Teachers’ assessment practices in mathematics: classrooms in the context of reform

This article responds to calls that have been made for research into how teachers incorporate new assessment ideas into their practice. We draw on a large‐scale study that examined the implementation of reform in mathematics in grades 7–10 in Ontario, Canada. We present teacher questionnaire data, and focus on data gathered from case studies for details of what new assessment practices look like in classrooms. We show teachers using a variety of forms of assessment and using assessment to improve student learning. Observed assessment practices went beyond tests to include the use of journals, observation, questioning, self‐assessment and unique forms of ‘quizzes’. These practices allowed teachers to examine students’ mathematical thinking and provided feedback to students and teachers to improve student learning. We also observed the important role of collaboration, coherence, and the teachers’ beliefs in supporting new assessment practices.     

Teachers’ perceptions of boys’ and girls’ shared activities in the school context: towards a theory of collaborative play

The Finnish educational system and curricula lay emphasis on play, collaboration and equality. Modern educational practices allow the learning environment to be enlarged from indoor classrooms to outdoor playful learning environments (PLEs). PLEs have been constructed in schoolyards in Finland with the goal of increasing learning through play in curriculum‐based education and augmenting collaborative play (ColPlay) between boys and girls. In order to better understand and describe such developments, the author set out to ascertain how teachers perceive mixed‐gender play activities in pre‐primary and basic education. Fourteen teachers were interviewed and the obtained data were analysed using the grounded theory as an analytical approach. The research suggests five premises for ColPlay: (1) the most suitable forms of ColPlay are outdoor games and role‐play, (2) gender roles adjust in contemporary play culture, (3) teachers’ pedagogical thinking on ColPlay includes various practices to promote collaborative relationships between girls and boys, (4) teachers have confidence in ColPlay and (5) learning to collaborate with both genders requires practice and reflection. The study offers useful insights for teachers, teacher educators and designers of game content and learning environments.     

Biopolitics and the ‘subject’ of labor in science education

Viewing science education as a site of biopolitical engagement—intervention into forces that seek to define, control, and exploit life (biopower)—requires that science educators ask after how individuals and populations are governed by technologies of power. In this paper, I argue that microanalyses, the analysis of everyday practices and discourses, are integral to biopolitical engagement, are needed to examine practices that constitute subjectivities and maintain oppressive social conditions. As an example of a microanalysis I will discuss how repetitive close-ended lab/assessment tasks, as well as discourses surrounding careers in science, can work to constitute students as depoliticized, self-investing subjects of human capital. I also explore the relationship between science education, (bio)labor and its relation to biopolitics, which remains an underdeveloped area of science education. This paper, part of my doctoral work, began to take shape in 2011, shortly after the 2008 economic crisis achieved a tiny breached in the thick neoliberal stupor of everyday (educational) life.     

Teachers’ spaces for coping with change in the context of a reform effort

In this paper, we are interested in the emotional responses of teachers in the context of a reform effort, and our study is oriented toward describing the significance of these responses with respect to the space teachers create to deal with reform in their school. Our interest for educational reform incorporates and builds on the work of spatial theories and theories of emotions in education, and most notably the work of Andy Hargreaves whose conceptualization of “emotional geographies” provides an insightful link between emotion and space. This is done through a 2-year ethnographic study with six teachers that were involved in science program restructuring in their school. In this study, we explore three aspects of the spaces for coping with change that were created by this group of elementary teachers: (1) time and space as sources of social and emotional support; (2) teacher collegiality and trust; and (3) teachers’ moral values and concerns. Finally, this paper explores the implications for practice and policy from the development of spaces for teachers to process their feelings about change.

Marxist state theory and state autonomy theory: the case of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education

Abstract

In recent times, there have been a number of critiques of Marxist and neo‐Marxist analyses of the state and education policy. These have drawn on postmodernist, ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ and state autonomy perspectives. While the postmodernist and ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ approaches have attracted critical response, to date, the state autonomy perspective has, to our knowledge, gone unchallenged. To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper analyses one writer's attempt, via an historical case study, to uphold state autonomy theory by detailing the ongoing relationship between one quasi‐state agency and the practice of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education. We argue that there are serious conceptual weaknesses in this latest attempt to apply state autonomy theory to educational policy analysis. The arguments in the case study under consideration are seriously compromised by a basically flawed hypothesis, a misrepresentation of contemporary (neo‐) Marxist education policy analysis and by a failure to look at ‘the big picture’.     

Teachers�� emotions and professional identity in curriculum reform: A Chinese perspective

In educational research, emotion has attracted substantial attention since the mid-1990s. While there are many studies of teacher emotion in educational change in the West, there is a remarkable dearth of such studies in China. This qualitative study attempts to address this issue by examining teachers?? emotional experiences in the national curriculum reform of senior secondary education in China. Results indicate that teachers revealed complex emotional responses to the reform. These emotions were related to teachers?? perceptions about the use of new textbooks, teaching approaches, and, more importantly, the uncertain changes in college entrance examinations. Three types of teachers with different emotions and professional identities are identified in the reform (i.e., the losing heart accommodators, the drifting followers, and the cynical performers). These findings highlight the Chinese perspective on teacher emotion and provide some implications for the management of curriculum reform and teacher emotion in the Chinese context.     

Responding to children’s answers: questions embedded in the social context of early childhood education

This article presents analysis of question–answer sequences during problem inquiry between a teacher and two children in an early childhood crèche in New Zealand. Conversation analysis is used to reveal which questions the teacher asks, how children answer the questions, and the teacher’s responses to the child’s answers. Although adults’ ‘effective’ questions were identified and promoted in the REPEY study much less attention has been given to how adults respond to children’s answers. It is imperative to investigate the sequences of talk which follow a question in order to establish how teaching and learning is co-constructed in context, one utterance at a time and as a joint project between teacher and child. The findings suggest that task problems and emotional problems are treated in a similar way during problem inquiry, highlighting the complexity of interactions when teachers are providing both emotional care and educational support for young children.     

Teachers’ professional development in Nanoscience and nanotechnology in the context of a Community of Learners

ABSTRACT

This case study focuses on teachers’ professional development in NanoScience and nanoTechnology (NST). In the context of a Community of Learners (CoL), in-service teachers in collaboration with science education researchers, nanoscience researchers and experts from science museums, developed a teaching module. This module integrates NST topics along with aspects of science communication, i.e. development of science exhibits and socio-scientific issues, e.g. ethics regarding the research in this field. The data were gathered over 1-year period by using video recordings and interviews. The Interconnected Model of Professional Growth was used to study the processes that support teachers’ professional change in this context, as they are elicited from their interactions in the CoL. Our findings indicate that the dynamic of teachers’ interactions with colleagues and the mediating processes that impact on their professional learning, are crafted on the basis of the emerged challenges in each phase of module’s design and development. These findings give an insight on teachers’ professional learning as they transfer their professional knowledge regarding scientific topics which are innovative to them, i.e. NST, into their teaching practice. In this respect, this study contributes to research literature relevant to teachers’ professionalisation in order to implement innovations in the classroom.     

Presence in context: Teachers’ negotiations with the relational environment of school

This inquiry research builds on the theory of presence in teaching (Rodgers and Raider-Roth 2006) adding nuanced understandings of how school contexts play into teachers’ abilities to support students’ learning. Findings are drawn from multiple interviews with five veteran middle school teachers, teachers’ written work, and field observations. Illustrating these findings is the compelling story of an exemplary teacher’s negotiations of her practice in response to the school’s relational environment. Our findings point to the teacher’s sense of isolation and vulnerability–indicators of the relational context in the school as a threat to undermining her presence. They also create a compelling argument for the importance of a healthy relational context to support teachers’ most powerful teaching, hence students’ learning.     

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory in the context of globalization

The article reviews the social-educational theorization of the early Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky (1896–1934) in the light of the impact of communicative globalization in educational practice. Vygotsky proposed four “genetic domains” for investigating higher cognitive processes: the phylogenetic (humans undergoing natural evolution), the cultural-historical (social activity of humans), the ontogenetic (individual lifespan), and the microgenetic (immediate events). Vygotskian sociocultural theory is widely used in educational research, especially Vygotsky’s notion of mediated development via tools and signs. Since Vygotsky, communicative globalization has transformed educational potentials. Nevertheless, provided adjustments are made to Vygotsky’s genetic method to incorporate time-space compression, the mutual presence of the genetic domains, and the glonacal heuristic, Vygotskian theory continues to be useful in socially-situated investigations of educational development and transformation, and opens another way into the global, for example investigation of the role of global mediation in learning.     

Education,democracy and social change: Venezuela’s education missions in theory and practice

The ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela is conceptualised as a pedagogical project that aims to develop ‘twenty-first century Socialism’ through state-grassroots collaboration in the reorganisation of political space in order to develop participatory, democratic institutions and processes. The cornerstones of this project to deepen and expand democracy in and through education are the adult Education Missions, set up in parallel to existing educational structures, and with an explicit focus on socio-political education and community projects aimed at promoting a new hegemony based on active grassroots citizenship. While the struggle to extend democracy in and through education is not unique to Venezuela, the conceptualisation of democracy as protagonist and participatory, and the explicit links made between education and democratic social change within the broader framework of twenty-first century socialism, makes Venezuela a dynamic site to revisit and reinvigorate classical debates as to the role of education in promoting democratic social change. Based on 15 months of empirical research, this paper examines the extent to which adult education in Venezuela is contributing to the development of a counter-hegemonic movement to build socialism for the twenty-first century.     

Causes and consequences of academics’ emotions in private higher education institutions: implications for policy and practice through the lens of affective events theory

Educational Research for Policy and Practice - This study aims at testing a few tenets of affective events theory (AET) from a predictive perspective in the context of Malaysian private higher...     

Dispositions in the field: viewing mathematics teacher education through the lens of Bourdieu’s social field theory

Mathematics teacher educators are confronted with numerous challenges and complexities as they work to inspire prospective teachers to embrace inquiry-based pedagogies. The research study described in this paper asks what a teacher educator and faculty advisor can learn from prospective secondary mathematics teachers as they construct (and are constructed by) official pedagogical discourses embedded in mathematics classrooms. Drawing on the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu, I present several pervasive discourses, or dispositions, as storied by prospective mathematics teachers. These discourses highlight prospective teachers’ negotiations of conflicting habitus-field fits during their teacher education field experience. The reflections put forth in this paper offer insights into the roles of mathematics teacher educators and teacher education programs in general.     

Religious education and social literacy: the ‘white elephant’ of Australian public education

As a result of globalisation, the boundaries that once limited the trade of ideas and culture have largely dissolved. In Australia, the fruits of intercultural exchange have largely been enjoyed, yet this expansion of Australian interaction with diverse Others has posed a perceived threat to some. This parallel expansion and contraction of cultural engagement demonstrates the need for Australia to represent diversity more adequately as a part of our society. A central point of tension in this discussion is religion. This paper reports on a study that explored the question: Why is it so hard to talk about religion in public classrooms? This narrative inquiry attempts to unpack some of the challenges facing Australian educators at present. This study brings out the conflicting priorities and pressures of the secular system against student needs and puts forward an argument for the development of social literacy education that addresses education about religion in Victorian public schools.     

Teachers’ work in complex times: the ‘fast policy’ of Swedish school reform

This paper analyses recent educational reforms on teachers’ work in Sweden following the 2010 Education Act, and up to the School Commission Report released in April 2017. We draw upon key policy texts and associated documents from the Ministry of Education, and the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket). We consider the background to the reforms, their relations with one another and how they have played out in the Swedish educational policy context. We argue that these reforms exhibit features of ‘fast policy’ in terms of how they have taken on an increasingly centralised and neoliberal character, and the rapid-fire way they have been directed at teachers as individuals, rather than broader schooling structures. We show how the fast policy reforms have recentralised schooling and teachers’ work—effectively de-professionalising educators.     

In pursuit of social democracy: Shena Simon and the reform of secondary education in England, 1938–1948

Shena Simon (1883–1972), a leading English socialist and educationist, actively called for the reform of secondary education in the 1930s and 1940s in order to bring the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’ into the English educational system. This paper explores the continuity and changes in Simon’s proposed reforms in relation to her ideals of social democracy from the appearance of the Spens Report (1938) to the publication of her book, Three Schools or One? (1948). In addition, Simon’s transnational visits to the Soviet Union, the USA and Scotland, as well as the impact of her international and comparative perspectives on different educational systems on her policy agenda, are also examined. It concludes that as many policy issues shown in the current paper continue to be debated, Simon’s democratic ideals and discourses are still relevant in the present and suggest implications for the future of secondary education in England.     

Teachers’ capacity for organizational learning: the effects of school culture and context

This paper investigates how key elements of school culture are associated with teachers’ capacity to find and act on new information. We analyzed survey data from 3,579 teachers located in 117 schools which were a randomly selected sample from 9 states in the US. We found that school cultural components such as academic press, student support, and trust and respect among teachers promote teachers’ capacity for organizational learning. We also found that the role of teacher professional culture in molding the capacity for organizational learning is critical. In terms of school contexts, we identified that school level (elementary, middle, and high school) was associated with teachers’ capacity for organizational learning in 2 different ways. First, as the school level increases, the capacity for organizational learning tends to decrease. Second, as school level increases, the positive relation between reflective dialogue and teachers’ capacity for organizational learning is weakened. Implications of these results are discussed.