The teacher education curriculum and the world of work: A study of teachers of disadvantaged children in Nigeria

A key element in the current attempt to actualise the goals of the Dakar Framework of Action for Education for All in Nigeria is the broadening of access to education for disadvantaged groups. These groups include: nomadic pastoralists; migrant fishermen; and out-of-school children and youth. Special educational programs are being provided for them so as, inter alia, to: integrate them into the mainstream of Nigeria's social and political life; disseminate modern occupational and life skills; and promote cultural renewal based on reconstructionist principles.The major concern of this paper is to analyse the teacher education curriculum in Nigeria vis-à-vis the concrete existential realities in which teachers of these disadvantaged groups teach. It critically examines the extent to which the curriculum prepares teachers for the world of minority children, particularly the realities of the schools and the cultural contexts within which teaching takes place. To what extent has the teacher education curriculum adequately prepared teachers for the realities and challenges of teaching disadvantaged children? What do the teachers themselves think of the training they have received? How have their experiences as teachers of disadvantaged groups influenced their sense of marginalisation, professionalism and sense of worth? These questions are posed using quantitative and qualitative strategies so as to determine the level of congruence or incongruence between the existential realities of teachers’ work and the teacher education curriculum. Finally the paper highlights the suggestions made by the teachers sampled for this study about how to reform the teacher education curriculum in order most effectively to address the peculiarities and challenges of the cultural and educational contexts in which they work.     

Secondary School Choice as a Window on Jewish Faith Schools in Contemporary British Society

ABSTRACT

Research into school choice has generally explored both the processes by which choices are made and the considerations that parents explore when making this important decision on behalf of their children. This article examines the secondary school choices of Jewish parents in the United Kingdom. It explores parents’ reasons for choosing to select Jewish faith secondary schools. We frame our arguments against the backdrop of the wider faith-school phenomenon in the UK, and as with the Christian communities, we find a disconnect between the small number of Jewish adults attending places of worship regularly and the growing number of Jewish children attending Jewish faith schools. We show that for many parents, schooling is synonymous with Jewish socialization, or enculturation; developing networks of Jewish friends, providing sufficient cultural resources to enable participation in Jewish life, and nurturing distinctive values. We show how Jewish schools have become more than places for academic advancement for these families; they have become the primary locus of Jewish community.     

Mothers' Acculturation and Beliefs About Emotions,Mother–Child Emotion Discourse,and Children's Emotion Understanding in Latino Families

Research Findings: We examined associations among Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, maternal beliefs, mother–child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in 40 Latino preschool-age children and their mothers. Mothers self-reported Anglo acculturation, Latino enculturation, and beliefs about the value/danger of children's emotions and parent/child roles in emotion socialization. Mother–child emotion talk was observed during a Lego storytelling task. Children's emotion understanding was measured using 2 age-appropriate tasks. Correlations showed that mothers' Latino enculturation was associated with mothers' stronger belief in guiding children's emotions and children's lower emotion understanding. Anglo acculturation was associated with mothers' lower belief that emotions can be dangerous and children's better emotion understanding. Mothers with a stronger belief in guiding children's emotions more frequently labeled emotions. Mothers with a stronger belief that emotions can be dangerous less frequently explained emotions. Regressions controlling for child age and maternal education demonstrated that mothers with a stronger belief that children can learn about emotions on their own and mothers with greater Latino enculturation had children with lower emotion understanding, whereas mothers with greater Anglo acculturation had children with better emotion understanding. Practice or Policy: Results suggest that understanding both family acculturation and family enculturation will be helpful for early childhood researchers and educators seeking to assess and promote children's socioemotional development.     

Mobilising capitals? Migrant children's negotiation of their everyday lives in school

This paper considers how first‐generation immigrant children contribute to processes of capital accumulation through their negotiation and positioning in Irish schools. Drawing on the concepts of social and cultural capital, as well as inter‐generational analyses of children's role in the structuring of everyday life, the paper highlights migrant children's strategic orientation to their primary schooling, positioning themselves in order to maximise the exchange value from their education. Social class, gender and ethnic/migrant status were identified as significant to the strategies adopted, and how children coped with their positioning as ethnic ‘other’ in school.     

Time,things, teacher,pupil: engaging with what matters

This article presents an empirical study of everyday life in school and a methodological attempt to emphasise children’s views and to find ways other than representation to analyse them. The empirical portion took place in a Finnish elementary school in which the author was the class teacher. The ten-year-olds in the class engaged in an unstructured classroom diary activity in which they freely wrote their observations, thoughts and stories. The study takes a relational materialist approach to the children’s writings focusing on various moments and gatherings in the classroom as assemblages and illustrates how time, things, teacher and pupils are co-produced in them. Temporality and materiality are also considered in relation to research methodologies. Research with children is reconceptualised based on the focus on mattering. The analysis is enacted as a non-linear and nomadic process through retelling and responding to the children’s texts. It highlights particular situations, unstabilities, ‘tiny’ things and the complexities of children’s lives in educational environments.     

Ethnically Speaking ... The post‐migration divide and educational perspectives in Sicilian family life stories

The decades following the mass migration of Italians and their cultural traditions to Australia during the 1950s and 1960s witnessed an increase in research concerning second generation cultural minorities and the role they maintain as “bridges” between two divergent cultures. Ideas of cultural duality and conflict stand in opposition to notions of cultural synthesis, and at times, have served to blur the lived experiences of this group. To compound this problem, much of the research in this field has focused on the adolescent experience, therefore denying an insight into those “lived experiences” of the adult. The effect of this focus has been the negation of the historical specificity that applies to a generation that has reached adulthood as “second generation Italian ethnics” in Australia. Through a comparison of women's life stories, as told by female cousins in both Sicily and Australia, this paper aims to explore women's perceptions and experiences of their schooling. Their accounts reveal a sense of “connectedness” and a delicate balancing in their concepts of family, culture and educational experience. Equally important is an exploration of the intersection of ethnicity and education to enable a better understanding of schooling at an experiential level both among second generation Sicilian women in Australia and Sicilian women in Italy. Through such a comparison, the relationship between ethnicity, education and generation can be further explored.

     

Embedded Identities and Dialogic Consensus: Educational implications from the communitarian theory of Bhikhu Parekh

In this article the author will investigate the extent to which Bhikhu Parekh believes that a person's cultural/religious background must be preserved and whether, by implication, religious schooling is justified by his theory. His discussion will explore—by inference and implication—whether Parekh's carefully crafted multiculturalism, enriched and illuminated by numerous practical insights, is socially tenable. The author will also consider whether, by extension, it is justifiable, on his line of reasoning, to cultivate cultural and religious understandings among one's own children. Finally, the author will contend that Parekh, notwithstanding his cautious, even‐handed approach, commits several important errors, including conflating the culture of the parents with that of the children and insisting that cultural and religious persons ought to be allowed to defend their views in the public square on religious grounds.     

Re-invigorating the being of language in educational studies: unpacking Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ in Yijing as an exemplar

ABSTRACT

In international educational studies, cultural context matters and demands increased attention by educational researchers worldwide. Along with a globalized discourse, how to map historical–cultural understandings of teaching and learning without getting bogged down in modern Westernized epistemology has become a paradigmatic dilemma. This paper argues a Heideggerian–Foucauldian language perspective can provide a way to address this dilemma. As an example, the paper demonstrates how their language perspective has enabled the author to encounter a ‘wind-education’ discourse in China’s current schooling, and to explore, as the originary (re)source of the whole Confucian educational culture, Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ as expressed in Yijing. This unique historical–cultural ‘wind-education’ discourse is salient, yet goes unnoticed, in China’s current schooling largely due to a planetary signifier-signified style of reasoning. This paper sheds new light on educational literature on Confucian educational thinking and provides an alternative paradigm to the (cross-)cultural studies of education in China and beyond.     

The impact of standardized test feedback in math: Exploiting a natural experiment in 3rd grade

This paper studies how information (grades) from standardized tests in mathaffects human capital formation in early schooling. We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate how later outcomes of children scoring just below or above the threshold separating two grades are affected. Our results demonstrate that providing information to parents about their child's educational performance in math in third grade can improve their future educational outcomes, regardless of the child's ability level. We also investigate subjective well-being measures, such as academic confidence and intrinsic motivation, and find no evidence that low-performing students are particularly sensitive to negative feedback from tests.     

Educational Justice and Occupational Mobility: The Role of Civic Commitment and of Imagination

In Italy, the exploration of, and debate on, problems of educational rights and justice are not subsumed under the comprehensive rubric of “Urban Education”. They are rather studied from disciplinary realms and approaches such as social education or intercultural education that aim to understand and respond to issues of pressing social, political and educational concerns relative to migration, educational inclusion of immigrants’ and minorities’ children, recognition of cultural diversities as teaching and learning resources, among others. In this article the intercultural perspective is focused on the Italian occupational minority of the fairground and circus people, whose intensely mobile way of life impacts on their children’s school attendance and learning, and on the schools’ capacity to elaborate effective educational paths also able to valorize those people’s cultural diversity. Three relevant “bottom up” projects are here presented that mean to positively answer the mismatch between the mobility of the attractionist students and the schooling curricula, the annual teaching schedule and the attendance requirements.     

¡No cierren nuestra escuela! farm worker mothers as cultural citizens in an educational community mobilization effort

Mexican immigrant farm-worker mothers’ class, race, citizenship status, and jurisdictional status of their town in a Northern California community rendered them invisible. However, when the school board decided to close the elementary school the mothers mobilized. Drawing on these mothers’ fototestimonios we examine how they, as cultural citizens, resisted local practices of educational inequity. They wanted to ensure an education for their children. The fototestimonios reveal how farm-worker mothers: (1) negotiated as a collective with the school board; (2) sought negotiation and schooling alternatives; and (3) expressed cultural citizenship through collective efforts to be included within the US polity.     

Advocacy and Involvement: The Role of Parents in Western Islamic Schools

Muslim parents share many of the same ideals that other religious parents do when considering comprehensive religious schools. For those who see Islamic schooling as a viable option, supporters claim that these schools help to (1) preserve the culture and customs passed down from generation to generation, and (2) provide Muslim children with a proper identity consonant with one's home environment, thereby ensuring a positive sense of self. In this article the author will explore the role that Muslim parents play in Islamic schooling; in particular the author will examine the reasons why those parents who favor Islamic schools do, and what they hope to gain either for themselves or their children by enrolling them.     

Talking About Ourselves, Talking About Our Mothers: Latina Prospective Teachers Narrate Their Life Experiences

Through a Bakhtinian conceptual framework, this text explores Latina prospective teachers’ life histories—their experiences at home, in their K-12 schooling, on campus in a Midwestern university, and in their teacher education program. Further, it shows how often, when asked about their own experiences, Latinas responded with stories of their mothers’ past and present experiences. The author shows how drawing on stories of their mothers supported young women in rebutting discourses promulgated by white female peers regarding their cultural and language backgrounds, making them feel dismissed and unvalued. They used “mother stories” as ways to assert their strengths, knowledge, and understandings about schools and schooling.     

Effective investment in women's futures: Schooling with learning

Women's schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Yet countries vary widely in the extent to which a year of schooling conveys useful skills and knowledge and hence schooling and education cannot be treated as synonyms. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries we show the association of women's education, defined as schooling and the acquisition of literacy, with four life outcomes (fertility, child mortality, empowerment, and financial practices) is much larger than the standard estimates of the gains from schooling alone. In our preferred instrumental variables (IV) estimates, that correct for the attenuation bias induced by measurement error, the gain from education is more than 3 times larger than the standard OLS estimates of gains from schooling alone. While our results are not causal estimates, if anything like our results are true in the causal pathways whereby schooling and learning lead to improvements in women's well-being this implies the estimates of the costs and benefits of expansions in grade attainment versus improving learning need to be adjusted accordingly.     

How European American and Taiwanese Mothers Talk to Their Children About Learning

Little cross‐cultural research exists on parental socialization of children's learning beliefs. The current study compared 218 conversations between European American and Taiwanese mothers and children (6–10 years) about good and poor learning. The findings support well‐documented cultural differences in learning beliefs. European Americans mentioned mental activities and positive affect more, whereas Taiwanese mentioned learning virtues and negative affect more. Mothers, especially European American, reciprocated their children's talk about mental activities, learning virtues, and negative affect. Children, especially Taiwanese, reciprocated their mother's talk about positive affect. Mothers invoked more mental activities and positive affect when discussing good learning, but more learning virtues and negative affect when discussing poor learning. These findings reveal a source of cultural differences in beliefs and potential enculturation.     

Disciplinary enculturation experiences of five East Asian doctoral students in US-based second language studies programmes

This study reports on the non-discursive aspects of the disciplinary enculturation experiences of five international doctoral students from East Asia in three Second Language studies graduate programmes in the United States. Based largely on interview data, this study examined how students participate in their graduate discourse communities and what may contribute to or hinder academic success. It appeared that the kinds of social capital accrued through social ties and networks are key to students' successful disciplinary enculturation, suggesting the importance of establishing positive personal interactions and locating oneself within supportive discourse community contexts. The present study also sheds light on the issue that disciplinary enculturation is an inherent cultural practice, which may not favour students who do not adopt mainstream socio-academic conventions.     

Seeing Trees: Investigating Poetics of Place-Based,Aesthetic Environmental Education with Heidegger and Wittgenstein

It is common in environmental education literature to read about ‘transforming’ mindsets; for example, moving from humanist to post-humanist viewpoints, or adopting Indigenous Knowledge perspectives. To illustrate how complicated such conceptual shifts are, both philosophically and pedagogically, the paper explores how we come to see and regard trees, using the evergreen oak tree in the cloister at New College, Oxford. Philosophically, the case builds upon Stephen Mulhall's work on seeing aspects, drawing on Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Pedagogically, the author illustrates what place-based environmental education can offer by narrating a session conducted with participants at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain conference. Discursive interventions are described in order to demonstrate the philosophical, aesthetic and cross-disciplinary work needed to alter (even slightly) perspectives that have become second-nature ways of seeing beings such as oak trees. These vignettes are genealogical, juxtaposing past/present landscapes and bringing participants to examine conceptual/emotional binaries like inside/outside, human/animal, enculturation/education, and environmental science/poetics of being. Wittgenstein's anthropological parable of how oak trees came to be venerated illustrates the way concepts, perceptions and practices are interwoven in the rituals and second-nature reactions of people sharing a form of life, changing gradually throughout their cultural and natural history.     

Suzhi,Relevance, and the New Curriculum

There have been ongoing discussions about the most recent curriculum reform in China. The new curriculum aims at a more quality-oriented (suzhi) education and producing more well-rounded citizens to meet the challenges of global competition. However, it is questioned how suzhi education is possible with entrance examination still being the sole sorting mechanism. A semester-long ethnography in a rural middle school in northwest China reveals how rural students face many challenges with the new curriculum. Based on interviews, analyses of textbooks, and observations of classroom teaching, the study examines how rural students question the relevance of their curriculum and further the meaning of formal schooling. In addition to the dichotomy between an exam-oriented and quality-oriented curriculum, students are also troubled by the dichotomy between general/academic education and relevant/practical education. The study raises concerns about the urban-centered curriculum and how the rural community's absence in the picture has led to rural students' increasing disengagement in schooling and even dropout. It also reveals how the substance of suzhi education and the new curriculum have further reduced rural students' chance to move upward socially. The article concludes by pushing for discussions on how formal schooling can better serve rural children and youth.     

The Rroma: Their history and education in Poland and the UK

Rroma, or Gypsies as they are commonly called in almost every part of the world, usually claim the nationality and language of their host country. In Europe, the Rroma, probably because they are a people without an ethnic territory or a national state of their own, frequently qualify for being the most hated of all ethnic groups. Certainly their lack of a territorial base seems to have contributed both to the long-lasting neglect of their rights and to the many acts of persecution and discrimination committed against them. The Rroma's nomadic way of life, which has been part of their identity for over five-hundred years, was forbidden in most Eastern European countries after World War II and has been increasingly penalised in Western Europe by legislative systems designed for and by settled societies. Because of their unique culture and traditions, many Rromani children do not receive any formal education at all while others, as a result of family mobility, eviction from unofficial sites and general lack of interest in imposed education, attend school only sporadically. Consequently, high levels of illiteracy prevail in the adult Rromani population which are rarely reduced when host countries attempt to use education to promote assimilation and settlement but, at the same time, ignore the cultural heritage of the Rroma and their own educational aims of preparing children for the nomadic life. Nevertheless, when host communities take the Rromani lifestyle and values seriously progress can be made.     

Zafar,so good: middle‐class students,school habitus and secondary schooling in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

This article examines how students from the ‘loser’ sections of the middle class dealt with the game of secondary schooling in a ‘good’ state school in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina). It engages with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and, in particular, with its concepts of game, habitus and cultural capital. It argues that middle‐class students embody a school habitus, which I call zafar. Zafar (a Spanish slang word) refers to students’ dispositions, practices and strategies towards social and educational demands of teachers and their school. Zafar propels middle‐class students to be just ‘good enough’ students, and promote an instrumental approach to schooling and learning. Although this paper offers an account within which the reproduction of relative educational advantage of a group of middle‐class students takes place, it also poses questions about their future educational and occupational opportunities.