How to Support Toddlers’ Autonomy: Socialization Practices Reported by Parents

Autonomy-supportive parenting is found to foster children’s adjustment but relatively few studies have been conducted with toddlers. In the present exploratory study, parents (N = 182) reported what practices they use when asking their toddlers (M age = 26.9 months) to engage in important yet uninteresting activities. Parents rated twenty-six potentially autonomy-supportive practices, along with a well-known scale measuring the extent to which they have a positive attitude towards autonomy support. Research Findings: Using correlational and factorial analyses, eight practices were identified: various ways to communicate empathy, providing developmentally appropriate rationales, describing the problem in an informational and neutral way, and modeling the requested behavior. This subset of autonomy-supportive practices for toddlers was positively related with toddlers’ rule internalization, providing them with further validity. Practice or Policy: These preliminary findings may be useful in guiding future conceptual, empirical, and applied work on the support of toddlers’ autonomy and its assessment in an emotionally-charged and challenging context.     

Makeover Or Takeover? The strange death of educational autonomy in neo-liberal England

This paper is concerned with the erosion of educational autonomy in Britain in recent years. Employing an analytical framework derived mainly from the recent work of Basil Bernstein, it examines ways in which weakened boundaries between the educational and the economic/political spheres may be linked to attempts by government in Britain to take over, to an unprecedented degree, domains where educators and producers of knowledge have in the past enjoyed significant, although by no means unqualified, autonomy. Implications for changing educational identities are highlighted, as is Bernstein's central contention that we may be witnessing not merely presentational changes, but rather a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between knowledge and the knower. Certain aspects of the political and educational agenda of the present New Labour government are seen as continuing many of the directions of policy set by previous New Right administrations. It is suggested that such continuities at the level of politics and policy indicate the potency of neo-liberal forms of governmentality and the extent to which they have become entrenched. Postmodernist and modernist interpretations of these developments are briefly considered. Obstacles to effective contestation of the new modalities of control are discussed.     

Assessment for learning in Norway and Portugal: the case of primary school mathematics teaching

In this study, we aim to understand the forces driving assessment for learning (AfL) in primary school teaching. By applying a case study design, including the two cases of Norway and Portugal and using mathematics teaching as an example, available policy documents and research reports are analysed to identify the differences and similarities that might explain the assessment practices previously observed in the two countries. Many similarities are found at the school and national levels. In particular, AfL is introduced as a national policy in both countries. Still, AfL practices are not common in primary mathematics classrooms in either country, although this is true for different reasons in each country. It is suggested that the assessment culture caused by national policies, such as curriculum reforms, national professional development projects and teacher autonomy, explains the similarities in the observed outcomes.     

Beyond method: assessment and learning practices and values

This article reports the findings of a survey of 558 teachers in England. It describes how conceptual and empirical insights from the literature informed the construction of questionnaire items to provide answers to questions about the way in which teachers value different classroom assessment practices and how congruent with these values they perceive their practices to be. Results from item, factor and cluster analyses reveal three underlying dimensions of assessment practice, sizeable values-practice gaps on two dimensions that appear to be in tension (promoting learning autonomy and performance orientation), and differences among teachers which show that over half of this sample report that they are unable to sustain practices across all dimensions in line with their values. We conclude that teachers are demonstrably committed to the values (not just the methods) of assessment for learning within a moral framework that gives importance to the quality of students' learning, yet they experience and need to resolve contradictions in order to realize their values.     

How to Support Toddlers’ Autonomy: A Qualitative Study With Child Care Educators

Research Findings: The present study explored the concrete manifestations of autonomy support (AS) toward toddlers. Eight child care educators were interviewed. Based on our assessment, these educators all valued AS. A qualitative content analysis revealed 18 practices that this group of child care educators considered supportive of toddlers’ autonomy. The present findings are in line with the traditional conceptualization of AS, namely, offering choices and encouraging initiatives, acknowledging the child’s feelings and perspective, and providing rationales and explanations for requests (Deci, Eghrari, Patrick, & Leone, 1994; Koestner, Ryan, Bernieri, & Holt, 1984), suggesting that these practices are developmentally appropriate for toddlers. Yet, they also widen the scope of AS, highlighting additional caregiving practices that may support the autonomy of toddlers. Practice or Policy: The results are discussed in light of child care educators’ professional training context and the relationship between AS and structure. The practices found in this study offer many means of actualizing AS with toddlers on a daily basis.     

Looking at Teacher Practices Through the Lens of Parenting Style

In this article, the author used a parenting style framework to explain mixed evidence about the influence of teacher practices on student outcomes. Participants included 3 fifth-grade math teachers and 45 of their students. The author assessed teacher practices, teaching style (i.e., demandingness and responsiveness), student engagement, self-efficacy, and standardized achievement test scores. The most academically and socially competent students were those who experienced an authoritative teaching style (i.e., consistent classroom management, support of student autonomy, and personal interest in students). The author found disengagement and limited ability beliefs in the authoritarian context (i.e., consistent classroom management but limited autonomy support and limited personal interest in students). She found smaller academic gains in the permissive context (i.e., inconsistent management, autonomy support, and interest in students).     

Mixed messages: discourses of education in policy speeches to the Japanese Diet

This paper will examine how Japanese education policy was articulated discursively from 1996 to 2010 in the semi-annual speeches of prime ministers to the Diet. It will identify three distinct discourses within these policy statements: a progressive discourse emphasizing the rights of individuals; a neo-liberal discourse of social independence and multi-tracked schooling; and a moral conservative discourse of patriotism and social conformism. In the 1990s, progressive and neo-liberal discourses held sway. Discursively, they were centred on key phrases such as kosei jūshi (“respect for individuality”) and sōzōsei (creativity), which were employed in a strategically ambiguous way to satisfy both progressive and neo-liberal demands. In the 2000s, however, right-wing politicians began to push a moral conservative agenda, which emphasized not the rights of individuals but their subservience to the wider needs of society and state. With neo-liberalism backed by powerful business interests, policymakers had to find a way to reconcile these two conflicting viewpoints discursively. They did this by binding the concept of individuality to traditional notions of Japanese identity and national citizenship, creating a hybrid discourse that attempted to blur the fundamental difference in ideologies.     

Assessment at the boundaries: Service learning as case study

This article explores the value systems which inform assessment practices in higher education, specifically how particular forms of knowledge valued in the curriculum shape and constrain assessment practices. The data for this article is drawn from two courses which participated in a service learning research and development project at the University of Cape Town. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, the article argues that the location of these courses—within the field of higher education and a particular kind of institution, faculty and department—shapes their assessment systems, practices and outcomes in certain ways. What is valued in this field (Bourdieu) is a form of knowledge production which requires students ‘to step out of the particularities’. This form of knowledge operates as a regulative discourse, constituting what counts as legitimate. Using the assessment system as a ‘window’, this article explores how these service learning courses constitute and are constituted by the regulative discourse of the field. While the constraints of the field are powerful, this project offers some hopeful signs of forms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment that, at the very least, name and challenge these underlying value systems.     

The agencement of taskification: On new forms of reading and writing in BYOD schools

Abstract

The proliferation of digital devices in educational settings has contributed to the decentralization of knowledge from teachers and established textbooks to fluid online personalized resources, and from blackboards as spaces of materialization of this knowledge to personal screens. In this new constellation, school practices such as reading, writing and note-taking take new forms. How are these practices reconfigured when centered around mobile digital devices? In this paper, we investigate routine lesson practices of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school by means of an ethnographic observation. Adopting the term agencement as a heuristic device, we explore what practices are being constituted and how they are always in connection with one another. Moreover, we show that by practicing they produce different forms of action. We argue that in such a hybrid constellation, tasks find a different status beyond isolated and self-contained units for enhancing learning in different lessons. We introduce task-agencement, through which the task always entails a process of taskification that formats BYOD schools. With taskification, we mean that the task-agencement expands the domain in which tasks not only influence the organization and structure of lessons, but equally the very organization of the BYOD school by enacting a particular form of schooling. Finally, we propose a taskified form as a form of BYOD schooling that templates and formats how practices such as reading and writing, contextualization and introduction of the lesson are conducted.     

Mathematics Teachers' Positions and Practices in Discourses of Assessment

Recent curriculum reforms have led to a wider variety of methods of assessment in formal 'high stakes' assessment regimes in many countries. Morgan's study of mathematics coursework assessment in UK schools identified a number of positions adopted by teachers as they assessed student texts. Using Bernstein's theoretical framework, we revisit Morgan's study in order to construct a model for understanding teachers' assessment practices and positionings. The model consists of opposing forms, generated by modelling agencies, agents, practices and specialised forms of communication, to identify their principles of construction, displayed as changes in the strength of boundary. This helps to distinguish practices of assessment as different modalities of regulation, and to understand the tensions within and between discourses and practices. Thus, for example, by interpreting tensions between discourses of 'mathematical investigation' and of 'assessment' in terms of the contradictory demands made by different modes of pedagogic practice, we can reveal the social assumptions of the pedagogic discourse.     

Learning in a comfort zone: cultural and social capital inside an outcome‐based assessment regime

Despite numerous problems with outcome‐based assessment systems, claims that they enhance learners' motivation and autonomy resonate with research interest in how young people develop cultural and social capital. However, research has not yet explored the ways in which assessment systems affect the forms of capital embedded within them. This paper applies concepts from a growing body of work on social and cultural capital in education to data from a study of assessment policy and practice in the Advanced General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) in two further education colleges. It evaluates how norms, practices and dynamics created by the GNVQ assessment regime interacted with other factors in students' lives and the learning programme itself. These interactions shaped cultural and social capital inside a learning ‘comfort zone’ and affected students' motivation and attitudes to learning. The article evaluates the implications of these factors for the types of cultural and social capital that may be on offer in different assessment regimes. In particular, it raises questions about the extent to which social and cultural capital are empowering or constraining, and offers ideas for further research in this area.     

Science in early years education: introducing floating and sinking as a property of matter

In the present study we test the effectiveness of a teaching intervention concerning the phenomenon of floating and sinking as a property of the matter the bodies are made of. The treatment, designed for children aged four to six years, comprises two units of hierarchically sequenced activities. The children experiment with objects having specifically designed characteristics aiming at shifting children's attention from the objects to the material(s) these are made of. Both solid and hollow objects were used. The activities were developed collaboratively by a researcher and early years teachers and were implemented by the teachers of the work group in their own public school classes in a sample of 104 children. Action research processes were used to optimise classroom practices. Teacher preparation took place within the work group before implementation. Concept cartoons were used for the children's final assessment. Analysis of classroom data recorded during the course of the activities showed gradual redirection of the children's attention from the objects to the materials of which they were made. The results of the post-instructional assessment revealed high percentages of pupils understanding the kind of material as the determining factor for the bodies' behaviour in water.     

Technology-based assessment in science: Issues underlying teacher advocacy of testing policy

The theme of this article is that the development of informed teacher advocacy for new advancements in technology-based assessment is an essential requirement if such advancements are to contribute toward the systemic improvement of the quality of school science instruction. The potential for advocacy involvement by teachers is considered a natural reaction toward the increasing tendency for classroom practices to be affected by local, state, or national assessment policy initiatives. In support of such an advocacy process, this article provides an awareness of the principles of good measurement practices in conjunction with the qualitative characteristics of technology-based assessment that together are sufficient to serve as a foundation for teachers whose concerns may motivate them to raise relevant questions regarding assessment policy. Based upon such implied standards of testing practice, the article suggests key evaluative questions for teachers to ask about any forms of science assessment that would have the effect of amplifying the potential value of new technology-based forms of assessment applications to enhance ongoing classroom processes of science teaching.     

School-to-work transition services: marginalising ‘disposable’ youth in a state of exception?

Disadvantaged young people often inhabit a dangerous space: excluded from education, training and employment markets; constructed as disposable; and cast out as ‘human waste’ (Bauman, 2004). There are many macro-level analyses of this catastrophic trend, but this article provides insights into some of the everyday educational micro-practices which contribute to such marginalisation. It presents findings from a study of a national school-to-work transition service in England, in a context not only of neo-liberal policies but also of severe austerity measures. The data reveal processes of triage, surveillance and control – driven by governmental and institutional targets – which denied many young people access to the service, including some of the most vulnerable. Beneath a rhetoric of social inclusion, the service in fact acted as a conduit into a dangerous space of exclusion. Drawing on the work of Butler and of Agamben, the article argues innovatively that such practices may represent an encroaching state of exception, in which more or less subtle forms of governmentality are gradually being supplanted by the more overt exercise of sovereign power.     

Towards a shift in perspective for inclusive education research – a continental approach

With a starting point in the tradition of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, this article presents a challenge to inclusive education research to engage a Continental perspective on educational research. The motivation is to entice inclusive education researchers to begin to ask educational questions of inclusion, as opposed to inclusive questions of education. Recent years has seen a call to re-think inclusive education research and this paper attempts to answer this call by turning to a Continental perspective and the emphasis on an at least relative autonomy for the theory and practice of education. The article explores the relationship between Continental and Anglo-American educational theory, and why they seem to have developed in such distinct directions. Beginning with the Anglo-American perspective, it is outlined how pedagogy and the so-called educational interest became replaced by the scientific standards dominant in other academic disciplines. This is countered by a look at the continued endeavours in the Continental spheres to formulate specifically educational criteria for educational processes. This leads to a negative aim in the form of arguing against neo-liberal policy and the politicisation of inclusive education, and a positive aim in the form of an argument for a move towards constructing a pedagogical ideal of inclusion.     

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.     

Teacher factors and perceived assessment practices needs of social studies teachers in Cross River State, Nigeria

This study evaluated perceived assessment practices needs among social studies teachers in Cross River State, Nigeria, in relation to some teacher factors (attitude towards social studies, sex, teaching experience and educational qualification). Subjects who participated in this study were 297 social studies teachers (144 males and 153 females) from 116 secondary schools in the state. Teacher Classroom Assessment Practices Needs Questionnaire (TCANQ) and Teacher Attitude towards social studies Inventory were used for data collection in the study. Cronbach coefficient alpha of .81 and .93 were obtained as estimate of construct validity and internal consistency reliability for the Teacher Classroom Assessment Practices Needs Questionnaire and the Teacher Attitude towards social studies Inventory respectively. Independent t-test, one way analysis of variance and Pearson Product Moment correlation were used to test the hypotheses. Results indicated that gender and teacher qualification significantly influence perceived assessment practices needs of social studies teachers. Significant positive relationship was observed between years of teaching experience and expressed assessment practices needs; and between attitude towards social studies and assessment needs. It was concluded that factors such as years of teaching experience, attitude towards social studies, gender and educational qualification significantly influence social studies teachers perceive priority needs in assessment practices.     

Professionals,partnerships and learning in changing times

Abstract

Under neo-liberal modes of governance, new forms of partnership are emerging. This article begins by looking at the notion of partnership and the dominant model of partnership operating under New Labour in the United Kingdom, through a discussion of two cases of partnership working. I argue that the dominant model of partnership is primarily concerned with promoting the modernising agenda, and is instrumentalist and economically driven. As a result, the potential for partnership, in terms of democratic renewal and participation, cannot be realised. In the final section I argue that we need to conceptualise partnerships as learning partnerships, through which collaborative working could provide opportunities and spaces to resist the narrow instrumentalism of the neo-liberal agenda.     

The Perceived Role of Diploma Examinations in Alberta,Canada

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceived uses of diploma examination results by Alberta, Canada, high school teachers and to replicate and extend D. Loerke's (1993) study. Classroom teachers and school-based administrators (N = 414) across Alberta took part in the research questionnaire developed to measure the variables under study. Findings indicate that classroom instruction has improved as a result of the reimplementation of diploma examinations, concerns about the reduction of teacher autonomy as a result of diploma examinations persist, study participants lacked the professional training necessary to make the most of the available student assessment information, and the perceived uses of diploma examination results have changed since the Loerke study. These findings have the potential to contribute to changes in teacher assessment practices in Alberta regarding appropriate use of standardized test results as a measure of student learning.