Classroom discipline and student responsibility:: The students’ view

There is, internationally, increasing interest in the quality of children's character. This paper examines, in 21 elementary and 21 secondary schools, the role of classroom discipline in promoting student responsibility for the protection of learning and safety rights in the classroom. The results indicate that teachers are seen by students to react to classroom misbehavior by increasing their use of coercive discipline, which inhibits the development of responsibility in students and distracts them from their schoolwork. Unfortunately, teachers fail to increase their use of more productive techniques, such as discussions, rewards for good behavior and involvement in decision-making. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

‘I like being a lab Rat’: student experiences of research participation

Undergraduate students are often expected to be participants in academic research. However, decisions relating to student participation in research are typically based on speculation or educator assumptions rather than a solid research base. We conducted three studies to investigate student experiences of research participation. These included online surveys (Study 1), semi-structured interviews (Study 2), and analysis of reflective essays (Study 3). A range of pedagogic and ethical issues were considered including motivation to participate, distress, and the educational value of participation. Findings suggest that the experience provides students with important opportunities to learn about research methodology and ethical issues which inform their own research practice. Further, students cite additional non-academic benefits of research participation such as self-discovery and networking opportunities. Negative experiences typically consisted of nervousness prior to the first laboratory study or boredom, though for some students (e.g. those uncomfortable in social situations) engagement in research may lead to anxiety. We conclude that participation in research has pedagogic value to students, and educators should promote those elements of the research experience (e.g. critiquing studies, networking with researchers) that are most beneficial. However, researchers and educators should also actively work to reduce apprehension and minimise potential distress.     

‘Class-bucks’: a motivational tool to encourage active student participation during lectures

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the influence of an extrinsic motivational tool, ‘class-bucks’, on the possibility of improving first year student-teachers’ participation in active learning at Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa. Research participants (n=289) were divided into four classes and engaged in this study during the second and third semester of the course. During the second semester, the students in Class 1 and Class 2 were awarded with ‘class-bucks’ for active participation in lectures, while Classes 3 and 4 were not awarded. Then, during the third semester, the students in Classes 3 and 4 were awarded, while those in Classes 1 and 2 were not. Semester test results and the number of instances of active participation during lectures were recorded and compared to formulate findings and recommendations. The results presented in this article will assist lecturers in valuing an extrinsic motivational tool, ‘class-bucks’, which can be used to encourage active student participation during lectures, thus contributing to the expansion of quality education and improving the student's ability to retain learning content for longer.     

‘Smart state’ for a knowledge economy: reconstituting creativity through student subjectivity

Rejecting notions of creativity as self‐realisation through free expression, this article argues that such discourses currently driving education policy comprise intellectual technologies for the production of student subjectivities required by neoliberal contexts. Using a governmentality framework, it locates the conditions of possibility for the creative subject within dominant policy articulations of the global knowledge economy and emerging rationalities of risk and uncertainty. The analysis focuses on an industry school partnership formed by a state education system in Queensland, Australia, and several multinational corporations. It examines how the partnership has emerged as a novel neoliberal space for the constitution of new education figures such as the enterprising teacher and the entrepreneurial student‐worker. These subjectivities are functional to the devolved governing strategy of social investment, which seeks to achieve a broad reconstitution of relationships between students, schools and industry in Queensland.     

Constructing meaning in a community of learners: the ‘star’ pattern of talk

We present findings from an in-depth study on a school-based multi-disciplinary learning community in the context of practice teaching in university pre-service education. We elaborate on one of the three predominant patterns of talk identified, the ‘star’ pattern, and show how it created particular power relations in the discourse which eventually triggered occasions for learning in community. The community of learners consisted of 11 student teachers and a university mentor who functioned as a tutor responsible for facilitating the group discussion. The group met on a weekly basis throughout an entire academic year (23 meetings). Data collection included recordings of all meetings and semi-structured interviews with all participants including the mentor (altogether 25 interviews). Findings suggest that the ‘star’ pattern of talk constitutes a powerful channel for promoting learning in the context of a community of learners.     

The ‘More Capable Peer’: Approaches to Collaborative Learning in a Mixed-Ability Classroom

This essay challenges assumptions that those labelled as ‘high achievers’ are in some way ‘held back’ by those perceived as having lower initial capability. By exploring collaborative pedagogical approaches and focussing on my experiences with two students, with widely differing initial capabilities, and exploring how they have influenced each other’s learning, I argue that organisational models that separate students based on perceived ability can be damaging. Allowing time and space for students to collaborate on a range of tasks and creating a classroom atmosphere which values the contributions of all can enable those students deemed of lower ability to become useful learning tools for their ‘more capable peers’ as well as vice versa. Against those versions of the Vygotskian zone of proximal development that privilege the role of the ‘more capable peer’, I argue that collaborative forms of learning can be mutually beneficial.     

Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.     

‘It's not bullying’, ‘It's just a joke’: Teacher and student discursive manoeuvres around gendered violence

Threats or harassment related to the enforcement of gender norms remain largely unchallenged in many schools. Possibilities for meaningful interventions have been undermined by an over-reliance on individual, psycho-pathologised understandings of ‘bullying’ and a reluctance to examine contextual and socio-cultural mechanisms of power. Poststructural feminist approaches offer an alternative view of gendered violence and its responses—one that focuses on the meanings that individuals and groups constitute through discourse around gender, violence and ‘bullying’. This article examines focus group data from teachers and students from one Australian school that experienced a significant event of gendered violence referred to as ‘Kick a slut in the head day’. Results demonstrate that participants minimised or dismissed the ‘seriousness’ of this event through employing particular ‘discursive manoeuvres’ drawn from hegemonic discourses of ‘bullying’. Teachers utilised essentialist discourses to illustrate that the incident was ‘not bullying’, while students suggested that it was a ‘joke’ or that the girl/s were deserving of the treatment. These findings suggest that ‘discursive manoeuvres’ are a helpful indicator for understanding contextual resistance to addressing gendered violence.     

‘Time is not enough.’ Workload in higher education: a student perspective

Students' workload has been recognised as a major factor in the teaching and learning environment. This paper starts by structuring the different conceptualisations of workload described in the scientific literature. Besides the traditional distinction between objective and subjective or perceived workload, a distinction between conceptualisations focusing on the perception of quantitative and qualitative aspects of workload comes to the fore. This qualitative study investigates what workload means for students in higher education. Forty Civil Engineering and Educational Sciences Master's students were interviewed. The results show that ‘having time’ is a precondition for experiencing a manageable workload. When this precondition is fulfilled, the interest of a student and the ability to plan and set priorities play an important role in the perception of workload. Finally, the results show that several aspects of the learning environment can influence this interest and the perception of workload.     

‘We are the ones that talk about difficult subjects’: nurses in schools working to support young people’s mental health

As health professionals in an educational setting, nurses in schools occupy a unique place in the spectrum of children’s services. Yet the service is often overlooked and has been described as invisible. This paper draws on findings from a study, funded by the Scottish Government’s National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Well‐being, which explored the role of school nurses in promoting and supporting the mental health of children and young people. The school nursing service throughout the United Kingdom is at a pivotal point as its role is being redefined to align with moves across the National Health Service towards a public health model. This paper therefore offers a timely overview of the mental health work of school nurses, and raises key issues for future work. Interviews were conducted with 25 school nurse managers across Scotland. Interviewees claimed that the contribution of nurses in schools was distinctive, owing to the quality and consistency of relationship that they could offer, and the autonomy that the service allowed young people. However, significant challenges were reported in making this contribution, and tensions were evident in the conceptualisation of their role. The framework of resilience is used to discuss the findings on the significance of building relationships in promoting mental health.     

‘Walking yourself around as a teacher’: gender and embodiment in student teachers’ working lives

This paper considers the psychic and social dynamics reported by student teachers when learning to embody their teacher persona in the secondary school environment. Focusing on gender dimensions of embodiment and drawing on qualitative interview data from a UK study of postgraduate teacher‐training students, teaching is examined as a physical experience. The paper conceptualises findings under two related headings: the appropriately gendered body, signified by heteronormative readings of gender and sexuality; and the gendered authoritative body, conceptualised as male. The ‘teacher body’ emerges as an important element of student teachers’ stories of trying to fit with the new professional environment and the paper concludes by arguing for a consideration of gender and body politics in the practice and training of teachers, thus challenging the assumption that professional occupations are essentially ‘disembodied’ and gender neutral.     

Mobility as ‘becoming’: a Bourdieuian analysis of the factors shaping international student mobility

This paper unpacks the meanings and implications of the mobility of international students in vocational education – an under-researched group in the field of international education. This four-year study found that transnational mobility is regarded as a resourceful vehicle to help international students ‘become’ the kind of person they want to be. The paper justifies the value of re-conceptualising student mobility as a process of ‘becoming’. Mobility as ‘becoming’ encompasses students’ aspirations for educational, social, personal and professional development. Theorising mobility as ‘becoming’ captures international students’ lived realities and has the potential to facilitate the re-imagining of international student mobility with new outlooks. By theorising mobility as ‘becoming’, this research suggests the importance of drawing on the integrated and transformative nature of Bourdieu’s forms of capital in understanding the logics and practice of the social field – international student mobility.     

Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times

This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of governance to minimise the risk of adverse student behaviour, maximise student outcomes on standardised tests, and provide teachers with discrete learning experiences construed as improving such outcomes. The sum total of these foci is the construction of education as an increasingly ‘risky business’ which employs a myriad of products and tests to manage perceived and actual risks. The paper also reveals how these products and processes constitute student misbehaviour and inadequate teacher and student learning as ‘risk objects’ requiring constant intervention, but which also inhibit inclusion in schooling settings, and challenge teachers’ professionalism.     

‘That's not treating you as a professional’: teachers constructing complex professional identities through talk

Public debates about the role of teachers and teacher performance place teachers at the center of a range of national and local discourses. The notion of teacher professional identity, therefore, framed in a variety of ways, engages people across social contexts, whether as educators, parents, students, taxpayers, voters or consumers of news and popular media. These highly contested discourses about teachers' roles and responsibilities constitute an important context for research on teachers and teaching, as researchers and educators ask how changes to the teaching profession affect teacher professional identity. This article investigates the identity talk of three mid‐career teachers in an urban, public school in the USA, to better understand how the teachers used language to accomplish complex professional identities. Research approaches to teacher identity often focus on teacher narrative as a key tool in identity formation. The analysis presented here extends our understanding of language as a resource in teacher identity construction by using discourse analysis to investigate how speakers use implicit meaning to accomplish the role identity of teacher. The analytical lens draws on an interdisciplinary framework that combines a sociological approach to teacher as a role identity with an investigation of language as a cultural practice, grounded in the ethnography of communication. The analysis focuses on how teachers use specific discourse strategies – reported speech, mimicked speech, pronoun shifts, oppositional portraits, and juxtaposition of explicit claims – to construct implicit identity claims that, while they are not stated directly, are central to accomplishing teacher as a role identity. The analysis presented here focuses on the particular implicit role claim of teacher as collaborator. Findings show that, in their identity talk, the teachers strategically positioned themselves in relation to others and to institutional practices, actively negotiating competing discourses about teacher identity by engaging in a counter discourse emphasizing teachers' professional role as knowledge producers rather than information deliverers, collaborative, rather than isolated, and as agents of change engaged in critical analysis to plan action. Awareness of how these counter discourses operate in the teachers' conversation helps us better understand the cultural significance of identity talk as a site for the negotiation of the significances for the role identity of teacher. In addition, the notions of role identity and implicit identity claims offer an accessible way to talk about the complexity of teacher identity, which can be helpful for increasing awareness of the importance of teacher identity in teacher education and professional development, and in bringing teachers' voices more prominently into the debates over education.     

Revisiting metaphors for education: a student’s perspective

This study examines metaphors about learning produced by a group of eighteen students at a big public university in Malaysia. The learner perspective is placed within a wider discourse on education in order to explore whether the images employed by the learners to describe their learning reflect the dominant conception of education as “production”. The metaphors supplied by the participants were analyzed and classified into several themes. None of the metaphors generated by the students alluded to the images that link education with “production”. The study contends that the student perspective on education can enrich educational discourse and highlight the previously obscured notions on education and learning.     

‘Opening up’ a science task: an exploration of shifting embodied participation of a multilingual primary student

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students have different home languages and cultures from many of their peers, In our context, these students suffer from higher school drop-out rates than their peers and are far behind their peers in sciences. This study investigates the interactions of a nine-year-old child whose home language is Portuguese and who learns science in this specific case in a diglossic environment in the Luxembourgish school system, in which his teacher used German for written tasks and Luxembourgish for oral communication. We examine, moment-by-moment, the interactions around a task regarding environmental protection. The role of this Lusoburguês (Luxembourgish and Portuguese identities and nationalities combined) student and his embodiment and participation changes when his group is confronted with an activity that requires an increased amount of manipulation. His identity evolves in interaction, as he becomes the leader in his group, and through a playful stance, manages to open the task so that his peers can further explore. Implications include the value of including more open-ended investigations in the teaching and learning of science as well as implications for further study concerning practice-based approaches in science classrooms with CLD students, particularly in increasingly multilingual/cultural and/or diglossic or heteroglossic school contexts.     

Embodying Teaching: A Body Pedagogic Study of a Teacher’s Movement Rhythm in the ‘Sloyd’ Classroom

The article draws on body pedagogics and considers that teaching and learning experiences and outcomes are directly related to the different characteristics of movement behaviour. In this article movement behaviour specifically centres on a sloyd (handicraft education) teacher’s walk through the classroom. The analysis illuminate the specific teaching use of the body as a spatial, temporal and situational movement rhythm in the classroom and how teachers and pupils tune into educational discourses by means of different body techniques. A wireless GoPro camera was attached to the teacher’s chest in order to gain detailed view of pupil–teacher–body–material–tool encounters and a specific visual perspective of the sloyd teacher’s walk. During a 2.5 years fieldwork, 25 wood–metal sloyd lessons were observed and recorded (circa 50 h of video). The study is informed by Dewey’s embodied theory of learning and focus the alternation between active and passive phases in the stream of experience. From such Deweyan perspective the rhythm of an activity for organising experience, is fundamental to the creation of intelligent moving habits. The results show the body pedagogic experiences, outcomes and means by highlighting the teacher’s (a) spatial path by describing mutual relationships between the material arrangement of the classroom, the teacher’s bodily movements and the pupils’ participation in the lesson, (b) temporal pace by his ‘flights and perchings’ through the lessons and how he moves from pupil to pupil and assignment to assignment, (c) specific pacts by describing body techniques and situated teacher–pupil encounters that terminate in an agreement about how to proceed.     

Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’: Reflections on the Secondary English Classroom

English teachers select texts for the edifying qualities they possess: a good poem, novel or film can act both as a window looking out over different lives and as a powerful mirror for reflection. When teachers reflect on their professional practice, however, they generally look to education theory, to research or to action learning strategies. But if great works of literature strengthen a student’s empathetic, critical and reflective capacities, they can do the same for the English teachers who prescribe them. The article does not advocate for a rejection of pedagogical expertise in favour of pure literary criticism, but it does consider that these two aspects of English teaching can be brought together for the purposes of professional reflection and development. Using William Wordsworth’s lyric ‘We Are Seven’ as an example, it aims to illustrate how a close reading of the poem leads naturally and effectively from an analysis of content to more general considerations of why and how we teach.     

Technology Integration in a Science Classroom: Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions

The challenge of preparing students for the information age has prompted administrators to increase technology in the public schools. Yet despite the increased availability of technology in schools, few teachers are integrating technology for instructional purposes. Preservice teachers must be equipped with adequate content knowledge of technology to create an advantageous learning experience in science classrooms. To understand preservice teachers’ conceptions of technology integration, this research study explored 15 elementary science methods students’ definitions of technology and their attitudes toward incorporating technology into their teaching. The phenomenological study took place in a science methods course that was based on a constructivist approach to teaching and learning science through science activities and class discussions, with an emphasis on a teacher beliefs framework. Data were collected throughout the semester, including an open-ended pre/post-technology integration survey, lesson plans, and reflections on activities conducted throughout the course. Through a qualitative analysis, we identified improvements in students’ technology definitions, increased technology incorporation into science lesson plans, and favorable attitudes toward technology integration in science teaching after instruction. This research project demonstrates that positive changes in beliefs and behaviors relating to technology integration in science instruction among preservice teachers are possible through explicit instruction.     

From ‘financial considerations’ to ‘poverty’: towards a reconceptualisation of the role of finances in higher education student drop out

While the role of financial considerations in higher education student dropout is being recognized increasingly, the dominant international literature fails to reflect the extent of socio-economic deprivation among students in countries where many people live below the poverty datum line. This article draws on a study of student retention and graduate destination at seven HE institutions in South Africa, focusing on the University of the Western Cape which caters for a large proportion of impoverished students. The study found many students left before completing a qualification because they were too poor to stay. A model of student departure is presented which draws on the very influential work of Vincent Tinto but also allows for greater emphasis than he did on students’ ability to pay (real or perceptual) and demarcates the times in the academic calendar when finances present their greatest challenge to retention. The model also invites consideration of the national and international factors which impact on the social/economic/political milieu in which students’ persist-or-depart decisions are made.