‘A uniform seemed the obvious thing’: experiences of careers guidance amongst potential HE participants

The growth of higher education is a global phenomenon and provides challenges for educational leaders in schools and universities. Raising aspiration and participation requires an understanding of the sources of advice and information available to potential participants and how these are used when they decide whether or not to participate.

This article draws on a qualitative study using social network analysis undertaken in England. This study examined the nature of decision making amongst individuals who have chosen not to participate in higher education despite possessing the qualifications and experience which would enable them to be admitted to a university programme. The research sought to identify their decision‐making processes within the ‘networks of intimacy’ that are their family, friends and significant individuals in their educational and/or working environments, past or present. Lying at the heart of the research is the belief that, in social network analysis, it is the interpersonal relationships rather than the individuals that form the unit of analysis.

This article examines the role of information, advice and guidance (IAG) on individuals when they make the decision whether or not to participate in higher education. It considers the experience that individuals had at school, and explores their career decision making engaged in outside the school environment, and beyond the age of 18. It spells out the implications for educational leaders and managers in schools and universities as well as policy makers concerned about improving participation rates in all sectors of the community.     

Capitalizing on Participation: Latina/o Adolescents and the Classroom Economy

Interactions with capital??how it is identified, accumulated and exchanged??occur within fields of action, and every field has its own set of rules, or habitus, shaping the ways in which these interactions unfold. Classrooms, the fields in which students interact in schools, shape and privilege certain ways of thinking and acting, thereby building (or neglecting) opportunities for students. Yet little research has focused on student perceptions of classroom interaction, and particularly whether or how classroom participation might be a form of capital for them. Deploying data collected through classroom observations and interviews with Latina/o students at a large urban high school, this study focuses on examining the ways in which distinct groups of Latina/o students (in a set of schools within a school) understand and experience classroom participation. Findings reveal that while a shared understanding of classroom habitus may be more common than previously thought, we cannot just tell students to participate, or merely depend upon a general belief in the value of participating. Instead, we must simultaneously and explicitly bolster student participation and the cultivation of student networks so that a shared habitus turns the promises of participation into meaningful and equitable praxis.     

The influence of informal learning processes of social network sites on the subjective well-being of women in rural areas / La influencia de procesos de aprendizaje informal en las redes sociales digitales en el bienestar subjetivo de mujeres de zonas rurales

Abstract

This study provides a predictive model of the subjective well-being of rural women who participate in social network sites. Three processes of informal learning in digital social networks (participation, identity consistency and relationships) are used as predictors. An ex post facto correlational study was supported by face-to-face interviews with 478 women from rural areas in the province of Seville, using a questionnaire with different scales. For data analysis we used confirmatory analytical techniques, using Smart PLS 2.0. The results provide an empirical model that contrasts the relationship hypothesis established, with high reliability and validity indicators. The results show that identity consistency has a direct effect on life satisfaction with networks. The informal learning processes (participation and relationships in virtual social networks) influence identity, but do not directly influence satisfaction.     

Idle chatter or compelling conversation? The potential of the social media-based #NGSSchat network for supporting science education reform efforts

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) chat (#NGSSchat) is a social media-based professional network used to discuss topics related to the NGSS in the United States. While successful reforms involve and coordinate the work of multiple stakeholders, recent research points out a striking lack of coordination between the individuals working in different educational roles—to the detriment of intended changes in the system. In this study, we analyzed more than 7,000 posts from individuals participating in #NGSSchat on Twitter (n = 247) during 2 years of 1-hr synchronous discussions. We studied the depth and types of conversations that took place, the extent to which the involvement of teachers, administrators, researchers, and organizations was balanced, and what explains participation in the network over time. Using a mixed-methods approach involving social network analysis, we found that conversations were primarily transactional, or social, and substantive, or providing opportunities for sense-making about the standards or for participants to transform their practice and that individuals from diverse roles participated, with teachers comprising the plurality of those involved. Additionally, researchers, administrators, and teachers were the most active in the network, with no differences in both initiating, or sending, and being the recipients of, or receiving, replies as a part of conversations. Finally, we found that being a teacher or administrator, as well as receiving replies from individuals who were important in the network, were positively related to sustained involvement in the network in the following year. We discuss how #NGSSchat—as a social media-based professional network—demonstrates similar features in other effective networks, and how social media-based networks invite new visions for how to implement ambitious, large-scale changes in science education.     

Vertrauen im Bildungsverbund

Educational networks constitute a new way of governance, which aims at collaborating on current challenges in the educational system. Such networks are based on the social relationships of their members, whereby trust is of particular relevance. In this article, we focus on this interpersonal trust within an educational network and take a first step towards an empirically grounded theory on dimensions of trust in a multi-organizational coalition. To that end, we analyze semi-structured interviews with a total of 21 actors of an exemplary educational network. The interviews were mainly focused on the interviewees’ network relationships. These relationships were analyzed by means of Grounded Theory using the data analysis software MAXQDA. Our analyses resulted in a theory of five dimensions of trust: (1) individual attitude, (2) time, (3) organizational and issue-specific proximity, (4) power, and (5) multiplexity. These dimensions represent an approximation of a better understanding of trustful relations in educational networks and have to be verified in further – particularly representative – studies for their validity.     

How and what do academics learn through their personal networks

This paper investigates the role of personal networks in academics’ learning in relation to teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 11 academics, this study examines, first, how and what academics learn through their personal networks; second, the perceived value of networks in relation to academics’ professional development; and, third, whether and how network participation affects professional learning and extant teaching practice. Findings suggest that personal networks equip academics with a diverse pool of knowledge and skills about teaching, offering both professional and emotional support. What academics learn through personal networks subsequently becomes embedded in their teaching practice. In this sample, change in teaching practice is focused on application of new learning technologies and new teaching and assessment strategies.     

Exploring the dyad: the relationship establishment between a novice physical education teacher and his mentor

The retention of new teachers is a noteworthy issue among physical education teachers. One way to combat attrition is with the implementation of induction programs that have a strong emphasis on mentoring. Mentoring creates a growth-in-connection for the novice physical education teacher as well as the mentor. The relational cultural theory (RCT) develops relationships based in situational boundaries between the mentor and the mentee. RCT explores the nature of human development based on the individuals involved in these relationships. The purpose of the study was to explore the perception of the relationship between a novice physical education teacher and his mentor and to determine if the mentoring relationship between the participants reflected the RCT model. Observations, interviews, and the researcher’s journal were used as a means for data collection. In this study, meaningful relationships occurred in the working relationship, as well as the personal relationship. It was indicated that when meaningful relationships are established, novice physical education teachers are more confident in their teaching abilities and are more likely stay in the profession.     

政策网络视角下农村人居环境整治的参与网络治理研究--基于A镇的案例分析

借鉴罗茨的政策网络治理理论框架,对A镇农村人居环境整治中各参与主体构成的参与网络展开研究,研究发现:各主体之间的关联性较为松散,尤其是议题网络与生产者网络之间关联性欠缺会提高生产者网路对社会效益的忽视程度,并且生产者网络和议题网络中的多数主体参与能力有欠缺。提出应建立一个整合性的网络治理结构,增强各参与网络之间的关联性,尤其要建立专业网络、生产者网络和议题网络之间的关联性和依赖性。     

‘Becoming co-operative’ – challenges and insights: repositioning school engagement as a collective endeavour

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a school’s decision to become co-operative affects its engagement relationships with students and parents. The findings stem from a wider study exploring approaches to engagement in a recently converted co-operative academy, a large secondary school in a northern English city. The article surfaces the possibilities and tensions that occur as the school seeks to reposition itself in the English education marketplace, with a co-operative model that explicitly sets out to promote mutualisation, not privatisation; ‘we’ rather than ‘me’. The process of becoming co-operative is examined by exploring the underlying purposes of the school’s engagement with students and parents and the relationships that emerge as a result. The study surfaces the issues faced as a co-operative school seeks to enact thicker, ‘collective forms’ of democratic engagement against a backdrop of English education policy based on individualistic notions of democracy as freedom of choice. The findings point to the need for a different policy understanding of school engagement, an understanding that suggests engagement is about the process of developing more equitable, collaborative relationships with stakeholders and rests on the repositioning of students, parents and community members – from ‘choosers’ and ‘consumers’ to a collective public in education.     

Young people,social capital and network‐based educational decision‐making

This paper explores whether and in what ways young people's perceptions and experiences of higher education (HE) can facilitate the transmission within their social networks of social capital both upwardly (from child to parent) and horizontally (from sibling to sibling), and thus can potentially provide bridging capital to family members, especially in families with little or no prior experience of HE. It utilises data from a project that explored the embedded nature of decision‐making about HE amongst a group of ‘potentially recruitable’ adults and their wider networks. The study researched 16 networks, and the resultant sample of 107 individuals included six teenagers and 15 young people in their twenties. The paper concludes that, despite the general emphasis within existing theoretical approaches to network capital on the downward transmission of social capital, the educational experiences of younger generations can be critical in shaping the perceptions of other (including older) network members, albeit not always in ways that encourage formal educational participation.     

Network ethnography and the cyberflâneur: evolving policy sociology in education

This paper makes the argument that new global spatialities and new governance structures in education have important implications for how we think about education policy and do education policy analysis. This context necessitates that researchers engage in new methodologies to ensure that there is a suitable link between their research problem and the methods utilised for its investigation. To this end, I suggest that network ethnography can be conceived as a ‘threshold’ methodology; a new way of looking at social relations in changing times with attendant methodological benefits and shortcomings. Here I constitute the network ethnographer as cyberflâneur, who, like the nineteenth-century flâneur is lured by and attentive to the ‘new’, where they embrace the convergence of space and new technologies to become a well-positioned observer of contemporary policy processes. In focusing on the cyberflâneur, this paper aims to provoke debate amongst policy sociology researchers about how we can reflect on and modify our practice to ensure we are contributing to meaningful research in the twenty-first century.     

Relationships de Confianza and the organisation of collective social action

This article examines the social and cultural organisation of learning and community change in a largely new immigrant and under-resourced neighbourhood in the US Situating our investigation within a local social movement for food justice, we use an ethnographic lens to study how learning is made to become consequential across relationships between people, across activities, and contexts. Our four-year ethnographic study highlights how community health workers (promotoras) build relationships de confianza as a tool that mediated new forms of action in the focal neighbourhood. We demonstrate how relationships de confianza have laid a foundation to (a) mediate social networks to organise for change and (b) promote solidarity through the response to urgent needs, creating a more holistic model of community health and sustainability. Drawing attention to relational resources foregrounds social actors and their ingenuity, promoting equity-oriented scale-making.     

Learning Neuroscience: An Interactive Case-Based Online Network (ICON)

We have developed an interactive case-based online network (ICON) that provides a new learning environment and integrates the student's thinking across the different concentration tracks of one of Harvard's interfaculty science initiatives. ICON takes advantage of this cross-disciplinary, undergraduate curriculum as a model system to bring a compelling, integrative focus to bear on reshaping how Harvard students learn neuroscience. ICON contains 9 learning modules specific to each case: Case, Working Papers, Blackboard, Neuroimaging, Research Programs and Trials, Decision Tree, Learning Objectives, Virtual Contact, and Brainstorm. Modules allow the student to get away from interpreting vast amounts of available information, move toward selecting useful information, recognize discriminating findings, and build a conceptual understanding of real and meaningful problems in neuroscience. The result is that ICON introduces a new landscape within the academic curriculum where the active participation of faculty and students effectively intersects and captures an immediate, integrative learning experience for the student. The benchmark of ICON is the time spent by students and faculty to create a user-defined learning network that engages faculty to participate in the students' learning and transforms the way the student thinks.     

Questioning ‘integrated’ disaster risk reduction and ‘all of society’ engagement: can ‘preparedness pedagogy’ help?

Abstract

AbstractThis paper contributes to the conceptual and empirical development of ‘preparedness pedagogy’. Preparedness involves learning, thus disaster risk reduction (DRR) should be discussed more in the field of education, particularly its sub-discipline of public pedagogy. Disaster risk reduction education should have an element of a pedagogy in the interest of publicness, which is an experimental pedagogy in which citizens act in togetherness to develop their own preparedness. The paper pays attention to the two phrases utilised in the recent DRR discourse – ‘integrated’ DRR and ‘participation by all’ – and examines the case of Japan, applying whole-system thinking. It is suggested that ‘the mesosystem’ of the DRR system yields relationships and learning, and thus enables collaboration, change and ‘participation by all’. Preparedness pedagogy has a role to play in this. The mesosystem functions as the confluence between state-led and community-based DRR to truly integrate the system.     

Brokering educational opportunity for homeless students and their families

This qualitative study in a Midwestern US city examines how school and community-based organizations support homeless students’ connections to education-related resources and relationships. Drawing from organizational brokerage theory, which delineates how individuals’ chances to thrive are shaped by the organizations in which they participate, the study finds that brokerage practice unfolds and is affected by variables at three specific levels. First, social workers, teachers, and principals at the individual school level arranged for registration, enrollment, and other immediate connections for students. Second, school district-level actors played key roles in orchestrating homeless students’ transportation and educators’ professional development across the city. Third, a range of neighborhood factors – including immigration and housing trends – affected the ways and extents to which organizations identified and supported homeless students. The study concludes by presenting several implications for research and practice.     

Municipal consultants’ participation in building networks to support science teachers’ work

This paper focuses particularly on the role of municipal science consultants in developing and maintaining network activities and connections among primary school science teachers. The hypothesis is that consultants play a crucial role in supporting strategic planning, and sustaining contacts and activities within professional learning networks. The research is framed by a project that involved 80 primary science teachers in 20 schools. The aim of the project was to develop network activities that facilitate sustainable change of the participating schools’ collective culture and practice of science teaching. The authors were involved as researchers and evaluators in the project. Data consist of reports from the consultants about their participation in various network activities, school assessment reports and a longitudinal survey. Three distinct cases are analysed through the use of a framework of professional learning networks to assess the consultants’ opportunities and constraints in terms of participating in network development. The results indicate that the consultants’ roles in successful network formation is characterized by personal stable contacts within the science teacher community in the municipality, availability of municipal resources to support network activities, participation in strategic planning of municipal network support, and facilitation of the development of new teaching activities within schools or in collaboration between schools. These four distinctive features of municipal science consultants’ participation in supporting network activities enable the participants to share and develop teaching activities.     

Learning to negotiate sexual relationships: a girls’ school in Tanzania as a restrictive and agentic site

Literature on schooling in Africa often frames sexual relationships as threatening girls’ educational participation, health, and general well-being. Schooling practices aimed at sheltering girls reflect the prevalence of discourses emphasising danger and abstinence. This article presents the case of one all-girls school in Tanzania which provides a protective environment while also teaching young women strategies to negotiate sexual and romantic relationships. Drawing on classroom observations and in-depth interviews, we examine how the school's policies, practices, and lifeskills curriculum offer students a supportive environment in which to learn about relationships. Our analysis reveals that young women find this space simultaneously restrictive and freeing, and that their learning has supported their ability to imagine equitable relationships for themselves. This case contributes to our understanding of how schools can serve as sites that foster young women's agency when curriculum and pedagogy create space for open discussion of sexual relationships.     

Rheingold,Howard (2012) Net smart MIT Press (Cambridge MA & London) isbn 978‐0‐262‐01745‐9 322 pp £17.95 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12827

This book is about the identification, development and use of the critical literacies that are necessary for the effective use of digital media and social networks—including individual participation but also cyber sociality, the reciprocal or co‐creation of social capital for the greater good. The literacies are attention, critical consumption (“crap detection”), participation, collaboration and network smarts. If it seems that the content of this book is likely to be relevant to you, I recommend you buy your own copy. Samuel King     

The truth,but not yet: avoiding naïve skepticism via explicit communication of metadisciplinary aims

ABSTRACT

Introductory students regularly endorse naïve skepticism – unsupported or uncritical doubt about the existence and universality of truth – for a variety of reasons. Though some of the reasons for students’ skepticism can be traced back to the student – for example, a desire to avoid engaging with controversial material or a desire to avoid offense – naïve skepticism is also the result of how introductory courses are taught, deemphasizing truth to promote students’ abilities to develop basic disciplinary skills. While this strategy has a number of pedagogical benefits, it prevents students in early stages of intellectual development from understanding truth as a threshold concept. I argue that we can make progress against naïve skepticism by clearly discussing how metadisciplinary aims differ at the disciplinary and course levels in a way that is meaningful, reinforced, and accessible.     

Teachers’ motives for learning in networks: costs,rewards and community interest

Background: This paper discusses teachers’ perspectives on learning networks and their motives for participating in these networks. Although it is widely held that teachers’ learning may be developed through learning networks, not all teachers participate in such networks.

Purpose: The theme of reciprocity, central to studies in the area of learning in networks, is often approached from a rational exchange perspective. This study attempts to extend this approach with reference to the concept of symbolic interactionism. The study was guided by the following research question: What is the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of learning networks and their motives for participation or non-participation in these networks?

Design and methods: In order to address this research question, semi-structured interviews among 25 teachers in secondary education in the Netherlands were carried out. The semi-structured interviews consisted of three parts: background information, perspectives on learning networks and personal experiences with those networks. Data were analysed qualitatively and analyses consisted of within-case analysis, and cross-case analysis of interview fragments. Three themes were considered: (1) perspectives on learning networks, (2) motives for participation perceived as rational exchange, (3) motives for participation perceived as related to social order.

Findings: The findings are presented around these three themes. Each theme is discussed in relation to relevant aspects from the literature. Findings indicated that teachers perceived learning networks to be organised both within-school and outside school, and mostly focused around specific content knowledge. Reasons for participation or non-participation were related to rational costs and rewards (such as time, technology, self-efficacy); in symbolic motives (such as joy, sharing and mutual understanding), and also in a sense of meaning that resulted from networking activities.

Conclusions: We conclude that, in addition to social exchange motives, the data suggest that symbolic aspects of communication and interaction play an important role in considerations for participation in learning networks. This may be described in terms of four ‘types’ of networking teachers: the Community focused networking teacher, the Locally focused networking teacher, the Not-yet-networking teacher, and the Non-networking teacher. It is hoped that these exploratory findings could be helpful in supporting the development of learning networks for all teachers.