“There are carers,and then there are carers who actually care”; Conceptualizations of care among looked after children and care leavers,social workers and carers

BackgroundLooked after children and care leavers (LACCL) are some of the most vulnerable and marginalized young people in our communities. Existing research demonstrates that this group often interprets care in terms of genuineness and tends to feel uncared for. Less work exists from the perspective of social workers and formal carers.ObjectiveThis study aims to explore how care is perceived and practiced among LACCL and those with a duty of care for them. We use a theoretical lens of care ethics to compare and contrast understandings in order to explore how they affect the delivery and receipt of care.Participants & settingThere were 44 participants from four local authorities in north-east England including nineteen LACCL aged 12–20, eight social workers, and nineteen formal carers.MethodTwenty-eight semi-structured 1:1 interviews, four dyad interviews and three focus group interviews.ResultsLACCL desired care that felt familial, went beyond minimum standards and involved understanding. Social workers had to manage LACCL expectations and build relationships by both rationing care according to role constraints whilst sometimes going ‘above and beyond’ statutory care. Carers conceptualized care in terms of dedication and discipline but felt limited in their ability to achieve care in this way.ConclusionBridging different conceptualizations of care is necessary to achieve integrated support for these vulnerable young people whilst also helping them to develop key skills for later adult life. A deeper understanding of frameworks of care has implications for social worker and formal carer training and practice.     

Living in Plurilingual Spaces: Self-Study,Critical Friendship,and the Plurality of Publics

ABSTRACT

In this article, we engage in collaborative self-study through a critical friendship that is specifically designed to evoke our personal histories in relation to how we approach our practices as teacher educators. In particular, we focus on understanding the conceptual origins of our pedagogies of teacher education and how our identities as teacher educators were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by colleagues, teacher candidates, and by the process of self-study itself. We argue that the multiple studies that are available to any self-study research programme create a plurality of publics in which we identify, and are identified, in particular ways by particular members of the teacher education community. One significant avenue for our developing line of work concerns the ways in which our shared bilingualism plays out during our critical friendship, and how the use of multiple languages helps us to reframe our identities as teacher educators, particularly whilst engaged in translanguaging practices.     

‘Shaping the Future’, Black History and diversity: teacher perceptions and implications for curriculum development

ABSTRACT

This study provides an evaluation of history subject leader's perceptions of a project called ‘Shaping the Future’, together with their attitudes towards Black History and diversity. It found that primary subject leaders were less likely to attach importance to these dimensions than their counterparts in secondary schools, whilst only a small minority of subject leaders made use of the project. Nevertheless, the findings provided insights into how some subject leaders used them as threads or within topics in their curriculum. The study argues that this provides a model for developing Black History as a means of understanding the past which is applicable to meeting the needs of all children.     

Shaping the democratic,relational, and reflective youth recreation leader

ABSTRACT

Youth recreation centres have been a key institution in providing young people with meaningful activity after school, going back to the mid-twentieth century in Sweden. These centres have been the focus of research, but very few studies have paid attention to the youth recreation leader, the person working in these centres. In this article, we direct our focus towards youth recreation leaders by analysing how a discourse on the ideal youth recreation leader takes shape through policy, how it operates, and with what effect. We are inspired by the work of Foucault in understanding discourse, power, and subjectivity. Our analysis illustrates how a democratic, relational, and reflective ideal youth recreation leader is shaped and fostered through current policy discourses in Sweden. Such a subjectivity emerges through technologies of power and the self, of which the confession is one. Through the confession, the youth recreation leader is simultaneously governed and governs others – the conduct of conduct. The case presented here can tell us more about the way in which governing operates in contemporary society.     

Implementing Peer Learning Across Organisations: The development of a model

Peer learning can be implemented by individual teachers within an organisation or can be implemented across an organisation by a central implementer. In this article, it is argued that the types of approach required in these two forms of implementation are very different and whilst the former is dealt with in the literature on peer learning, the latter has been largely unconsidered. The article reports how a review of the literature on organisational change was used to develop a model of how to implement peer learning across organisations. It describes how this model was used to guide the implementation of peer learning across a UK further education college. The results of a pilot study into the model's effectiveness in this context are reported. These results suggest that the model appeared to be a useful guide to the implementation of peer learning across an organisation and, as such, is worthy of further investigation in other contexts.     

Framing the role of the school leader in OECD documents: A critical analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the OECD framing of the role of the school leader in a series of its publications, drawing on role theory, using critical analysis of how school leaders’ roles are represented in a body of OECD texts. The research findings provide insight into the multi-faceted portrayal of the ‘ideal’ role of school leadership as framed by the OECD. The findings also show the dominance of classic scientific management ideas in the framing of the role of school leadership by the OECD. The study demonstrates how adopting role theory can provide a deeper understanding of how OECD discursive actions redraw new roles for those working in education.     

Teenage girls negotiating femininity in the context of sexually explicit materials

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we draw from elements of a study that sought to examine how teenage South African girls, both white and black African, articulate their relationship with online sexually explicit materials (SEM). The study contributes to the literature by resisting the dominant discursive practices underlined by the construction of sexuality as an exclusive realm of danger for teenage girls. Challenging this static version of femininity, we focus on the ways in which teenage girls, aged between 13 and 18 years old in two elite private schools, use online SEM to expand their sexual knowledge and engage in pleasurable forms of sexuality. By drawing on individual interviews, focus group discussions and open-ended visual elicitation research methods, we show how girls embrace online SEM in ways that expand the definition of femininity beyond fearing sexuality whilst demonstrating the entanglement with gender inequalities. Girls’ relationship with online SEM, whilst tenuous, disrupts normative assumptions around femininity. However, an ambiguous relationship with online SEM is evident as their challenges to dominant femininity are mediated by concerns about respect and innocence, as well as by persistent evidence of male power within online SEM. Implications for school-based sexuality education concludes the paper.     

Name writing ability not length of name is predictive of future academic attainment

Background: The Performance Indicators in Primary Schools On Entry Baseline assessment for pupils starting school includes an item which aims to assess how well a pupil writes his or her own name. There is some debate regarding the utility of this measure, on the grounds that name length may constitute bias.

Purpose, method and design: The predictive validity of this item and its link to name length was investigated with a view to using this item in further assessments. Previous modest scale work from the USA, suggests that name writing ability is a robust indicator which correlates substantively with other known indicators of later reading whilst remaining independent of name length. This paper greatly expanded the sample size and geographical coverage and, rather than concurrent measures, the predictive validity of the item is assessed. The sample includes children from England, Scotland and Australia (N = 14932), assessed between 2011 and 2013. Potential confounding factors that are analysed include age, geographical region and ethnicity.

Findings and conclusions: The evidence suggests that the name writing item is a robust measure, with good predictive validity to future academic outcomes in early reading, phonological awareness and mathematics. The length was not related to the ability to write one’s own name nor was it predictive of future outcomes.     

Androgyny and the Mentoring Role: an empirical study to examine for prominent mentor expectations

abstract

As part of an ongoing research design, we wished to examine how mentors behave whilst in the mentoring role. The starting point for this was a study to examine how mentors felt they were expected to behave in context; that is, an organised educational mentoring situation, as we recognised the importance of situation‐specificity. Prior to empirical study, we theorised that the mentor may be androgynous; or more precisely are able to display high levels of expressive and instrumental behaviour. Seven suppositions were examined. Our findings were that whilst in the role, mentors do indeed feel expected to blend and display high levels of both instrumentality and expressiveness. Further, the levels of expressive behaviour they perceived they were expected to display were significantly higher. The higher levels of expected expressive behaviour is not congruent with the androgyny literature: our samples proved an exception to the ‘masculine supremacy effect’. Also, that mentoring may require high levels of stereotypically feminine behaviour is something that the mass of mentoring literature has not discussed and may warrant further attention. We concluded that the diverse, complex and complicated nature of mentoring is met with expectations to display flexibility and versatility across situations — to take a proactive approach to coping with mentoring situational demands — such is not mitigated by gender. Their reported high expected levels of both expressive and instrumental behaviour are congruent with our theory of the androgynous mentor.     

Revisiting the Analects for a modern reading of the Confucian dialogical spirit in education

Abstract

This study investigates the educational thought of Confucius with focus on the educational relationship in the Analects, which is a historical text that defines the foundations of Confucianism. The first part of the investigation examines Confucius’ concept of the educational relationship and how it is characterized with a dialogical spirit, which consists of worldly and secular human-orientedness, co-existentiality as a fundamental principle for educational practice, and dialogue to become an ideal ruler through self-discipline. The second stage of this study further examines the spirit of dialogue in the Analects with consideration of its historical–cultural context. Through this process, the study unravels the historical and cultural limitations of original Confucian educational thought for modern society and proposes a possible way to reengage Confucius’ educational value in today’s modern educational context.     

The Rankings of Marketing Programs in China

ABSTRACT

This paper reports how Chinese marketing educators perceive the relative quality of Chinese marketing programs. The rankings and evaluative criteria adopted indicate that Chinese marketing educators consider more on the inputs to the program, for instance faculty quality and strength, whilst output characteristics like competence of graduates receive no attention. The evidence presented in this paper seems to indicate that the faculty quality and strength of Chinese marketing educators are at the moment very weak. Innovative measures, for instance the marketing teaching company scheme, should be adopted.     

Setting by numbers: datafication processes and ability grouping in an English secondary school

ABSTRACT

With the rise of accountability policies since the early nineties, the daily operation of English schools has profoundly changed. Through the in-depth analysis of ability grouping practices in one English secondary school, this paper aims to explore how the accountability shift and datafication impacted the practice of student grouping and students’ experience of education. The paper documents how an English secondary school which had fully endorsed the comprehensive ideal gradually shifted from mixed ability teaching to a rigid system of hierarchically arranged attainment-based grouping structure over a period of decades, and explores the pedagogical dilemmas that data-driven governance generates. The paper concludes that the school’s data-driven practice creates an environment of competition and an experience of incessant insecurities for the students which unsettlingly echo the culture of the late neoliberal labour market.     

North West Cross Institutional Action Learning developing women's leadership

ABSTRACT

Human resource development professionals in Higher Education are continually striving to develop efficient interventions to increase the capabilities of their leaders. As a result of evaluating feedback from an action learning (AL) programme designed and delivered in North West Higher Education Institutions in the UK for women in senior academic and professional service roles, we are able to share how AL can be utilised to transcend and supplement traditional leadership training. The article discusses the approach taken to support participants to develop vital leadership behaviours through the acquisition of critical questioning and reflective habits whilst developing strong supportive cross-institutional relationships with other higher education leaders.     

Evil,virtue, and education in Kant

Abstract

For Kant, we cannot understand how to approach moral education without confronting the radical evil of humanity. But if we start out, as Kant thinks we do, from a morally corrupt state, how can we make moral progress? In response, I explore in this paper Kant’s gradualist and revolutionary accounts of moral progress. These differing accounts of progress raise two key questions in the literature: are these accounts compatible and which type of progress comes first? Against other views in the literature, I argue that gradual progress through a change of mores must come first and can gradually lead toward, as its ideal endpoint, a revolution in our disposition (or a change of heart) and the overthrowing of our radical evil. This has important implications for moral pedagogy.     

Computer Simulation in Teacher Training

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a survey of 156 FE librarians which examined the provision of library support for franchised HE courses in FE colleges by determining the involvement of the library in the franchising process and assessing the practical issues of provision. A significant finding is that the problems cited by librarians tend to be of a practical issues, such as stock management, whilst the benefits are perceived to be more of a managerial or professional nature.     

Ethnic Masculinities in Australian Boys’ Schools: Scots and Irish secondary schools in late nineteenth‐century Australia

Recent research into the cultural construction of masculinity has shown it to be not a monolith, but multi‐faceted, contested, and changing over time. Masculinities are institutionalised and practised in many arenas of social life, but schools are especially important in endeavouring to shape and inculcate particular models and codes of masculinity. Historians of education in Britain and Australia have examined how Victorian boys' schools instilled an ideal of manliness, which changed markedly in the late nineteenth century. The English public school code of masculinity was a key feature of Australian boys' schools conducted by the Church of England and other English‐oriented churches and agencies.

This article examines some schools established by Scots through the Presbyterian Church, and by the Catholic Church which was overwhelmingly Irish. The period from the 1880s to the First World War is focused upon, to ascertain what distinctive ideals or models ofmanhood may have been transplanted through these ethnic traditions, and the extent to which they differed from, resisted, or adapted to, the prestigious Arnoldian English code, supported as it was by the popular cultural ideal of British Imperial manhood. The question of whether a distinctively Australian model of masculinity was emerging at this time, and which ethnic traditions contributed most to it, is also explored.     

Intellectual and Personality Characteristics of University of Utah Students

Abstract

The purpose of the study Is to determine if counselors perceive secondary school students differently from teachers. A group of 25 effective teachers, as determined by their respective principals, and a group of 25 counselors-intraining were interviewed by the author. Each subject completed an 84-item Q-sort constructed of items describing an ideal student. Each item on the Q-sort was judged by a three-judge panel to describe a student as being more flexible or more rigid.

The two groups were matched according to degrees earned, sex, and age. The teacher group averaged six more years' experience than the counselor group.

Each subject's Q-sort was scored to produce a flexible score or a rigid score according to how the subject perceived the ideal student. A significant difference at the 0.1 level of confidence was found when Chi Square was used to analyze the data.

This study suggests that perceptual differences occur between two groups of persons in similar helping relationships which may be directly related to the personalities of the helpers. These perceptual differences are necessary for being effective In either helping relationship.     

Teachers' Perceptions of Their Pupils' Views on Rewards and Punishments

Although sabbatical leave for teachers was suggested in the James Report more than 25 years ago, it remains as much of an unattainable ideal as ever—a sad fact in the light of the message of this paper. What Les Summers tells us clearly illustrates the potential value that sabbaticals might have for teachers: how they might return to school both refreshed and with new and innovatory ideas. The chance to study some schools in Australia enabled Summers to do just this, and he was able to see issues of disaffection here from a new perspective as a result of his experiences. He then went on to develop the idea of a programme which responds to the needs of young school leavers.     

Inquiry-Based Learning and the Flipped Classroom Model

Abstract

The flipped classroom model of teaching can be an ideal venue for turning a traditional classroom into an engaging, inquiry-based learning (IBL) environment. In this paper, we discuss how two instructors at different universities made their classrooms come to life by moving the acquisition of basic course concepts outside the classroom and using class time for active problem-based learning. Results from student surveys are presented to relate student perceptions of the flipped/IBL classroom model.     

Reviewers

Abstract

The growth in importance of performance assessment in education over recent years has been linked with a concern to ensure that the service represents ‘value for money’. To date the absence of a satisfactory analytical framework has meant that questions of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ have been kept separate. An additional problem has been that, whilst there are many different outcomes which are appropriate for education authorities to pursue, conventional models handle these only one at a time.

In this paper we use data on the 96 English LEAs to show how an underlying model allows authorities to be compared in terms of ‘efficiency’ when facing different environmental circumstances and utilising different resource inputs. The technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is first described in the context of an explanatory model, and then the results of applying this to the English LEAs are presented.

As distinct from a league table’ analysis, DEA gives some indications of where improvements are to be sought. It allows for ‘trade‐offs’ between outputs of different types and provides a small but distinct peer group of ‘efficient’ authorities to which an ‘inefficient’ LEA can be compared.

The efficiency measure used is ‘relative efficiency’ which arises from comparing the actual performance of an inefficient authority with that of others which can be used to model its environmental circumstances and resource inputs.

A number of case studies are described. The limitations of the technique, and the caution required in interpretation, are discussed.