a number of researchers and educators to oversimplify men's experiences as a foil or antidote to the ills of schooling. In this qualitative study of men, women, and ‘feminisation’ in early education and care environments, interview data (N?=?4) are discursively analysed to provide a more nuanced understanding of how male and female careworkers construct and orient themselves in relation to masculinity and maleness.     

Residing in silence and wonder: career counselling from the perspective of ‘being’

We are approaching career counselling from the perspective of “Being”, which we recognize to be a daunting task. Nevertheless we find it extremely important that the counsellor become aware of and try to think, talk and act from his or her embeddedness in being, and by that help the client to do the same. This process involves an ontological and spiritual approach, and builds upon the Socratic ability to wonder, the meditative way of “undoing” and the artful act of creation.     

‘Becoming and being writers’: the experiences of doctoral students in writing groups

The use of writing groups to support students undertaking post-graduate research within universities has begun to receive attention from academic supervisors and doctoral researchers. Very little has been written by doctoral students themselves on the benefits of working within such writing groups. In this article, the experiences of working within a doctoral writing group at an Australian University are presented, primarily from the perspective of students. The authors identify two main benefits they have experienced through participating in a writing group using a ‘multi-voiced’ approach. First, they discuss the kind of learning that they achieved through working in a writing group. They do this with reference to key principles of peer learning and of peer review. Second, they focus on the ways the group worked as a community of discursive social practice. An overarching message for them in participating in the group and now writing this article is the shift in their thinking and experience of writing from seeing writing as an essentially private and implicit process to writing becoming a matter of public and shared work. These two notions are bound by the concept of identity building, drawing from the literature on communities of practice.     

Challenging Students’ Belief in the ‘Balance of Nature’ Idea

Science & Education - This article reports on the theoretical output of a design research study, which concerns the design of a learning environment (LE) for helping students challenge the...     

‘The city snuffs out nature’: young people’s conceptions of and relationship with nature

This paper reports a study of 384 13–14-year olds’ written responses to open-ended questions about their understanding of and relationship with ‘nature’. Using constant comparative method the responses were coded, categorised and themed. Most students held scientific conceptions of nature (excluding humans) and a utilitarian relationship with nature, a predominantly anthroprocentric worldview. A small number held aesthetic conceptualisations and an intrinsic value relationship: an ecocentric worldview. A substantial number of students however were neither anthroprocentric or ecocentric but rather expressed a conception of and relationship with nature which reflected aspects of Bonnett’s ‘human-related’ relationship (Bonnett, M. 2004. Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-humanist Age. Oxford: Blackwell). The findings from this study challenge a simple binary approach in which students’ environmental worldviews would be analysed as either predominantly anthroprocentric or ecocentric. Bonnett’s ‘human-related’ relationship to nature reflects a more complex view of the world. Analysis revealed interesting differences, however, between students according to their urban/rural location, gender and school type.     

Challenging educational injustice: ‘Grassroots’ privatisation in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa

The phenomenon of low-cost private schools ‘mushrooming’ in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and elsewhere, is now well-documented. Findings from research by the author’s teams and others show that these schools are serving a majority (urban and peri-urban) or significant minority (rural) of the poor, including significant proportions of the poorest of the poor. Concerns are raised in the literature about their implications for social justice. In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen asks us to rethink ideas about justice; instead of the quest for a Rawlsian ‘transcendental institutionalism’, he argues for a comparative approach, grounded in the practicalities of human behaviour. Linking Sen’s ideas on justice with the grassroots privatisation leads to the tentative conclusion that those concerned with promoting social justice could agree to help improve access to, and quality in, the low-cost private school sector, rather than focus on the public education sector. Paradoxically, this could be true even for those whose ideal is an egalitarian public education system.     

Recognizing respondents’ ways of being and knowing: lessons un/learned in researching Asian immigrant and Asian‐American teachers

Critical race theory (CRT) offers educational researchers a compelling way to view racism in education by centering issues of race and using counterstories to challenge dominant views in both research and practice. This article provides an overview of CRT and illuminates the dilemmas for white researchers wishing to incorporate CRT into their work. The author argues that while CRT may not be fully open to white researchers, their strategic use of CRT can help legitimize its use in fighting racism in educational settings. Building on her participation in CRT discussions in a mixed-race setting, the author suggests that white researchers must work to center race in their personal lives and work, engage in the strategic and sensitive use of CRT, and join in the effort to legitimize research that utilizes alternative methods such as CRT.     

Being ‘nice’ or being ‘normal’: girls resisting discourses of ‘coolness’

In this paper we consider discourses of friendship and belonging mobilised by girls who are not part of the dominant ‘cool’ group in one English primary school. We explore how, by investing in alternative and, at times, resistant, discourses of ‘being nice’ and ‘being normal’ these ‘non-cool’ girls were able to avoid some of the struggles for dominance and related bullying and exclusion found by us and other researchers to be a feature of ‘cool girls’ groupings. We argue that there are multiple dynamics in girls' lives in which being ‘cool’ is only sometimes a dominant concern. There are some children for whom explicitly positioning themselves outside of the ‘cool’ group is both resistant and protective, providing a counter-discourse to the dominance of ‘coolness’. In this paper, which is based on observational and interview data in one school in the south of England, we focus on two main groupings of intermediate and lower status girls, as well as on one ‘wannabe’ ‘cool girl’. While belonging to a lower status group can bring disadvantages for the girls we studied, there were also benefits.     

‘Proper masculinities’ and the fear of feminisation in modern Cyprus: university students talk about homosexuality and gendered subjectivities

The present article attempts to pay attention to the ways in which a group of young Cypriot students engage in the construction of conventional notions of masculinities through the negation and the fear of homosexual desire. Drawing on interviews with 12 male and female university students, I argue that many young men go through complicated processes of anxiety and fear in order to achieve a masculine heterosexual career and to prove that they are ‘real men’. In that way the male participants I interviewed expressed the idea that in the cultural space of Cyprus masculine subject positions are the most powerful ones. The participants commented on the unthinkable sexual choice of loving someone from the same sex and concluded that choosing to stay in Cyprus and live a gay life would be very painful if not unthinkable. The article concludes that gender anxiety in Cyprus is expressed through the abjection of homosexuality.     

The ‘nature of science’ in the school curriculum: the great survivor

This paper explores the ways in which the ‘nature of science’ (NoS) has been interpreted, accommodated and justified within school curricula since science was first schooled in the mid-nineteenth century. It explores how different interpretations of ‘the NoS’ have been invoked by those seeking to reform school science education in response to wider political, economic or social concerns such as the demand to ‘humanise’ school science teaching, to increase the supply of qualified scientists or to promote scientific literacy. It offers some comments upon the implications of these interpretations for current attempts to promote the ‘NoS’ in school science education. The focus of attention is England and, to a lesser extent, the USA but the issues raised are of contemporary relevance to many other parts of the world.     

‘Loveable’ mammals and ‘lifeless’ plants: how children's interest in common local organisms can be enhanced through observation of nature

This study investigated which plants and animals Swiss children found most attractive and evaluated the effect of an educational programme on children's preferences for species. More than 4000 pupils (8–16 years old) from 248 classes participated in the study. Possible effects of the programme were studied with the help of questionnaires using a pretest/post‐test design with an experimental group that participated in the programme and a control group that did not. Before the start of the programme most children found decorative or garden species among plants, and pets and exotic species among animals, most attractive. However, the more wild plants and animals children noticed in their local environment and could name, the more did they appreciate these organisms. Moreover, the more additional wild plants the children noticed due to the programme, the higher was the increase in their appreciation of these species. This supports the hypothesis that children may appreciate animals other than pets and exotic species and even inconspicuous wild plants if they know them.     

‘Doing identity’ in the Botswana classroom: negotiating gendered institutional identities

Drawing on post-structural and post-colonial conceptions of gender, this paper explores multiple student masculinities and femininities in the classrooms of four junior secondary schools in Botswana. These gendered identities, it is argued, are negotiated within broader institutional constraints that have been socio-historically produced. Such constraints include the colonial legacy of heavily authoritarian (and inherently gendered) teacher-student relations, which in turn are sustained (and resisted) through the practice of English as the medium of instruction, and a punitive disciplinary regime, which has corporal punishment at its core. Three similar gender performances are identified for both girls and boys: ‘good classroom students’, ‘classroom rebels’, and ‘docile bodies’, though these are discursively produced and interpreted differently, against the norms of masculinity and femininity, and within a pervasive and stereotypical binary gender ideology.     

The constitution of agency in developing lifelong learning ability: the ‘being’ mode

In an age of uncertainty, one of the aims of higher education is to establish lifelong learning abilities in students. However, different authors remain divided on the question of what constitutes ‘lifelong learning ability’. This article proposes the hypothesis that the cultivation of lifelong learning abilities in higher education needs to be conceptualised and sustained through a focus on the constitution and operation of agency. The cultivation of lifelong learning as a set of agent abilities needs to be grounded within the mode of being, a concept inspired by Heidegger, rather than within having or doing. While the importance of developing epistemology by focusing on learning as delivery (having) and interacting (doing) is not denied, this article suggests that higher education also concerns ontological learning. The Heideggerian perspective on being provides a more person-focused approach that is useful for providing balance and congruence between feeling and thought and between mind and body, supplementing the having and doing approaches by inviting students to reflect on their own growth and leading not only to knowledge construction for problem-solving but also to the construction of subjectivity as a means of finding meaning in the learner’s existence in times of uncertainty.     

Teachers’ use of PowerPoint in kindergarten: An empirical investigation in China

Nowadays, with the rapid progress of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the integration of ICTs in education has attracted more and more attention of educators and researchers. However, there are different situations between developed and less-developed nations both in ICT application and in ICT research. PowerPoint is a readily available and most popular tool for teaching in some less-developed countries. Under this particular circumstance, it is not an outdated issue to explore teachers’ use of PowerPoint in teaching. Thus, this paper systematically looked at teachers’ PowerPoint use in the setting of Chinese kindergartens. Specifically, four questions were explored: (i) the status of PowerPoint-related infrastructures in the kindergartens; (ii) teachers’ use of PowerPoint in teaching; (iii) teachers’ design, competences and training related to PowerPoint; (iv) teachers’ perceptions and attitudes toward PowerPoint in teaching. A sample of 62 kindergarten teachers was investigated with a self-created questionnaire. Finally, it was found that the kindergartens had been well equipped with PowerPoint-related equipments; teachers frequently implemented teaching activities with PowerPoint and in an intelligent manner; the majority of teachers had positive perceptions and attitudes toward PowerPoint’s general effects, but there was an imbalance of perceptions and attitudes toward children’ emotional-social aspects and children’s cognitive aspects. Besides, the influencing factors of the availability and access to PowerPoint equipments in kindergartens, PowerPoint’s location, teachers’ using years of PowerPoint, teachers’ knowledge and skills, teachers’ training were also emphasized by this study.     

‘Beauties’, ‘geeks’ and ‘men-john’: the possibilities and costs of girls' performances of gender in Antiguan schools

Whilst it is known that Caribbean girls academically outperform boys, much less is known about their experiences of school. This paper, based on qualitative research in Antiguan secondary schools, is concerned with who girls can ‘be’ in their school contexts and the consequences of positioning oneself (or being positioned) within different discourses. Drawing on interview narratives and classroom observations, this paper discusses the stories of six girls to illuminate three broad types of gender performances that were observed: ‘beauties’, ‘geeks’ and ‘men-john’. Using Francis' concepts of gender ‘monoglossia’ and ‘heteroglossia’, the extent to which these girls were able to resist the normative gender–sexual order and the consequences of conformity/non-conformity are examined.     

‘Soviet’ in teachers’ memories and professional beliefs in Kazakhstan: points for reflection for reformers,international consultants and practitioners

This paper is a part of a three-year study, ‘Internationalisation and reform of secondary schooling in Kazakhstan’, jointly conducted by an international team of UK- and Kazakhstan-based researchers in 2012–2014. The study was conceived as a mechanism to support education reform in the country. This was achieved through reconstructing the education policy narrative of the last two decades and understanding the effects of the newly established Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools and the Centres of Excellence in-service professional development programme on the larger system. While the focus of the study was on Kazakhstan’s educational present, the references to the previous system of education, which was often referred to as Soviet, traditional, but also successful, fundamental and the best in the world, were numerous. These continuous references to the past prompted the authors of this paper to address the questions: What memories and practices of Soviet education are still dominant in the field of education in Kazakhstan? How do these beliefs continue to shape educational debate in the country? In support of its argument, the paper draws on the literature on Soviet schooling and contemporary education reform, interview data with national and international teachers in Kazakhstan, and field observations. The resultant narrative, which brings together the analysis of educational change and changes in teachers’ beliefs, may appeal to many involved in the construction of the contemporary reform agenda.     

’Always knowing’ and ‘never being sure’: familial and institutional habituses and higher education choice

In 2008, the UK Labour government unveiled plans to abolish the Learning and Skills Council and transfer funding for the education and training of 16–19‐year‐olds in England to local authorities (LAs). The transfer of 16–19 funding complements the responsibilities that LAs have already acquired in relation to the raising of the education and training ‘participation age’ and ensuring that all young people have access to a full 14–19 curriculum entitlement in their area. Such a move might be read as part of the ‘new localism’ that has gained currency under the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, as well as an opportunity to rein back from an English education and training system that has become increasingly centralised and ‘top‐down’. Indeed, some commentators have argued for a new model of governance based on ‘devolved social partnership’, with input from a wider range of stakeholders and the space for policy levers to be shaped more at local level. Drawing upon interviews with key personnel in LAs and other stakeholders, this paper examines the opportunities and challenges that LAs face in their new role, whether this amounts to a genuine devolution of power, and the prospects for ‘devolved social partnership’.