Standards,criteria and the problematic of action research within an award bearing course[1]

This paper stems from my practical involvement as Course Director for a Masters programme that supports teacher action research within the general area of school management. My starting point was the seeming contradiction between the need to apply criteria to make judgements about higher degree worthiness and my belief that the evaluative criteria and assessment procedures of academia should not take precedence over teachers' insights that were grounded in a rigorous examination of their own practice. This paper outlines my values as a facilitator of action research within the programme and explores possible criteria for judging success. Several possible standards of judgement are considered: to do with ethics, rigour, logic, the ‘practical’ and aesthetics. The paper also suggests criteria that might apply to different stages of the action research process and raises the question concerning ‘competence to judge’ action research.     

Teachers’ professional development: a solitary or collegial (ad)venture?

There exists nowadays consensus on the importance of teachers’ professional development. Also, most authors agree that the school's workplace conditions can exert great influence on this development. In this paper the impact of two workplace conditions, autonomy and collegiality, on elementary school teachers’ professional development is analysed. The qualitative research reported makes clear that this influence should be thought of in a balanced way. Certain forms of autonomy and collegiality — and more specifically certain combinations of both workplace conditions — have a far more positive influence on teachers’ professional development than others.     

Teacher collaboration: 30 years of research on its nature,forms, limitations and effects

ABSTRACT

This article reprises and reflects on 30 years of the author’s work on teacher collaboration. The distinctive nature of this work has not been in making a case for teacher collaboration in terms of its benefits for students, teachers, or educational change. These arguments are widely available elsewhere. Rather it has examined ways of collaborating that are available to teachers, how formal or informal collaboration should be, how collaborative efforts can be misused or misdirected, and what factors must be considered when deliberately designing teacher collaboration so it will have the most beneficial effects. The article discusses the explanatory and strategic power of three concepts in particular—contrived collegiality, professional capital, and collaborative professionalism. Conclusions are drawn about next steps for educational research in terms of establishing clear typologies of teacher collaboration in relation to their impact and appropriateness in different circumstances.     

Conceptions of effective teaching in higher education: extending the boundaries

This paper examines university teachers’ conceptions of effective teaching. It reports a small illuminatory study of eight teachers. Their narratives identify rich insights. Conceptions of ‘learning through dialogue’, ‘community of learners’ and ‘meta-learning’ emerge as crucial in supporting students’ learning. These conceptions extend understanding of effective teaching in higher education and illuminate how teachers transform their teaching to transform learning. Insights emerge about the importance of social contexts. Theoretical dimensions informing pedagogy, knowledge construction, relationships between teaching and research, and professional learning are congruent: dialogue and collegiality are key. What inhibits teachers’ effectiveness is the ‘performativity’ culture especially setting aside preferred ways of operating as colleagues. A model is constructed to explain opposing standpoints.     

The method of empathy-based stories

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the processes of the method of empathy-based stories (MEBS) and illustrates the ways in which MEBS facilitates storytelling and narration. In MEBS, the participants narrate stories based on the frames and prompts provided by the researcher, and two different versions of the frame story offer variations in the story elements. This variation enables the researcher to study how the stories change when one element is varied – an idea that imitates traditional experimental research. MEBS is well-suited for examining the informants’ perceptions, reasoning, expectations, and values regarding a specific phenomenon or experience. Additionally, MEBS enables researchers to map out a research area, because the stories might provide new and unexpected insights into the topic. In this paper, we present the history of MEBS, outline how to design and implement MEBS research, discuss the advantages and limitations of the method, and conclude by exploring some methodological possibilities.     

Narrative Inquiry for Science Education: Teachers’ repertoire‐making in the case of environmental curriculum

This paper considers how the school science curriculum can be conceptualised in order to address the contingent and complex nature of environmental and sustainability‐related knowledge and understanding. A special concern lies in the development of research perspectives and tools for investigating ways, in which teachers are faced with complex and various situations in the sense‐making of science‐related issues, and subsequent pedagogic issues. Based on an empirical examination of Korean teachers’ sense‐making of their curricular practice, the paper develops a narrative approach to teachers’ perspectives and knowledge by considering the value of stories as sense‐making tools for reflective questioning of what is worth teaching, how and why. By employing the idea of ‘repertoire’, the study regards teachers’ stories about their environment‐related personal and teaching experiences as offering angles with which to understand teachers’ motivation and reflection in curricular development and implementation. Furthermore, three empirical cases present ways in which the nature of knowledge and understanding is recognised and potentially integrated into pedagogies through teachers’ narratives. Finally, the paper argues for the need to reconsider the role of the science teacher in addressing environmental and sustainability‐related issues, in ways that facilitate teachers’ reflexive interpretation of meanings in cultural texts and the construction of pedagogic text.     

Method as a journey: a narrative dialogic partnership illuminating decision-making in qualitative educational research

Qualitative education research is an inherently complex landscape, presenting the qualitative researcher with constant ethical and reasoned decision-making. Presented as a narrative dialogic, this paper traces and juxtaposes the method stories of two qualitative researchers who focused their work around education phenomena, but in different contexts and in different ways. One researcher’s narrative study of phenomena via interviews is juxtaposed with the other’s phenomenographical investigation utilizing Facebook status updates. Seeing researcher thinking side-by-side provides a comparison that teases out the ways in which researchers might consciously grapple with thinking around method. These twin method stories offer ways for other qualitative researchers to think about their own decision-making as they address the challenges of balancing subjectivity and rigour, authenticity of reported data, and protection of participants. This dialogic partnership points to the malleability of method. It also encourages further exploration of the complexities of qualitative education research in which the researcher is often insider–outsider or outsider–insider.     

Stories return personal narrative ways of knowing to the professional development of doctoral supervisors

Storytellers have always known that there is more to a story than ‘just a good yarn’. It is through stories that individuals construct and reconstruct their sense of self as they learn ‘to be’ in the world. Learning through stories is common across a number of professional contexts. However, storied approaches are under-utilised in supervisor professional development programs. This paper argues that telling, receiving, reading, writing and re-writing stories can open to doctoral supervisors a way to negotiate the chaotic pedagogy of becoming and being a doctoral supervisor. Two examples of storytelling – interactive telling and reading of stories of research student experience and supervisor autobiographical writing – illustrate how the art of storytelling can return personal narrative ways of knowing to professional development in today's performance-driven higher degree by research context.     

Middle managers’ experience of policy implementation and mediation in the context of the Scottish quality enhancement framework

This paper analyses how middle managers perform and experience their role in enacting policy in Scottish higher education institutions. The policy focus is the quality enhancement framework (QEF) for learning and teaching in higher education, which was launched in 2003. The data-set was collected between 2008 and 2010, during the evaluation of the QEF by means of focus groups with middle managers at nine Scottish institutions. The metaphor of a policy implementation staircase helps to situate middle managers’ position in enactment, and analyse their experience of the role. Despite the values of collegiality and ownership upheld by the QEF, middle managers’ accounts of their practices reveal that their position at the interface between university management and core academic activities continues to be a delicate one, marked by contradictory allegiances to institutional strategies and the concerns of academic colleagues. While emphasising middle managers’ pivotal role in the implementation of the QEF policy, the data paradoxically suggest that the systemic positioning of middle managers is more influential in shaping their role of mediation than the values of collegiality and ownership promoted by this enhancement approach to quality specific to Scotland.     

Education reform and managerialism: comparing the experience of schools and colleges

This paper explores the organizational and management consequences of the changing policy environment facing public sector education in England and Wales over the past 10 years. In particular it considers how far arguments about the replacement of older ‘bureau-professional’ forms of organizational order by more ‘managerialist’ forms in the public sector in general can be applied to the specific case of education. The paper begins by reviewing the major policy changes that have affected schools and colleges since 1988. Drawing on published studies from these sectors, it then considers a number of themes: changing roles of senior and middle managers; changes in managerial and organizational culture; and changes in specific aspects of management. Emphasizing the tentative nature of the evidence, the paper identifies some common trends which imply a movement towards managerialism in many institutions. However, it also identifies areas where the position is less clear and suggests a number of factors which may explain differences of experience. It emphasizes the importance of not reifying a previous ‘golden age’ of collegiality and concludes that what is being experienced is a complex and dynamic process of adjustment between old and new organizational and managerial forms.     

Immigrant or refugee: perceived effects of colonisation of academia by market forces

Managers and personnel within tertiary institutions colonised by neo‐liberal ministrations and buffeted by the winds of a ‘change culture’ formed within the philosophical shifts of the last century can be considered in terms of ‘immigrants’ or ‘refugees’ within this new territory. The case story of this article is set in a college of education newly situated within a traditional university culture. Superimposed on that scenario is an ontology shift from academia to a neo‐liberal business model. The article considers how people, enculturated with an already established socio‐cultural paradigm where research, collegiality, democracy and the concept of academic freedom predominate, are challenged to reform their epistemologies to fit the definition of the new culture. The article is a theory‐based, qualitative report of a case study using anthropological parameters and terminology of cultures and culture change to map the impact of the change process on the epistemologies of people involved in claiming the post‐colonial space.     

Good School/Bad School: paradox and fabrication

This paper, drawn from an ESRC‐funded research project, deploys data from one secondary school to raise some general issues about the development of disciplinary technologies of surveillance and uses of performativity in education. It is argued that the use of Total Quality Management, School Development Planning and Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education) Inspections, individually and collectively produce an intensification of teachers’ work, submit teachers more directly to the ‘gaze’ of policy, and encourage schools and teachers to ‘fabricate’ themselves for the purposes of evaluation and comparison. The paper is premised on the argument that schools cannot be represented adequately within research (or evaluation) by simple stories or single essentialising tags; ‘good/bad’, ‘successful/failing’ ‐‐ they are inherently paradoxical institutions.     

理科大学生毕业论文的质量对科学素质培养的启示与实践

本文从理科大学生毕业论文凸显的问题,探讨了培养大学生科学素质的途径.科研训练是提高大学生科学素质的重要途径之一,诚信的科学态度是培养的核心.自主性学习和探究是提高科学素质的动力源泉.对学生科学素质的培养应该成为学校的终级目标.通过建立和健全管理机制,使培养学生科学素质制度化.通过建立激励机制,充分调动学生提升自身的科学素质的积极性和主动性.     

Emotions involved in encountering classroom diversity: Beginning teachers’ stories

This article addresses emotions involved in encountering classroom diversity as appearing in beginning teachers’ stories. Previous research has pointed out that teachers’ emotions related to growing classroom diversity are seldom addressed, although increasing classroom diversity has been distinguished as a significant emotional challenge for teachers. In this article, teachers’ work is viewed as relational and moral work, in which emotions are inherently present. We conceptualise emotions as simultaneously social and individual. Instead of predefining the term ‘diversity’, we are interested in what kind of classroom diversity seems to become meaningful in teachers’ stories. The data consists of narrative interviews with seven Finnish beginning teachers. The findings illustrate how, in beginning teachers’ stories, students are both categorised and approached as unique individuals. Furthermore, the findings show diverse ways that emotions are present in teachers’ stories about classroom diversity, and how the working community also affects teachers’ emotions. We argue that teachers’ stories related to emotions and classroom diversity can be interpreted as moral negotiations, in which teachers’ own values and ideas of teaching are challenged. The findings of this article may add understanding of teacher–student relationships in diverse classrooms, and are also significant for teacher educators and teacher education programmes.     

Counting and comparing school performance: an analysis of media coverage of PISA in Australia, 2000–2014

This paper empirically documents media portrayals of Australia’s performance on the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000–2014. We analyse newspaper articles from two national and eight metropolitan newspapers. This analysis demonstrates increased media coverage of PISA over the period in question. Our research data were analysed using ‘framing theory’, documenting how the media frames stories about Australia’s performance on PISA. Three frames were identified: counts and comparisons; criticisms; and contexts. Most of the media coverage (41%) was concerned with the first frame, counts and comparisons, which analysed PISA data to provide ‘evidence’ that was then used to comparatively position Australia against other countries, reference societies, which do better, with particular emphasis on Finland and also Shanghai after the 2009 PISA. The other two frames dealt with criticisms and contextual issues. This paper only focuses on the first frame. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which media coverage of Australia’s PISA performance has had policy impact.     

Autobiographies of B’nai Mitzvah: The Meaning of B’nai Mitzvah and the Role Adolescents Believe Adults Play in the Process

ABSTRACT

B’nai mitzvah is a significant motivation for engagement in Jewish education. Professionals and families devote resources in aiding young people in becoming b’nai mitzvah. This article examines the adolescent narratives of b’nai mitzvah and the ways in which adults feature in their stories. Their accounts surface a belief that adults support them through pep talks, expressions of pride, helping them make choices, and being with them through the process. Teens see themselves responsible for their choices and achievements, but are appreciative of support. This article raises questions about what ways and by whom adolescents should be guided and supported.     

Pedagogical possibilities for unruly bodies

Project Re?Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re?Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as body-becoming pedagogies to create non-didactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories ‘teach’ about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become ‘conditions of possibility’ for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of ‘looking back’ at ableist gazes.     

Haraway's ‘bag lady story-telling’: relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’

In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates childhood within a world that is much bigger than us (humans) and about more than our (human) concerns. It allows us to reconsider the ways in which children are both constituted by and learn within this more-than-human world. Adopting Haraway's feminist narrative strategy, we offer three very different ‘bag lady’ stories that consider the ethics and politics of child/non-human animal cross-species encounters. Each of these stories gestures towards the ways in which we can learn to live with ‘companion species’ rather than only ever learn about them.     

The influence of academic culture on quality management system ISO 9001 maintenance within Malaysian universities

This study investigates the influence of the elements of academic culture on quality management system ISO 9001 maintenance within Malaysian universities. There is a dearth of empirical studies on maintaining ISO 9001, particularly in the higher education context. From the literature review, academic culture was classified according to four elements – academic freedom, individualism, professionalism and collegiality. Two case studies were conducted within Malaysian universities that had been ISO 9001-certified for 5 years. At the time of this research, these two were the only universities that had certification for their entire organisation. (Most organisations gain certification for specific departments). The findings showed that academic freedom, individualism and collegiality had worked against ISO 9001 maintenance, while professionalism had influenced ISO 9001 maintenance both positively and negatively. The opposites of individualism (teamwork) and collegiality (managerialism) had supported ISO 9001 maintenance in one of the cases.