In pursuit of ethical research: studying hybrid communities using online and face-to-face communications

Hybrid communities using online and face-to-face communications to construct their practices are increasingly part of everyday life amongst people who have easy access to the internet. Researching these communities raises a number of challenges for researchers in the pursuit of ethical research. The paper begins by exploring what is understood by hybrid communities and how their practices might be researched using hybrid methods to investigate the experiences of participants in them. The discussion then considers what might be an ethical framework for researching activity in these entities, giving examples from several projects that have tried carefully to embed this framework in their practices. In exploring these studies, the paper highlights the ethical possibilities and challenges that online and offline spaces offer for researchers in the conduct of their qualitative educational research.     

Learner Identity Amid Figured Worlds: Constructing (In)competence at an Urban High School

This article explores the figured world of learning at urban Oakcity High School, describing the learner identities that were available to students amid the practices, categories, discourses and interactions of this world. My aims are 2-fold and interconnected: (1) to reframe a taken-for-granted phenomenon—that students tend to do poorly at urban high schools serving low income students of color, and (2) to apply a situated perspective and the concepts of figured worlds and positional identities to the study of learning and identity at an urban high school, expanding the use of these concepts in educational research. Beth C. Rubin is an Assistant Professor in Graduate School of Education, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey 10 Seminary Place New Brunswick NJ 08901 USA     

Connecting with place: implications of integrating cultural values into the school curriculum in Alaska

Many authors primarily from industrialised nations discuss human relationships with the natural environment in the context of global environmental issues, and highlight the close relationships that ‘traditional’ societies have with nature. There is a growing trend among indigenous people in North America to restore such a connection with the land through place‐based education. This article reports on progress on such a programme at Russian Mission School in rural Alaska in the period 2002–2007 and its implications for sustainability. The programme actively seeks to integrate the community’s cultural values and activities into their curriculum. This has resulted in raising pupils’ academic skills and confidence, and seems to be bridging a gap of distrust between the school and community. An ethnographical approach was adopted with a mixed research design based primarily on participant observation, supported by semi‐structured interviews, written surveys, and conversations with stakeholders, student writings and secondary sources. The initial fieldwork in 2002 was followed up five years later.     

公平视阈下城乡社区教育发展均衡化问题研究

自20世纪80年代中期我国兴起现代社区教育以来,社区教育的地位和作用不断加强。公平是城乡社区教育均衡发展追求的目标,由于城乡二元结构体制的影响、城乡经济水平的差异、政府职能的缺失以及公共政策的失衡,城乡社区教育呈现出一种失衡的发展状况,因此,在社区教育的发展过程中要通过整合优化农村社区教育资源,建立社区教育多级体系,丰富农村社区教育内容,建立健全社区教育机制,依托信息化平台以及建立社区教育专业网站等,来促进我国城乡社区教育的均衡化发展,推动社会公平与社会主义和谐社会的建立。     

层类教育公平与城乡教育公平相互促进的关系状态及其形成

教育公平是教育平等和教育效率相互促进的关系状态及其水平持续不断提高的发展状态,既包括教育机会、过程和结果的公平,也包括不同层次、类型教育的公平和区域、城乡教育的公平。不同层类的教育公平不仅本身相互影响,而且也与城乡、区域教育公平相互影响。城乡学生接受高等教育不平等和不公平的直接原因是基础教育的不平等和不公平。实现城乡教育公平必须首先实现城乡基础教育的平等,形成不同层类教育公平相互促进的关系状态。     

Love as a Language for Educational Justice

Abstract

Schools need to do a better job of recognizing the contributions and gifts students bring with them. Such a community-spirit approach could help everyone, from teachers and parents to district leaders and the Secretary of Education, dissuade the public from individualistic school structures and instead focus on equitable solutions that include the norms and histories of the people schools serve.     

Reconstructing Imagined Finnishness: The Case of Art Education through the Concept of Place

This multidisciplinary article presents a methodology, a research project and selected outcomes from an environmental art education course for teacher students. The course is part of an art education minor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Teacher Education. The students were asked to construct their place through an intertextual art method that provided them the means to study their place open‐endedly as a space of plural cultural meanings. Applying the results from their intertextual process, they reconstructed their place artistically. The end product was a personal work of art that included traces of their chosen places, and created a new meaning for it. The outcome is a visual space of compacted meanings from different places. Places contain history and memories important to identity construction. The results show that the intertextual reading extends the students’ concept of place as a space for relational and plural cultural meanings. Foucault's concept of heterotopia, as it applies to otherness of places and spaces, was used alongside the intertextual art method.     

“Drag Me to the Asylum”: Disguising and Asserting Identities in an Urban School

In many inner-city high schools, students face violence on a regular basis. Authorities contain and curtail the use of weapons and other acts that threaten the individual and the functioning of the institution. These attempts to create a safe environment separate students, who are largely black working class and poor, into criminal and noncriminal categories, creating a labeling system that denies complex individuality. In this article, I demonstrate how teens reaffirmed and subverted harmless/dangerous labels by disguising themselves and creating personas through the use of clothing, graffiti, and poetry. These forms of communication allowed them to achieve anonymity, assert violent identities, and resist dehumanization. Ultimately, I analyze how poetry became a means to explore individual interests, fears, and fantasies. Through personification and metaphor, students articulated and elided psychological and physical constraints despite the monolithic labels of school. Their work often conveyed a subtlety that subverted institutional categories that otherwise reduced them to a single identity. Drag Me to the Asylum emerged from research conducted in and outside a large urban high school. From 1992 until 1997, I collected student poetry, listened to the stories of students and school staff, and taped over 100 hours of unstructured interviews with students and teachers.     

Rural Location and Academic Success—Remarks on Research,Contextualisation and Methodology

In this article the focus is on the relationship between rural location and education outcomes, a field that has not received enough attention either by educational authorities or by educational researchers. Main goals are to argue for an increased focus on rural education and for the need for contextualisation of educational research in general. Research on issues such as school size, local adaption, population composition, parental involvement and rural approaches to learning are presented in order to map significant areas in rural education research. Perspectives focusing on compositional and contextual effects explaining spatial variations in academic success are highlighted. In addition, an outline of some methodological consequences following from the latter goal is provided.     

Becoming an urban science teacher: How beginning teachers negotiate contradictory school contexts

Teacher attrition rates are high in urban schools, particularly for new science teachers. Little research has addressed how science teachers can be prepared to effectively bridge the divide between preparation and urban teaching. We utilized the theoretical frameworks of social justice, identity, and structure-agency to investigate this transition. Specifically, we examined the Urban Science Teacher Preparation (USTP) program as a critical case of “well-prepared” urban science teachers. Study participants included one cohort of four teachers. Data, primarily from individual interviews, a focus group, and written reflections, were collected from participants during pre-service preparation and their first year of teaching. The USTP program nurtured the development of a professional identity aligned with teaching science for social justice, with a unique emphasis on identifying structural injustices in schools. Findings indicate all four teachers used their identities to negotiate school policies and procedures that restricted student opportunities to learn science through three processes: deconstructing the context, positioning themselves within and against the context, and enacting their identities. These findings suggest the importance of USTP programs to provide teacher candidates with political clarity for teaching for social justice and sustained induction support to resist school socialization pressures.     

Muskrat theories,tobacco in the streets,and living Chicago as Indigenous land

In this paper, we aim to contribute to ongoing work to uncover the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments and explore lessons learned from an urban Indigenous land-based education project. In this project, we worked to re-center our perceptual habits in Indigenous cosmologies, or land-based perspectives, and came to see land re-becoming itself. Through this recentering, we unearthed some ways in which settler colonialism quietly operates in teaching and learning environments and implicitly and explicitly undermines Indigenous agency and futurity by maintaining and reifying core dimensions of settler colonial relations to land. We describe examples in which teachers and community members explicitly re-engaged land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a land-based environmental science education that enabled epistemological and ontological centering that significantly impacted learning, agency, and resilience for urban Indigenous youth and families. In this paper, we explore the significance of naming and the ways in which knowledge systems are mobilized in teaching and learning environments in the service of settler futurity. However, we suggest working through these layers of teaching and learning by engaging in land-based pedagogies is necessary to extend and transform the possibilities and impacts of environmental education.     

Academic ‘place-making’: fostering attachment,belonging and identity for Indigenous students in Australian universities

Place is a concept used to explore how people ascribe meaning to their physical and social surrounds, and their emotional affects. Exploring the university as a place can highlight social relations affecting Australian Indigenous students’ sense of belonging and identity. We asked what university factors contribute to the development of a positive sense of place for these students. Findings are presented from two Australian universities, based on focus groups with Indigenous students, and interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. Students prioritized relationships with academics as a key theme, stressing academic’s flexibility and understanding enabled their persistence at university. Students situationally manage self-identification, requiring academics to engage effectively with diverse students, but staff felt they required further professional development. We argue that academics can ‘make’ university places in their pedagogies and mentoring roles, but require universities to recognize this pedagogical caring as a legitimate and valued element of their work.     

我国义务教育财政公平的经验研究——基于浙江省普通小学数据的分析

教育公平是社会公平的重要基础,教育公平是社会公平在教育领域的延伸,也是达到社会公平的重要手段和途径。但学界对我国教育制度和政策公平性的研究缺乏实证考量,所提出的观点缺少客观数据分析的支持。利用一种较为新颖的度量方法,并基于2005—2006年浙江省普通小学区县级数据对义务教育财政公平程度的经验研究,发现近年来浙江省的义务教育财政改革促进了横向公平的提升,但纵向公平的"一免"(免教科书)目标没有实现。浙江省级政府应该大幅改变"一免"公平要素的权重,适当调整"一补"(寄宿生补助)公平要素的权重。     

Coherence,contradiction, and the development of school science identities

This study demonstrates the potential for collaborative research among participants in local settings to effect positive change in urban settings characterized by diversity. It describes an interpretive case study of a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse eighth grade science classroom in an urban magnet school in order to explore why some of the students did not achieve at high levels and identify with school science although they were both interested in and knowledgeable about science. The results of this study indicated that structural issues such as the school's selection process, the discourses perpetuated by teachers, administrators, and peers regarding “who belongs” at the school, and negative stereotype threat posed obstacles for students by highlighting rather than mitigating the inequalities in students' educational backgrounds. We explore how a methodology based on the use of cogenerative dialogues provided some guidance to teachers wishing to alter structures in their classrooms to be more conducive to all of their students developing identities associated with school science. Based on the data analysis, we also argue that a perspective on classrooms as communities of practice in which learning is socially situated rather than as forums for competitive displays, and a view of students as valued contributors rather than as recipients of knowledge, could address some of the obstacles. Recommendations include a reduced emphasis on standardized tasks and hierarchies, soliciting unique student contributions, and encouraging learning through peripheral participation, thereby enabling students to earn social capital in the classroom. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 1209–1228, 2010     

对城乡教育一体化改革理论与实践复杂性的思考

当前城乡教育一体化在理论和实践的推动下,逐渐成为热门话题。以复杂性角度对现有的城乡教育一体化理论和实践进行分析,认为城乡教育一体化改革存在区域局限性、深度变革的限制、非一体化局限性、价值向度问题、思维动向的局限性等问题。在城乡教育一体化的改革中必须重视这些问题,从而更好地推进城乡教育一体化发展。     

Changing places,changing spaces? Towards understanding teacher education through space–time frameworks

This article draws together theoretical ideas from studies of space/spatiality and the history of teacher education. These ideas form a theoretical framework through which to analyse the findings from a small–scale ethnographic study of the geographical relocations made by two university schools of education in England. Data collection instruments included documentary analysis, field notes from dedicated observations, pre- and post-relocation questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, again pre- and post-relocation. The findings indicate the ways in which the spaces of teacher education are integral to the historical and contemporary practices, social relations and professional identities found in the field.