Sixth‐Form Colleges and Incorporation: some evidence from case studies in the north of England

There are some important ambiguities in discussions about the implications of ‘evidence‐based practice’, both for educational research and for the work of teachers. In this paper we explore several of these through examining the Evidence‐based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) study—part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), a major UK research initiative that is explicitly committed to improving the contribution of educational research to policymaking and practice. The field of science education is in some ways a critical case, given that the notion of evidence‐based practice treats scientific research as a privileged source of evidence. We examine the assumptions built into the EPSE study, and how these relate to the classical medical model of evidence‐based practice, and to some other approaches to educational research that are concerned with closing the gap with practice.     

Jumping the Fences: Maori women's resistance to missionary schooling in northern New Zealand 1823‐1835

This article examines the educative activities of Marianne Coldham Williams and Jane Nelson Williams, who were recruited by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in the 1820s to serve in its New Zealand mission. As educated, middle class Anglican women, Marianne and Jane held firm beliefs regarding the role of Christian wives and mothers and it was this evangelical framework that guided their missionary work and activities. From the outset, the CMS and its missionaries believed that Maori, as an indigenous people, were in need of salvation and those religious and cultural changes that missionaries introduced were beneficial to Maori. Although Maori welcomed the arrival of Pakeha (European) for the new knowledge that they brought, they did not seek knowledge to change, replace or transform their world. The purpose of the second CMS mission to northern New Zealand in the 1820s was twofold; to civilise local Maori (Nga Puhi) and, secondly, spread the teachings of the Gospel. There were two related aspects to this civilisation. In the first instance, missionary women and men were required to provide the model example of the Christian family. Secondly, schools were established to teach Nga Puhi Scriptural knowledge in the hope that this would transform them from heathen savages to Christian women and men. More specifically, Nga Puhi women were considered far more (morally) degraded than men and in need of the civilising influence and Christian teachings of missionary women. Consequently, the first school that was opened was for Nga Puhi women. The school curriculum supported the policies and practices of civilisation and Christianisation based on exigencies of race and gender and its relationship with domesticity and labour. A direct consequence of this was that Nga Puhi women were trapped between the two competing worlds. They did not conform to missionary expectations and contested their dual positioning by engaging in acts designed to undermine Marianne and Jane's attempts to re‐form them as useful Christian women. This involved attempts to subvert Marianne and Jane's educative activities through the public display of resistance to schooling and associated Christian practices that were introduced     

Religious diversity,inter‐ethnic relations and the Catholic school: introducing the responsive approach to single faith schooling

The article offers a case study of the ways in which a Catholic primary school located in the centre of a large South‐Asian community in Leicester, UK, responded to the religious and ethnic diversity of its surroundings. The school, Our Saviour’s, engaged in shared activities with a neighbouring school which had a majority intake of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh children. Approaches to religious education at Our Saviour’s combined with weekly shared activities with the neighbouring school resulted in improved inter‐ethnic relations in the surrounding community, as children from both schools began socialising after school hours. This article draws on ethnographic research to give a case study of the ways in which Our Saviour’s employed a responsive approach to single faith schooling by engaging with religious and ethnic diversity as a means of promoting dialogue.     

The ‘doublethink’ of data: educational performativity and the field of schooling practices

This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educational performativity and data, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article reveals how performative, data-driven practices play out at the level of the school. This process reveals a ‘field of schooling practices’ characterised by contradictory and contested logics of deifying, delivering and denying data. We describe this as the ‘doublethink of data’, involving teachers engaging with performative processes for purposes of compliance but without any real sense of the value of doing so. The research reveals the extraordinary energy involved in this work, and cautions against these performative practices and associated technologies.     

Leadership in education: the case of Vice‐Chancellors

This paper is based on the Franklin Lecture given at the Guild of Educators on 17 November 2005 at the Bakers’ Hall, London.     

‘Catholic schooling with a twist?’: a study of faith schooling in the Republic of Ireland during a period of detraditionalisation

The role of faith-based schools is increasingly debated within a context of school reform, rights and plurality in multi-ethnic societies. The Catholic schooling system in the Irish Republic (always referred to as Ireland in the text) represents an interesting case internationally because of the extent to which Catholic education is structurally embedded as normative across the education system. Yet, Ireland is in a process of detraditionalisation and wider societal change. Drawing on Bourdieu and Bernstein, and a mixed methodological study of Catholic secondary schools, the article presents a typology of Catholic schooling in transition. This identifies a continuum of Catholicity among the study schools that is mediated by dynamics of social class in an increasingly competitive and diverse system. It is argued this has implications for considering the role of a recontextualised model of Catholic faith schooling, underpinned by principles of social justice in a multicultural and more secularly oriented society.     

Accountability: a key‐word in the discourse of educational reform

This paper examines the relationship between language and power in education policy. It takes the example of accountability as the specific focus for an analysis of discursive power in the shaping of education in the 1990s. In doing so, it examines the ways in which language contributes to the construction and maintenance of norms and consensual positions in education. Drawing on work in critical linguistics and cultural theory, the paper considers how recent changes in education might be analysed in a way which relates specific examples of social and linguistic practice to larger scale theoretical concerns. The examples which provide the specific focus for discussion in this paper relate to the concept of accountability and are drawn from an empirical study of the enactment of the statutory curriculum for English in secondary schools in 1992‐93.     

Historicity as a legitimising argument in the case of the Greek educational reforms of 1985 and 1997–1998 in general and technical‐vocational education

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the ‘historical argument’, namely references to the educational policies and practices of other historical periods, was used by Greek politicians in the framework of the 1985 and 1997–1998 educational reforms. Employing the method of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, the authors attempt, on the basis of original sources (parliamentary debates/minutes) both to count and interpret the historical references.     

Working‐class boys,educational success and the misrecognition of working‐class culture

This article contributes to the theory of institutional habitus by exploring the differing ways in which the institutional habitus of two schools in Belfast, Northern Ireland mediates the local habitus of working‐class boys. All of the boys in this qualitative case study live in the same disadvantaged working‐class community but attend two different schools, depending on whether they succeeded or failed in an examination at the age of 11 years. It is argued that these schools have different mediating effects on the boys’ common habitus. While most studies of working‐class boys focus on underachievement, and most studies of working‐class success focus on females, this article draws together the strands of success, failure, working‐class boys and locality, and examines the ways in which identity is constructed and reconstructed in response to schooling. Questions are raised about the interpretation and/or misrecognition of working‐class culture in schools and within the wider discourses of society.     

The children of the educational expansion era in Germany: education and further training participation in the life‐course

In this article, we examine the social dimension of inequality in educational participation. We look at the social transmission and gender‐specific channelling of education and further training in the context of employment and family. Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data collected from a multi‐level empirical life‐course study (Hamburg Biographical and Life‐Course Panel: 1980–2006) conducted with a sample of the 1979 cohort of secondary school graduates in Hamburg, Germany, we discuss the education and further training practices in their lives – with special emphasis on social class of origin and gender.     

Globalization and educational change: bringing about the reshaping and re‐norming of practice

The tendency in education writing on globalization has been to examine the congruence of educational policies in western societies and the international effects of global governance of education by powerful transnational institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union. The authors tend to identify massive changes in approaches to educational governance, including the establishment of a broadly common policy and management agenda that is characterized by ‘new managerialism’, devolution, and rigid accountability structures, entrepreneurialism, and school effectiveness, that have been imposed largely as a result of globalization. These measures are often seen as being directly related to the ‘hollowing out’ of the state, and the emergence of neo‐liberalism as the informing ideology of both international capitalism and residual nation‐states. There are few studies, however, of the dynamics of educational life and micro‐political activities that enable or challenge or bring about the kinds of educational reshaping and renorming that are typically associated with globalization. This study attempts to analyse such micro‐shaping, which, through reporting an ethnographic study in a site of educational practice, examines how school managers and teachers dealt with government policy intervention and, in the process, both willingly and unwillingly implemented significant educational change.     

The case of educational gerontology in Lebanon: a harbinger of empowerment,emancipation and social change?

Context: In Lebanon, older adults face socioeconomic challenges that are expected to worsen due to an increase in older adult population, chronic governmental neglect, institutionalised ageism and a lack of educational and social gerontologists. Consequently, local older adults are in dire need for social change, which can be initiated through later life learning. The University for Seniors (UfS) is a University for the Third Age providing learning opportunities for older people in Lebanon. While most older adult learning programmes are occupied with their learners’ self-fulfilment, Critical Educational Gerontology promotes emancipatory learning and social change. Study Objective and Design: A case discussion based on a variety of data sources is used to showcase and then challenge the practices of UfS from a critical educational gerontology perspective. To do that, we consider the semantic difference between emancipation and empowerment in their relation to power. Recommendations: We recommend programme-specific measures starting by revisiting the current philosophy of learning, targeting social change as an additional goal to later life learning, and advocacy for the establishment of educational degrees to prepare professionals and academicians in the field of social gerontology. We also recommend a more critical use of empowerment and emancipation within critical educational gerontology.     

Why context matters: understanding the material conditions of school‐based caring in Zambia

This study utilized in‐depth interviewing, participant observation, and student diaries completed by participants to examine the quality of teacher–student relationships at a low‐cost private school in the townships of Ndola, Zambia. Amidst economic decline and the HIV/AIDS epidemic facing Zambia today, teachers and students developed strong relationships that differed from those found in government secondary schools and were shaped by the economic and social realities in the larger society. These caring relationships were facilitated by official school policy, deliberative spaces created for caring such as longer school hours and smaller class sizes, and strict oversight of teachers by the school administration. Teachers’ efforts to provide students advice and resources related to the economic and health crises affecting their community resulted in the development of caring relationships that students noted were unique given their experiences in and exposure to government secondary schools. The findings of this study suggest that scholars of caring in the US and internationally should consider the material conditions of both students’ and teachers’ lives beyond the school environment in order to understand how caring relationships are structured, limited, and enabled in distinct moments by larger socioeconomic and political realities.     

Multiplying the origins of mass schooling: an analysis of the preconditions common to schooling and the school building process in Sweden, 1840–1900

The emergence of mass schooling is undoubtedly one of the most significant transformations that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article takes a new approach to this fundamental issue by analysing the historical conditions required for the construction of school buildings and the advent of mass schooling, in the 1840–1900 period. Using the school building process as a point of departure, the growth of schooling is tied not only to well-known factors such as industrialisation, state formation processes and the decentralisation of school systems, but also to the expansion of the market economy, modernisation of the credit market, liberalisation of the real property market, changes in local tax systems, and the expansion of the building materials market. Thus, a broader and largely novel explanation of the emergence of mass schooling is accomplished.     

Pedagogical renewal in sub‐Saharan Africa: the case of Uganda

There has been an unprecedented interest in reforming pedagogical practices in sub‐Saharan Africa in the past two decades. The reform efforts are often characterised by a move away from teacher‐centred instruction to child‐centred pedagogy (CCP). Uganda has been no exception to this trend as the new curriculum adopted the principles of CCP and efforts were made to popularise and institutionalise the reformed pedagogies in primary schools. Based on a fieldwork study in selected schools in Kampala, this article seeks to explore teachers’ views on CCP, their classroom practices, and the perceived challenges in implementing CCP. The article suggests that the implementation of CCP in Ugandan classrooms has not occurred in the ways intended by policy‐makers and offers some explanations for the discrepancy between policy and practice. It also raises questions with regard to the appropriateness of CCP as the most suitable pedagogy in African classrooms.     

Contextual challenges of implementing learner‐centred pedagogy: the case of the problem‐solving approach in Uganda

This article explores teachers’ experiences of implementing the problem‐solving approach; a learner centred pedagogic innovation prescribed by a centrally mandated curriculum in Uganda. It presents teachers’ interpretations of the pedagogic principles suggested by the innovation as well as their accounts of challenges of implementing the pedagogic approach. The findings suggest that the teachers’ implementation of the problem‐solving approach was far more regulated by contextual affordances and constraints within schools and the broader education system and society than by their interpretations of the official curriculum. These findings highlight the influence of structural contextual factors in regulating pedagogic practice and teachers’ take‐up of learner‐centred pedagogies in Africa. The evidence from this paper suggests the need for education researchers in developing countries such as Uganda to focus on helping teachers develop strategies for teaching large classes as learner‐centred pedagogies have a bleak future in the region.