Gender neutral engineering: an impossible dream? ‐ the case of Eastern Europe

A total of 189 engineers, both students and qualified engineers of both sexes at two universities in Bulgaria, were given a questionnaire addressing the issue of why such a high proportion of engineers in Bulgaria were women compared with Britain. Answers were both fixed answer and open ended. The responses stressed the importance of the need for women to work for economic reasons and the role of the previous (communist) system in emphasizing the importance of both engineering and gender equity in its policies, including its educational policy. Qualified engineers were slightly more ready to stress these ‘system’ factors than student engineers. Engineering in Bulgaria had not been altered in any way which would take account of Western feminist criticism of engineering, but was perceived as being taught more theoretically and via lectures than in Britain. A contemporary strong switch away from engineering into economics and business was perceived. It is not clear yet whether gender neutral engineering will survive in Bulgaria.     

Development of the concept ‘chemical substance’ ‐ some thoughts and arguments

The concept of ‘chemical substance’ occupies a central position among all the concepts of chemistry. Hence, much attention is given to its development during introductory chemistry courses. In this article, the author explores various issues relating to the teaching about ‘chemical substance’ in secondary school chemistry courses.     

Tackling knowledge ‘like a business’? Rethinking the modernisation of higher education in Poland

The year 1989 marked the official end of communist rule in Poland and the replacement of ‘Gosplan’ by new instruments for liberal-democratic governance. In terms of the economy this heralded a departure from Gosplan’s five-year planning cycles, performance targets and the ‘propaganda of success’. Paradoxically, however, 27 years later, the marketisation of higher education in Poland has been accompanied by a continuation of Gosplan thinking. This is manifested in a neoliberal vision of the modern, ‘corporate’ university as a largely utilitarian enterprise, but subject to a style of performance management strongly resonant of the Soviet era. This article analyses the thinking, ideas and ideologies that have shaped contemporary higher education in Poland. It is contended that the rise of the ‘corporate university’ signals the twilight of the Humboldtian tradition and raises questions about what the corporate ideal of ‘excellence’ may mean for the future of the university.     

Educational research that has an impact: ‘Be realistic,demand the impossible’

This AARE Presidential Address examines what it means to be an educational researcher in the current Australian, and global, political climate. The presentation draws heavily on the work of Levitas (Utopia as Method 2013). The address, using her notions of Utopia as archaeology, as ontology and as architecture, suggests that in the process of promoting a more socially just agenda there is no alternative but to look for alternative ways of doing educational research and being an educational researcher. It concludes by suggesting that associations such as AARE provide opportunities to envisage what academic life could look like for educational researchers in a ‘Realistic Utopia’—one in which they are realistic and demand the impossible.     

A decade of education reform in Thailand: broken promise or impossible dream?

This study addresses the perceived gap between the vision of education reform in Thailand embodied in its Education Reform Law of 1999 and the results of implementation a decade later. Drawing upon opportunistic data obtained from a sample of 162 Thai school principals, we analyze trends in reform implementation across schools in all regions and levels of Thailand’s K-12 education system. The results suggest that a decade following the formal initiation of education reform, changes in teaching and learning, ICT implementation and school management systems have yet to engage the nation’s teachers to a substantial degree. The lack of results is linked to a reform strategy that has emphasized top-down implementation and a cultural predisposition to treat change as an event rather than as a long-term process.     

Is graduate employability the ‘whole-of-higher-education-issue’?

Graduate employability has become an issue in Vietnam since many university students do not satisfy the needs of employers. Universities often receive the strongest criticism on the poor employability assets graduates possess. The ill-preparation of university graduates is considered the result of the out dated and irrelevant curriculum in the higher education system, of the traditional teaching methods and the absent of career guidance in most universities. This article, however, aims to challenge this common criticism that university is to blame for the ill-preparation for employment of its graduates. By conducting a qualitative research inviting the voices of both students and employers on the issue, this article wants to address a wider context and circumstance and also the related issues surrounding the transition from university to work of Vietnamese university graduates. It suggests that not only universities, but also students, employers and other related stakeholders (i.e. student’s family, government and educational policy makers) should acknowledge the changes in society, should be aware of the cultural features at work, and should see their responsibility in the process. They all should make an effort to create mutual understanding, to collaborate and to enhance the development of graduate employability in the Vietnamese context.     

Creative leadership? ‘It’s just the norm’

Creativity in teaching and leadership continues to be a topic of interest in education. This article focuses on comments made by a school’s leadership team as part of a larger study in which a mixed methods case study design involving the school’s leadership team and staff who taught Arts (either as specialist teachers or generalist classroom teachers) was used. The research took place in a 6-year-old Preparatory Year to Year 9 (P-9) school in a growth corridor in metropolitan Melbourne. Staff members in the school provided responses to a questionnaire, participated in focus group discussions and were invited to maintain journals during the course of the study. Comments made by members of the school’s leadership team are analysed in this article using perspectives of pedagogical leadership and relational power. The article finds that the school's leadership team models and encourages experimentation with new ideas across the school as the team promotes the development of collaborative professional learning approaches in their relatively young school. The article concludes that professional learning communities (PLCs) within the school will be well-placed to pursue the collaborative approaches modelled by the school’s leadership team to ensure that a school-wide focus on student learning continues.     

What's wrong with ‘the student experience’?

Speaking about ‘the student experience’ has become common-place in higher education and the phrase has acquired the aura of a sacred utterance in UK higher education policy over the last decade. A critical discourse analysis of selected higher education policy texts reveals what ‘the student experience’ has come to signify, and how it structures relations between students and academics, institutions and academics, and higher education institutions and government. ‘The student experience’ homogenises students and deprives them of agency at the same time as apparently giving them ‘voice’. This paper examines the dominance and sacralisation of the discourse of ‘the student experience’ and questions its positioning as a means of discriminating between the value of different experiences of education.     

Language,discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’

This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characterised by an overt focus on standardised English and behaviour ‘management’. In a grounded approach, I explore how the disciplining of language correlates with the disciplining of the body, based on ethnographic-orientated fieldwork undertaken in a London secondary school and drawing on a broad range of policy mechanisms such as curricula, textbooks, classroom artefacts and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion industry. I show how the current linguistic conservatism found within government policy gets reproduced in school-level policies, pedagogies and classroom interactions, and highlight these relations within a network of policy actors and key terms associated with so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘no-excuses’ schools. I show how teachers are positioned as language policy managers who work within a system of surveillance, compliance, coercion and control. As such, this article contributes to current thinking within critical language policy and the sociology of education by offering an expanded view of language ideologies in schools, whereby connections between language and discipline are explicitly illustrated and critiqued.     

Putting back the ‘E’ in ‘EBD’

This paper argues that recent developments in the curriculum and in administrative structures for pupils with special educational needs have fended to marginalise the term ‘emotional’ or to combine it loosely with ‘behavioural’. It looks at the influence of forty years of behavioural psychology on the UK Code of Practice for children with SEN and related government circulars and suggests an alternative model for conceptualising emotional difficulties. This is not only current with mainstream psychology but can be fraced back to pre-Christian thinking. If the term ‘emotional’ is to be used in statements and IEPs in the future, the paper suggests, then appropriate ways of defining, assessing and providing for these will have to be found.     

‘Would you like to tidy up now?’ An analysis of adult questioning in the English Foundation Stage

This study provides an extension of analysis concerned with adult questioning carried out in the Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study. The REPEY study drew on robust quantitative data provided by the Effective Provision of Pre‐School Education (EPPE) project to identify the particular pedagogical strategies being applied by more effective pre‐school settings to support the development of the skills, knowledge and attitudes that enable their children to make a good start at school. Following a line of investigation identified in the EPPE analysis, and supported by previous studies, REPEY included a preliminary analysis of the forms of questioning applied by early childhood practitioners. These findings were based on 1967 adult questions identified in a random sample of four half‐day observations drawn from each of the 12 pre‐school settings that were identified by EPPE as more ‘effective’. In this extension of the analysis a text search of the N‐Vivo database identified a total of 5808 questions across the full 400 hours of observations of 28 staff that were recorded in 2000–2001. The aim of the research has been to provide a more thorough analysis of the forms of questioning applied, and to investigate the possibility that the use of open‐ended forms of questioning might be particularly supportive in early childhood development. Surprisingly, it was found that 94.5% of all the questions asked by the early childhood staff were closed questions that required a recall of fact, experience or expected behaviour, decision between a limited selection of choices or no response at all. Only 5.5% were open‐ended questions, which provided for increased encouragement (to speculate and trial and error) and/or potential for sustained, shared thinking/talking. This article provides an account of the analysis and the authors' coding and rationale for the seven types of closed questions and four types of open‐ended questions that are most commonly asked by early years staff.     

Boys’ educational ‘underachievement’ in the Caribbean: interpreting the ‘problem’

Education ministries in the Caribbean countries have directed considerable attention over the last decade to ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ of boys’ underachievement. Rather than considering such interventions, our central concern in this paper is to revisit debates about the interpretation of the issue, to explore whether boys’ underachievement is indeed a ‘problem’, in the sense of both an empirical reality and an issue requiring political attention. In this paper, we explore contestations over the reality and complexity of educational underachievement and whether this relates to broader political–economic marginalisation (or privileging) of boys. We turn then to explore the relationship between material realities and gendered subjectivities. Overall, we argue that boys’ underachievement should neither be ignored nor be the exclusive focus of attention and that a move from ‘boys’ underachievement’ to a broader analysis of ‘gender and education’ is needed, to place the debate in a gender relational context.     

Children’s transitions to school: ‘so what about the parents’? or ‘so,what about the parents’?

Children progress through a number of life transitions and each is a pivotal point of development and growth for them, their parents and family members. Through a review of the literature, the Bioecological Model will be used to frame childhood transitions as highly social, contextualised and political. This paper will assert that governments, schools and educators have an increased role in supporting parents with their changing roles, responsibilities and relationships as their child transitions to school and that schools need to provide space for parents to share their own transition to school narratives in order to better understand the effect these stories may have on the transition process for them and their children. Finally, schools and systems will be challenged to engage in a strengths-based approach to support parents at this pivotal time in their own and their child’s growth and development and call for increased research to identify ways in which this can occur within respectful, collaborative and agentic relationships.     

What is the Meaning of the Physical Magnitude ‘Work’?

Usually, in physics textbooks, the physical magnitude ‘work’ is introduced as the product of a force multiplied by its displacement, in relation to the transfer of energy. In other words, ‘work’ is presented as an internal affair of physics theory, while its relation to the world of experience, that is its empirical meaning, is missing. On the other hand, in the history of its creation, ‘work’ was a concept that had empirical meaning from the start. It was constructed by engineers to measure the work (labor) of motor engines, men, and animals. Very soon however this initial meaning seems to vanish. In this article, it will be looked at how ‘work’ is presented in physics textbooks, what was its initial meaning in the history of its formulation, under what circumstances this initial meaning faded, and how elements from the history of its creation can be used in the classroom to teach it.     

是‘增长’还是‘增长到’?

有这样一道选择题:如果1只羊=2袋米符合等价交换原则,当生产羊的社会劳动生产率降低一半,而生产米的社会劳动生产率提高三倍时,则一只羊可换: A、8袋米 B、6袋米 C、12袋米 D、16袋米 答案应选“D”。因为生产羊的社会劳动生产率降低一半时,则每只羊的价值提高一倍,即1只羊=4袋米。又,生产米的社会劳动生产率提高三倍时,则每袋米的价值只及原来的1/4。(即理解为:米的价值之所以降低到原来的1/4,是因为生产米的社会劳动生产率“提高了”三倍,或“提高到”原来的四倍。)自然,这时一只羊可换16袋米了。 但也还有的学生和教师,未能很好地解决对“提高了”、“增长了”和“增长到”一类表述的准确理解。 数学知识告诉我们,某某劳动生产率或劳动时间提高或增加二倍,应理解为:“提高了二倍”或“提高到”原来的三倍。1992年高考政治题第13题:1双皮鞋=2件上衣符合等价交换原则。当     

‘Teaching’ or ‘support’? The poisoned chalice of the role of Students’ Skills Centres

After the 1992 Further and Higher Education Reform Act enabled polytechnics and the qualifying franchised colleges to be renamed universities or higher education institutions, the dominance of the rhetoric of skill development aggravated long‐standing schisms between further and higher education about whether or not degree‐level courses should be available in further education. One aspect of these disagreements concerns the dominance of a skills deficit model and its influence in learning and teaching. This article draws on the findings of a study into the role of a Students’ Skills Centre (SSC) in a post‐1992 university. It focuses on how and why working in SSCs is envisaged as a subordinate function, as a ‘support’ and not a ‘teaching’ role. The research study utilised both quantitative and qualitative research methods in a case‐study design to examine the nature of students’ requests for help in an SSC. The article argues that academic skills, including writing, study and key skills, are more effective if taught in a subject/disciplinary‐specific context. Hence, lecturers in the SSC had to provide intensive teaching, which, at the same time, also addressed this contextual dimension. This is a complex and highly specialised teaching process, yet, despite the yearly increase in numbers of students attending the centre for help, university managers and some academic staff refused to acknowledge the complexity of the nature of students’ learning requirements or the teaching function of the role of lecturers working in the SSC.