Sexing the Subject: Teachers,pedagogies and sex education

This article analyses the relationship between sexual biography and pedagogic practice. It is based on life history interviews with sex education practitioners (teachers and a school nurse) that aimed to explore elements of these individuals' sexual biographies, their experiences of learning about sex and their pedagogic practice. The article considers why the sexuality of sex educators may be important, how this manifests itself in school and, finally, some of the implications for policy and practice.     

Financial Delegation: its effect on the school and the role of the head

At the end of a decade of enhanced marketisation in schools, this article considers the subjective meanings attached to educational marketing by school teachers and the ways they construct and interpret teachers' 'idealised' and 'actual' involvement and contribution to school marketing. Through semi-structured interviews with 12 secondary school teachers from the south of England, the study revealed teachers' perceptions of and attitudes towards competition, marketing and education, their awareness of the marketing activities of their schools, the teachers' role in marketing the school and the perceived impact of the market upon teachers' well being. The results show that there is no coherent, organised view of education marketing among teachers in the study but rather that there are a number of inchoate voices amongst teachers concerning their role in school marketing. Broadly, two voices are revealed that reflect a cognitive dissonance which may exist among school teachers in the era of marketisation. This dissonance may stem from teachers' ideology-based difficulty in perceiving marketing as part of school life, while at the same time, they are aware of its importance to the school's success.     

Talking about teaching: a study of the professional uses of email by secondary school teachers in Uruguay

Abstract

Teacher collegiality has been highlighted as a crucial factor in educational change and professional development. Secondary school teachers have been consistently found to feel isolated from their colleagues, with few opportunities and mechanisms for collegial support and exchange. Research suggests that computer-mediated communication, and electronic mail in particular, may help overcome the logistical and cultural barriers that hinder teacher communication and collaboration. This article reports on some of the findings of a research study into the use of email by secondary school teachers in Uruguay. The aim of the study was to further understand the potential of email to support teacher collegiality. Content analysis was used to identify the purpose and usage patterns of 1356 electronic mail messages exchanged between 20 secondary school teachers in Montevideo, Uruguay, over a period of 37 weeks. The evidence suggests that a majority of the exchanges between teachers were related to teaching practice. However, communication in this study largely excluded discussions on teachers' theoretical stances and pedagogical beliefs. This may diminish the potential of email to challenge teachers' professional views and hence limit professional development opportunities to an ‘instrumental’ level.     

Professional autonomy versus managerial control: The experience of teachers in an english primary school

This article examines the relationship between primary teachers' professional autonomy and the increasing managerial control over teachers' work. It considers how the education policies of successive Conservative and New Labour administrations in Britain have tightened central control over education undermining teacher discretion and directly impacting upon the labour process of the professionals concerned. The research was undertaken in an English primary school and data gathered in a variety of contexts including observations of the teachers in classrooms and the staff room, a governors/parents meeting, informal conversations and a series of semi-structured interviews with staff. The study explores how teachers make sense of the managerial culture in education, and how this is reconciled with their ideas about teaching and learning, and their professional interests and individual career aspirations. Structuration theory (Giddens, 1976, 1979, 1984) is used as a theoretical framework to explore whether there is conflict between teachers' professionalism and the new managerialism and examine how primary teachers make sense of this inextricable relationship.     

Time to learn: Pacing and the external framing of teachers' work 1

The article reports research in two South African grade 3 classrooms, one located within a disadvantaged school and one in an affluent suburban school. The research examines the pacing rules of different transmission practices: weak pacing (a slower rate of transmission) is associated with pedagogy in the working-class school, and strong pacing (a faster rate of transmission) in the middle-class school. A further dimension to pacing, that of differentiating (between different student learning rates and different learning contexts), is identified. The discussion is developed through an analysis of how time use differs in different socio-economic contexts and points to possible relations between the internal control of the pace of learning in classrooms, and the external control of teachers' pedagogic practices. The article examines the social relations within which the different transmission practices are embedded and points to a possible relationship between teachers' transmission practices and the social relations that constitute teachers' work.     

Institutional change in teacher education: The faculty's tale

A national reform in Israeli seminaries for teachers reclassified them as teachers' colleges. Ten years later the views of faculty members of one teachers' college about this reform were examined. The findings pertained (1) to the nature of academic upgrading, which was vague for most faculty, as it comprised a set of purely organizational changes which were either achieved or will be completed in the future; and (2) to the form of the ultimate college, which looked similar to a university in awarding a degree, yet lacking all the substantial characteristics of academic culture. The failure to achieve institutional transformation and the disparity between the views of the reformers and the faculty were attributed to the nature of the imposed top-down macro-level organizational change with little faculty involvement which led to the continuance of the previous teachers' seminary culture. Suggestions are made for prospective higher education reformers to help them to avoid this outcome.     

Analyses Of “Teaching”

Abstract

This article aims to critically examine how misrecognition is conceived as a challenge for pedagogic action.Krassimir Stojanov’s notion of the pathological behaviour patterns of teachers and Charles Bingham’s ‘pitfalls of recognition’ introduce how misrecognition may appear in schools, and offer advice to teachers and students on responding to the challenges of misrecognition.Their ideas elicit the problems embedded in the theory of recognition and the problems resulting from understanding misrecognition as a challenge for pedagogic action.This article concludes that recognition theory offers pedagogic action a problematic challenge: it is as problematic to follow Honneth’s original ideas as it is to invent new directions in understanding misrecognition as a pedagogical challenge.     

Exploring the boundary between school science and everyday knowledge in primary school pedagogic practices

This paper explores the different ways that primary school teachers in Uganda navigate the boundary between school science and everyday knowledge in the context of a centrally mandated curriculum innovation. The paper is based on a study of the pedagogic practices of 16 teachers in eight Ugandan primary schools that were selected on the basis of having a track record of either high or low academic achievement in the public primary school‐leaving examination. The official primary school curriculum in Uganda prescribes that science be taught in an integrated form, including integration between science subject knowledge and everyday knowledge. The strategies that teachers in the study adopted in relating science to everyday knowledge was a key feature that differentiated between pedagogic practices in the high‐performing and low‐performing schools. In high‐performing schools, teachers recruited everyday knowledge as a resource for learning science as a specialised discourse; whereas in the low‐performing schools, acquiring everyday knowledge was viewed as an end in itself. The paper, then, considers the implications of differences in teachers' pedagogic strategies for the kinds of knowledge to which learners are given access.     

African-American early childhood teachers' decisions to refer African-American students

Existing literature regarding European-American teachers' referrals of African-American students for special education programs is abundant. However, literature that explains African-American teachers' referrals of African-American students, in their own voices, is limited. This qualitative study examines the influences guiding African-American teachers' decisions to refer African-American students for special education programs. It uses, as a conceptual framework, several researchers' investigations of influences guiding teacher praxis. From these collective works, a conceptual model was developed as a ''teachers' decisions to refer'' perspective that served as a framework for examining influences that may have guided the participants' referral decisions. Findings revealed that African-American teachers have a collective teacher way of knowing and that socially constructed images of race and gender influenced their referral decisions. Additionally, participant interviews revealed that African-American teachers tended to refer based on the need to find assistance for students with special needs.     

Being in Authority,Being an Authority: Disrupting students'/teachers' practices in literacy education

This is the second case study situated within my teaching of two undergraduate courses in the college of education of a large American university. It interrogates social forms that construct pedagogic and literate authority relations between preservice English education students and their teachers. It illustrates how teachers and students can negotiate engagement in critical literacy practice by constructing instructional circumstances that allow preservice teachers to question the kinds of practices that thwart the various aims of critical literacy and pedagogy. This study narrates a "critical incident" as a form of "practice-as-inquiry research", using field-notes, tape recordings, and interviews to describe four moments within the span of an activity that takes its historical antecedent in the work of I.A. Richards. The interpretation and analysis is informed by Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. The paper argues that teachers' disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge should not be undervalued or denied because with this knowledge comes an ethical responsibility to shape educative experiences for students that open them up to reflection and critique.     

Using Blackboard and Skype for Mentoring Beginning Teachers

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the nature of the Blackboard and Skype-based electronic mentoring system for beginning teachers. The Quality Teachers for Quality Students project developed an electronic mentoring system between beginning teachers and experienced teachers to support beginning teachers' instructional and classroom management skills with regard to the unique needs of English language learners (ELLs) in Southern California. The data analysis indicated that the combination of using Blackboard and Skype tools was beneficial to beginning teachers' effective teaching of ELLs.     

Feedback practices in a sample of children with emotional and/or behavioral difficulties

Abstract

This study examined two aspects of feedback in a population of children displaying emotional and/or behavioral difficulties. The study explored the agreement in teachers' and children's reports of positive and corrective feedback, as well as the role of teachers' beliefs concerning the child's sensitivity to feedback. Teachers' sensitivity ratings were positively correlated with teachers' reports of positive feedback, indicating that teachers may give differential feedback based on the teachers' perceptions of the child's sensitivity to feedback rather than specifically on performance indicators. Discrepancies between teachers' and children's reports of feedback were also evident. Given the critical role of feedback in the academic and social adjustment of children with emotional and/or behavioral difficulties, implications of feedback practices are explored.     

Assessment in French and English infant schools: Assessing the work,the child or the culture?

This article is based on a comparative study of French and English infant schools. The first section examines the understanding of 'mistakes' from a socio-cultural perspective, relating assessment to teachers' culturally situated practice and values. While mistakes and failure for some are an inevitable outcome of French pedagogic choices, they are less acceptable to English teachers and less relevant to the experience of infant school children. The second section considers the scope of assessment: teachers in France seek to dissociate their assessment of a piece of work from the pupil who has produced it, whereas English infant school teachers remain more holistic in their approach, assessing the 'whole child' through their work. The form and content of teacher assessment thus reflect socially constructed and culturally situated conceptions of pupils and of learning. Routine assessment in the classroom constitutes a prism through which one can examine teachers' beliefs and values, as well as the priorities of the two education systems.     

Meritocracy,policy and pedagogy: culture and the politics of recognition and redistribution in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Ideas about merit and the associated notion of a meritocracy have long been drawn upon to frame and understand a range of issues central to education policy. Little attention, however, is given to how in practice and through the workings of policy, meritocracy functions as an ideology that is struggled over by various social groups and pedagogic agents. Focusing on classroom pedagogic practices in Singapore, this article explores the ways in which in an ostensibly meritocratic education system, teachers interpret and negotiate ideas about culture to engage their students in the system’s low-progress tracks. We argue that these teachers are creatively resisting, even challenging official discourses of meritocracy and engaging in what Nancy Fraser calls struggles over recognition and redistribution.     

Teacher efficacy: An investigation of Economics teachers

Abstract

In an era of unprecedented curriculum change it is not surprising that many South African teachers have begun to question their ability to affect learner performance. Teachers have to engage with a changing learner culture, with new curriculum content and are under pressure to embrace different teaching strategies without fully understanding the theoretical principles on which they are based. In this paper the authors explore high-school Economics teachers' beliefs about their capacities to influence learning. This paper is based on a quantitative empirical investigation into Economics teachers' efficacy beliefs about the teaching of Economics. Economics teachers from each of the 45 Department of Education delineated districts in KwaZulu-Natal province were selected to be participants in the study. We argue that while Economics teachers perceive their role as important in the learning process, male teachers in particular see the teacher as the dominant influence on learner performance, and are more confident than female teachers of their knowledge and teaching abilities.     

Fast Kids,Slow Kids,Lazy Kids: Framing the Mismatch Problem in Mathematics Teachers' Conversations

Abstract

This article examines the social nature of teachers' conceptions by showing how teachers frame the “mismatch” of students' perceived abilities and the intended school curriculum through conversational category systems. This study compares the conversations of 2 groups of high school mathematics teachers addressing the Mismatch Problem when implementing equity-geared reforms. Although East High teachers challenged conceptions that were not aligned with a reform, South High teachers reworked a reform mandate to align with their existing conceptions. This research found that the teachers' conversational category systems modeled problems of practice; communicated assumptions about students, subject, and teaching; and were ultimately reflected in the curriculum. Because East High teachers supported greater numbers of students' success in advanced mathematics, this study considers the relation between teachers' understandings of student learning and the success of equity-geared math reforms. In addition, this study contributes to the understanding of how teacher conceptions of students are negotiated and reified in context, specifically through interactions with colleagues and experiences with school reform.     

Critical Reflection on Teaching: insights from Freire

Abstract

This article considers the processes by which teachers acquire the ability to engage in reflection on their teaching. The discussion draws on the author's experience with practising teachers who attended university seminars on the topic of teacher thinking. The work of Freire is used to suggest three stages which are important in working toward the development of self‐reflexiveness, to account for some of the difficulties experienced by both teachers and instructor, and to generate approaches to the enhancement of teachers' ability to reflect critically on their practice.     

Learning to Teach or Learning to Manage Mentors? Experiences of school-based teacher training

In the late 1990s teachers acting as mentors play a key role in initial teacher training (ITT). This article reports the findings of a study which examined student teachers' perceptions of 'good' practice in mentoring. Given that certain parallels have been drawn between the nineteenth-century pupil-teacher scheme and school-based ITT, the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) who see apprenticeship as central to learning was used as a framework for analysing the data. The study highlighted the significance of the affective in student teachers' school-based learning. But it also highlighted the significance of the affective in mentors' practice: e.g. mentors' feelings of vulnerability. The way in which students responded to mentors in this respect - how far they were able to 'manage' their mentors - ultimately contributed to the success of students' placements. The article concludes that the possession of mentoring skills alone will not guarantee that students receive appropriate support.     

Discourses about a teacher's self-initiated change in praxis: Storylines of care and support

At the foreground of this article is an account of an experienced science teacher's self-initiated change in praxis within an inquiry community. From classroom observation and interviews, data interpretations are made about the discursive practices of the teacher and his colleagues. In particular, the teacher's change in praxis is attributed to his dissatisfaction with previous practice, realization that alternatives were likely to provide better outcomes for his students, commitment to improving his practice, and a supportive school community in which teachers felt comfortable taking personal risks and engaging in professional discussions. The collaborative culture of the study site was characterized by the teachers' caring ethic for their students.