What Can Clients Tell Us about Seeking Counselling and Their Experience of It?

Research on counselling is often unknown to or ignored by counsellors. Research that explores counselling from the client’s perspective is even less familiar to most counsellors, perhaps because there is far less of it compared to the quantity of research investigating the process from the counsellor’s point of view. Nevertheless, research presenting the client’s perspective can be a useful guide to both counsellors and their clients. With this aim in mind, this article summarises some of the research that has been conducted from the client’s point of view and suggests implications for counselling practice.     

What Is Educational about Education? The Distinctiveness of Education

This article explores two questions: (1) Is education a unique and distinct discipline? (2) Is education anything other than the achievement of noneducational aims or objectives? In it, Trevor Norris examines how these two questions are interconnected, specifically analyzing how what we think about education as a distinct field of study informs what we ask of it as a practice. When we study education, we should be educational about it, because if we render education as the object of study, it is never endowed with agency or distinctiveness. Norris inquires into the distinctiveness of education as a way of thinking and a way of impacting the world, asking what are the conditions that make it possible for us to identify something as “educational”? To investigate this question, Norris draws from Hannah Arendt's account of politics, and he concludes by describing a case study assignment that requires educational foundations students to draw from philosophy of education in order to show what exactly is educational about education by contrasting education with business and psychology.     

What the Pendulum Can Tell Educators about Children’s Scientific Reasoning

Inhelder and Piaget (1958) studied schoolchildrens understanding of a simplependulum as a means of investigating the development of the control of variablesscheme and the ceteris paribus principle central to scientific experimentation.The time-consuming nature of the individual interview technique used by Inhelderhas led to the development of a whole range of group test techniques aimed attesting the empirical validity and increasing the practical utility of Piagets work.The Rasch measurement techniques utilized in this study reveal that the Piagetian Reasoning Task III — Pendulum and the méthode clinique interview revealthe same underlying ability. Of particular interest to classroom teachers is theevidence that some individuals produced rather disparate performances across thetwo testing situations. The implications of the commonalities and individualdifferences in performance for interpreting childrens scientific understanding arediscussed.     

Online Postings of Teacher Education Candidates Completing Student Teaching: What do they talk about?

This purpose of this investigation was to review the postings of candidates completing student teaching using an online discussion module. A total of 3624 on-line postings by 295 student teachers over eight semesters were examined. Postings were grouped into one of six categories (general information, teaching, students, placements, projects and parents). The most frequent postings (34%) focused on topics related to teaching. It was noted that the postings were positive in nature and that candidates used the discussion board to share and reflect on their experiences during student teaching.     

‘What Are We Talking About?’ Plural Education and Teacher Education

In this article some basic concepts in the field of education in a plural society are discussed and defined. A distinction is made between various forms of plural education, which is the generic concept for all educational reactions to the plurality of a society. This distinction is based on the target group, purpose and general orientation of these reactions. The ensuing discussion of the various forms of plural education results, among other things, in a critique of multi‐ and intercultural education and the proposal of a pluralist education. The third and last section deals with some perspectives for teacher education.

     

What Ought to Be Done to Promote Education for Sustainability in Teacher Education?

Teachers are major players in the development of future citizens who have the knowledge, understanding, skills, values and dispositions to respond to existential threats such as climate change, land degradation, sea level rise and population growth. Yet, this type of education, often captured under the name of Education for Sustainability (EfS), is often rejected by teacher educators and, thereby, mostly not included in the education of future teachers. This paper draws on learning from a long-term collaborative project to argue for the promotion of EfS in teacher education and to offer a set of propositions or strategies for doing so. The paper will interest academics and researchers within and beyond teacher education who are interested in change towards sustainability through education.     

What is Education For? On Good Education,Teacher Judgement,and Educational Professionalism

Teaching and teachers have recently become the centre of attention of policy makers and researchers. The general idea here is that teaching matters. Yet the question that is either not asked or is only answered implicitly is why teaching matters. In this article I engage with this question in the context of a wider discussion about the role, status and significance of the question of purpose in education. I suggest that this is the most fundamental question in all educational endeavours. It is a normative question which poses itself as a multi-dimensional question, since education always functions in relation to three domains of purpose: qualification, socialisation and subjectification. Against this background I analyse the specific nature of teacher judgement in education and show how the space for teacher judgement is being threatened by recent developments in educational policy and practice that concern the status of the student, the impact of accountability and the role of evidence. I indicate how, where and why these are problematic and what this implies for regaining a space for teachers’ professional judgement.     

What Kind of Research Culture Do Teacher Educators Want,and How Can We Get It?

This article describes a collaborative research journey involving nine teacher educators. Their common purpose was to find a research identity in a university department with a strong commitment to the education and training of student teachers but which existed within a university that prided itself on maintaining a reputation for research excellence. The methodology was inextricably linked to the decision to take a journey as a group. The journey, both route and progress, became the focus of our self-study through a number of exchange platforms including collaborative meetings, agendas which embraced equity and social justice, a shared blog space for self-reflection, and engagement with others through partnership conferences. Data were qualitative and focused on the ambitions, frustrations, and achievements of the participants as revealed through personal writing on a blog. Key findings of this study include: (i) the discovery of hurdles, false starts and frustrations that were common to all members of the group but hitherto had remained hidden and private; (ii) the tension between an identity as educator with a sense of responsibility to students and that of an active researcher; and (iii) issues of time and work balance between teaching and researching.     

What Does Distributed Cognition Tell Us about Student Learning of Science?

This paper reports multi-layered analyses of student learning in a science classroom using the theoretical lens of Distributed Cognition (Hollan et al. 1999; Hutchins 1995). Building on the insights generated from previous research employing Distributed Cognition, the particular focus of this study has been placed on the “public space of interaction” (Alac and Hutchins 2004, p. 639) that includes both participants’ interaction with each other and their interaction with artefacts in their environment. In this paper, a lesson from an Australian science classroom was examined in detail, in which a class of grade-seven students were investigating the scientific theme of gravity by designing pendulums. The video-stimulated post-lesson interviews with both the teacher and the student groups offered complementary accounts (Clarke 2001a) that assisted the interpretation of the classroom data. The findings of this study provide supporting evidence to demonstrate the capacity of Distributed Cognition for advancing our understanding of the nature of learning in science classrooms.     

What Do Teacher Mentors Tell Student Teachers About Pupil Learning in Infant Schools?

Abstract

Recent emphases on experiential classroom learning in the induction into expertise of student teachers may over‐estimate the learning support that class based practitioners offer students. Current understandings of teachers' thinking and planning suggest that expert practitioners may not be best placed to provide student teachers with frameworks for understanding what Shulman (1987) categorises as general pedagogical knowledge. Data from a sample of 11 UK infant school teacher mentors in the form of 5 hours of taped planning and evaluatory conversations with 20 students have been content analysed. Teacher‐talk related to explanations of how pupils learn forms the focus of the paper. Implications for mentor training and school‐university partnerships are drawn from the analysis of the data. Finally the need to confront the language difference that obtains between schools and universities in order to develop the theoretical base of teacher education is asserted.     

Can You Tell Without Measuring?

Here is a right angled triangle.The two shorter sides are three and fourunits long.How many units long is the longest side?Can you tell without measuring?How?About 2500 years ago(500 B. C.)a great Greek,     

What is ‘Agency’? Perspectives in Science Education Research

The contemporary interest in researching student agency in science education reflects concerns about the relevance of schooling and a shift in science education towards understanding learning in science as a complex social activity. The purpose of this article is to identify problems confronting the science education community in the development of this new research agenda and to argue that there is a need for research in science education that attends to agency as a social practice. Despite increasing interest in student agency in educational research, the term ‘agency’ has lacked explicit operationalisation and, across the varied approaches, such as critical ethnography, ethnographies of communication, discourse analysis and symbolic interactionism, there has been a lack of coherence in its research usage. There has also been argument concerning the validity of the use of the term ‘agency’ in science education research. This article attempts to structure the variety of definitions of ‘student agency’ in science education research, identifies problems in the research related to assigning intentionality to research participants and argues that agency is a kind of discursive practice. The article also draws attention to the need for researchers to be explicit in the assumptions they rely upon in their interpretations of social worlds. Drawing upon the discursive turn in the social sciences, a definition of agency is provided, that accommodates the discursive practices of both individuals and the various functional social groups from whose activities classroom practice is constituted. The article contributes to building a focused research agenda concerned with understanding and promoting student agency in science.     

What does technology integration research tell us about the leadership of technology?

Abstract

This systematic review of the literature focuses on the empirical research conducted between 1998 and 2018 at the intersection of leaders, teachers, and technology in K-12 schools. The question guiding this review was “what does the technology integration literature identify as key leadership practices that support teachers’ technology integration efforts?” Findings are presented in terms of the larger body of knowledge about effective leadership practices that are empirically shown to influence teaching and learning by applying a conceptual framework of empirically derived leadership practices. The researchers analyzed, deductively coded, and categorized findings from 34 relevant articles in peer-reviewed journals. Findings emphasized leadership practices for building professional capacity including providing teachers with opportunities to learn, creating communities of practice for them, considering their individualized needs, and addressing issues of access and support. In this article, domains of the conceptual framework are described and convey the findings about leadership practices in terms of IT and offer suggestions for further synthesizing the currently siloed work on technology integration in the leadership, teacher, and technology literature.