Foucault,counter-conduct and school leadership as a form of political subjectivity

Globally, a range of new schooling accountabilities have created a complex and often contradictory context in which school leaders work. For principals of low socio-economic status (SES) and disadvantaged schools, they must balance the accountability, performance and reporting requirements against the other needs of their communities. These tensions require new ways of rethinking leadership in the current educational context. This article draws on the work of Foucault, particularly the notions of power and counter-conduct, to examine the case study of one principal in a very low SES school as she negotiates her way through these new schooling accountabilities. This case study illuminates the importance of leadership as a form of counter-conduct through the constitution of the principal as a political subject or form of advocacy leadership.     

商务谈判中存在的问题及对策研究

本在对当前形势下现实谈判中存在的诸多问题进行总结、探讨的基础上，提出了解决问题的五条可采取的有效措施，以提高谈判队伍整体素质，并运用各种谈判技巧提高谈判的成功率。     

我国中小学生假期作业研究述评

中小学生假期作业是学校教学的继续和补充,也是学生假期生活的重要组成部分。我国对中小学生假期作业的研究经历了长时间的沉寂之后,在新世纪得到了空前的重视与发展。研究者普遍将假期作业分为传统型作业和新型作业,并认为,传统型假期作业有着数量庞大、重复单一、设计粗放等弊端,而新型作业则具有立足素养、形式创新、多元多样的优势。过往研究,既有将新型作业与传统作业对立起来的思维定势,也有忽视不同地区教学环境差异性的局限。不同学科的视界融合与对作业主体的重新认识,是假期作业研究的可行途径。     

Anglo-Western international school teachers as global middle class: portraits of three families

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study on the global middle class (GMC) examines three representative experiences of the tens of thousands of Anglo-Western international schoolteachers (ISTs), who teach in private, K-12, English-immersion international schools for extended periods of time. The notion of GMC provokes consideration of social class making and forms of belonging of professional and managerial service workers who are ‘middling actors’ in the flows of transnational migration. We ground our analysis by examining three IST families as a unique group within the GMC. We find that ISTs, oriented by pre-sojourn middle-class histories, differentially (re)fashion their social class locations in the more elite transnational milieu of the international schools. These families accumulate and exchange economic, cultural and social capital under their transnational routes, connections and returns. Their children’s access to an elite international education as a condition of their international employment represents a unique form of school choice.     

Learning about earthquakes: getting serious about authenticity in computer-supported learning

The discovery or re-construction of scientific explanations and understanding based on experience is a complex process, for which school learning often uses shortcuts. On the basis of the example of analyzing real seismic measurements, we propose a computer-facilitated collaborative learning scenario which meets many of the requirements for authentic learning, knowledge construction, and collaboration. The implementation of the learning environment called SeisModes is based on a general platform for supporting collaborative modeling activities. SeisModes provides a tool to allow students collaboratively learn about earthquakes and thus reduce the fears they might have concerning them. First formal evaluations showed the approach motivates students.     

Differentiation and integration in the Swedish upper-secondary school

This country report is devoted to the Upper secondary school introduced in Sweden in 1971, whose creation is the most radical reform attempted in Europe. It strives to integrate study-related and occupation-related education in higher secondary education. A brief explanation of the new concept is followed by a discussion of the structural and curricular characteristics of this school type, with emphasis on the importance of general subjects. In the final section the didactic principles of differentiation and integration and their implications for the organisational structure are juxtaposed and their interdependence is investigated.

---

Zusammenfassung Dieser Länderbericht ist der seit 1971 in Schweden eingeführten Gymnasialschule gewidmet, welche die in Europa radikalste Reform darstellt, in der eine Integration von studienbezogener und berufsbezogener Bildung in der Sekundarstufe II angestrebt wird. Nach einer knappen Begründung der neuen Konzeption werden die strukturellen und curricularen Qualitäten der Gymnasialschule erörtert, wobei die Bedeutung der allgemeinen Fächer unterstrichen wird. Im letzten Abschnitt werden die didaktischen Prinzipien der Differenzierung und Integration (mit ihren Auswirkungen auf die Organisationsstruktur) einander gegenübergestellt und ihrer wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit untersucht.

---

Résumé Ce rapport national est consacré à L'Ecole Secondaire Deuxième Cycle qui a été introduite en Suède en 1971 et dont la création constitue la réforme la plus radicale entreprise en Europe. L'objectif en vue est d'intégrer l'enseignement général et la formation professionnelle dans l'éducation secondaire du Deuxième Cycle. Après avoir expliqué brièvement cette nouvelle conception, l'auteur analyse les caractéristiques de la structure et du curriculum de ce type d'établissement en soulignant l'importance des matières générales. Dans la dernière partie il compare les principes didactiques de différenciation et d'intégration — avec leur portée sur la structure de l'organisation — et il examine leur interdépendence.

     

Single‐sex Education for Girls: heterosexuality,gendered subjectivity and school choice

Single‐sex education for girls constitutes a focal point around which issues of gender, choice and educational decision‐making coalesce. My concern is not to enter the debate about the merits of single‐sex education for girls per se, but to examine the relationship between discourses of femininity and discourses around single‐sex schooling to see how they interact in the choice of single‐sex schools by girls and their parents. In this paper, I explore the ways in which aspects of feminist poststructuralist theory can be used to offer a more dynamic and complex account of the processes of school choice than that assumed by neo‐liberal theorists. The theory I develop is illuminated by interviews with three girls and their parents, from different social‐class backgrounds, at the point at which they were making decisions about which secondary school to apply for. A focus such as this enables me to do two things: firstly, to develop a more adequate understanding of the relationship between gender and educational decision‐making; and secondly, to critique the underlying theory of instrumental rationality, and its relationship to school choice, which has underwritten the marketisation of education in Aotearoa/New Zealand.     

Middle‐School Homework Management: More than just gender and family involvement

The article links student and family characteristics, along with homework characteristics and homework purposes, to homework management as reported by 194 middle‐school students in Grades 5–6. The results revealed that homework management was not related to grade level, amount of parental education, time spent on homework, or extrinsic reasons for doing homework. However, girls and students who received family help reported more frequently managing their homework. In addition, homework interest and whether homework was a favorite activity were positively related to the use of homework management strategies, above and beyond gender and family help. Furthermore, intrinsic reasons for doing homework accounted for an additional, significant percentage of the variance in homework management, with higher levels of intrinsic reasons being positively associated with more frequent use of homework management strategies.     

'I Might as Well Give Up': Self-esteem and mature students' feelings about feedback on assignments

Lecturers working with adult students balance the need to provide feedback and assess students' work with a concern to protect vulnerable students. This article is based on a small-scale quantitative research project that looked at Access students' responses to feedback on assignments. All students found the first assignment problematic, but thereafter great variations were found, which related to varying levels of self-esteem. Students varied in their attitudes to receiving feedback, their perceptions of the messages they were receiving and whether it was important to them that they receive positive comments. They also differed in the extent of the impact of the feedback, for some students, it was 'only work'; for others, their whole sense of self was at stake.     

Homework involvement and functions: perceptions of Hong Kong Chinese primary school students and parents

This study examines the perceptions of Chinese students and parents in Hong Kong on homework involvement, assignment type and homework functions. The relationships of homework perceptions to student and parent attributes are also assessed. The sample includes 1393 pairs of students and their parents from 36 primary schools in Hong Kong. Findings of this study show similarities in preference for assignment type across students and parents. Between‐group discrepancies are observed in preference for homework involvement and endorsement of homework functions. Moreover, homework perceptions are found to relate to students’ and parents’ efficacy attributes and involvement behaviour. Findings of this study are discussed in light of the Chinese sociocultural context in Hong Kong. Suggestions are made on the design and use of homework in primary schools by incorporating the views of different stakeholders.     

Explaining the Third Reich: Swedish students' causal reasoning about the Nazi seizure of power in Germany

The topic of this study is how Swedish students aged 15–16 use causal reasoning in history when given a high-stakes task about explaining a historically significant event, the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. The study is based on student texts from the Swedish national test in history. The student texts are mainly analysed with regards to how many, and what kinds of, causal factors are used by the students. The study finds that while most students are able to combine agents and situational factors in their explanations, the explanations show a recurring theme of combining a generic sense of economic crisis with Hitler and the German people as the important agents, to the detriment of other causes that could open up for different interpretations of why the Nazi regime came to power. To counteract this, the study suggests increased emphasis on some contextual factors in teaching practices.     

The development of reasoning about the teaching of values in school and family contexts

This study investigated children's, adolescents', and young adults' reasoning about the teaching of a variety of values in the school and family contexts. One-hundred and sixty participants in four age groups (8-, 10-, and 13-year-olds, and college students) evaluated acts involving the teaching of values and laws that regulate the teaching of these values. Both the valence (positive or negative) of values and the context in which they were presented (school, family) were systematically varied. Results showed that a variety of factors were considered in evaluating the teaching of values, including context, the valence of the value, and the type of value being taught. Participants' reasoning about values education was found to be multifaceted and included distinctions between moral values that reflect justice and rights, and values that reflect other forms of personality traits and social values. The findings suggest that conceptions of values education may be better understood within models of social reasoning that draw distinctions between types of values (e.g., moral and other values) and account for the increasing capacity to differentiate social contexts and spheres of legitimate governmental regulation with development.     

Controlled choice assignments: A new and more effective approach to school desegregation

The authors argue that conventional mandatory and voluntary school desegregation techniques have failed to provide minority students with maximum feasible relief from invidious discrimination because they do not redress the root causes of segregation. They demonstrate that residential-based student assignment plans as well as plans that give students limited access to a few educationally enriched magnet schools are not asymmetrical remedies to wrongful segregation and thus work to perpetuate the racial and social inequities that they purport to correct. The authors offer an alternative approach to school desegregation—controlled choice—that operates independently from residential housing patterns and which explicitly seeks to maximize personal choice within a racially unitary, equitable, and educationally enhanced system of public schooling. Controlled choice was originally pioneered in Cambridge, Mass. during the early 1980s and has recently been adopted in Little Rock, Ark., and Fall River, Mass. The policy is also being actively reviewed by several of the nation's largest school districts including Seattle, Memphis, and Boston.     

新课标下中小学英语“积累型”作业设计思考

传统英语"积累型"作业设计模式形式单调,内容枯燥而脱离生活实际,作业资源缺乏合理整合和利用。新课标下中小学英语"积累型"作业设计应遵循主体性和人性化结合、趣味性和实践性结合、量力性和层次性结合、互动性和合作性结合、多样性和选择性结合原则,以达到英语课外作业促进学生完满发展目的。     

In between self-knowledge and school demands: policy enacted in the Swedish middle-year classroom

In this article, we focus on the interaction in a Year 5 classroom where students fill in a ‘self-evaluation form’ as a preparation for a forthcoming discussion on progress aiming at the production of an Individual Developmental Plan. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of fabrications and performativity, we understand this as an enactment of policy where both teacher and students become actors and subjects. From using document analysis together with conversation analysis as a methodological approach, we show how the ‘self-evaluation’ in interaction becomes a successful exercise in fabrications as teacher and student negotiate conceptions of the ideal student in relation to self-knowledge and school demands. The article is an empirically grounded contribution to the understanding of how policies are interpreted and made into being by local actors in everyday practices, in this case teachers and students in schools.     

Chinese adolescents' reasoning about democratic and authority-based decision making in peer,family, and school contexts

This study explored the judgments and reasoning of Chinese adolescents (13-18 years of age) from 3 regions of mainland China (N = 574) regarding procedures for making decisions involving children in peer, family, and school contexts. Participants evaluated 2 democratic decision-making procedures (majority rule and consensus) and decision making by adult authorities for 2 decisions embedded in each social context. Judgments and reasoning about decision-making procedures varied by social context and by the decision under consideration, and evaluations of procedures became more differentiated with increasing age. The findings reveal that concepts of rights, individual autonomy, and democratic norms (majority rule) are salient aspects of Chinese adolescents' social reasoning and are used to evaluate critically existing social practices.     

Equivalence and performance gaps in Swedish school inspection: context and the politics of blame

This article analyses and critically discusses how context is relevant when constructing and upholding an equivalent education for all within the neo-liberal educational regime of marketisation and accountability. At the centre of the article is a study of national school inspection reports in four municipalities in Sweden, exploring performance gaps, equality and justice in an educational system, that for decades has emphasised universal welfare, justice and equality. By drawing on the concept of ‘the politics of blame’, findings show that accountability and blame are constructed in complex ways. Although teachers and schools are blamed for low expectations with little contextual consideration by Swedish Schools Inspectorate, local governments are blamed for not redistributing resources. This can both challenge and strengthen the contemporary regime in governing education.