Rethinking work. Time,space and discourse

In this paper, we survey the contemporary movement away from traditional educational forms to the new discourses and practices associated with the term “lifelong learning”. We relate this movement to the sense of crisis which seems to be present in the post‐compulsory and higher education sectors. We locate it in the technological, economic and cultural changes which characterise the postmodern condition and the questioning of the grand narratives which have sustained education in modernity. We examine how these changes are effecting education in terms of trends such as vocationalisation, marketisation, the commodification of knowledge, the individualising of learning and the challenging of the monopoly position of universities. We ask what “education” means when it is not a bounded field and what “learning” means in the more loosely bounded spaces of lifelong learning. We argue that the current situation is both exciting and troubling for educators requiring a redefinition of roles and purposes in a context which is complex and contradictory.     

An Exploration of “Hyper-Local” Community-University Engagement in the Development of Smart Cities

The use of big data in smart cities poses new questions about higher education and community-university engagement practices in addressing longstanding social and economic exclusion in urban communities. Drawing on transdisciplinary ideas in higher education, cultural theory, and science and technology studies, primary concerns in the era of big data are considered with current conceptualizations of higher education engagement and anchor institution purposes. Tensions in the narratives of civic engagement and democratic practice for community well-being are juxtaposed with tensions in the smart citizen narrative implied by the idealized smart city design. A new framing of community-university relations under what I term “hyper-local” engagement is suggested for more justice-oriented and democratic practices when universities interact with their surrounding communities given the impending and sweeping changes occurring from the use of big data in social policy.     

Troubling “understanding mathematics in-depth”: Its role in the identity work of student-teachers in England

In this paper, we focus on an initiative in England devised to prepare non-mathematics graduates to train as secondary mathematics teachers through a 6-month Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) to boost their subject knowledge. The course documentation focuses on the need to develop “understanding mathematics in-depth” in students in order for them to become successful mathematics teachers. We take a poststructural approach, so we are not interested in asking what such an understanding is, about the value of this approach or about the effectiveness of the MECs in developing this understanding in their participants. Instead we explore what positions this discourse of “understanding mathematics in-depth” makes available to MEC students. We do this by looking in detail at the “identity work” of two students, analysing how they use and are used by this discourse to position themselves as future mathematics teachers. In doing so, we show how even benign-looking social practices such as “understanding mathematics in-depth” are implicated in practices of inclusion and exclusion. We show this through detailed readings of interviews with two participants, one of whom fits with the dominant discourses in the MEC and the other who, despite passing the MEC, experiences tensions between her national identity work and MEC discourses. We argue that it is vital to explore “identity work” within teacher education contexts to ensure that becoming a successful mathematics teacher is equally available to all.     

The reflective dimension in teacher education

The terms “reflection” and “reflective practitioner” are now common currency in articles about teacher education and teachers’ professional development, especially in British and North American research. In this chapter, the term “reflection” as it relates to teachers and teacher education will be problematized, drawing particularly on Schön's (Educating the reflective practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass) terms “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action.” Differing definitions of reflection will be put forward, their inter-relationship explored, and how these relate to courses of initial teacher education in a variety of countries and cultural contexts. Questions about the value and purpose of reflection will also be raised, as well as to its practical relevance to teacher education.     

Folk theories of “inquiry:” How preservice teachers reproduce the discourse and practices of an atheoretical scientific method

Despite the ubiquity of the term “inquiry” in science education literature, little is known about how teachers conceptualize inquiry, how these conceptions are formed and reinforced, how they relate to work done by scientists, and if these ideas about inquiry are translated into classroom practice. This is a multicase study in which 14 preservice secondary science teachers developed their own empirical investigations—from formulating questions to defending results in front of peers. Findings indicate that participants shared a tacit framework of what it means to “do science” which shaped their investigations and influenced reflections on their inquiries. Some facets of the participants' shared model were congruent with authentic inquiry; however, the most consistent assumptions were misrepresentations of fundamental aspects of science: for example, that a hypothesis functions as a guess about an outcome, but is not necessarily part of a larger explanatory system; that background knowledge may be used to provide ideas about what to study, but this knowledge is not in the form of a theory or other model; and that theory is an optional tool one might use at the end of a study to help explain results. These ideas appear consistent with a “folk theory” of doing science that is promoted subtly, but pervasively, in textbooks, through the media, and by members of the science education community themselves. Finally, although all participants held degrees in science, the participants who eventually used inquiry in their own classrooms were those who had significant research experiences in careers or postsecondary study and greater science‐content background. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 481–512, 2004     

Teachers’ objects of responsibility: something to care about in education for sustainable development?

Answers to questions about good teaching in environmental education can be expressed in different selective traditions. Questions as to what should be included in good teaching tend to be addressed by both teachers and researchers on an ideological basis. This qualitative study uses a pragmatist approach, and aims to make an empirical contribution to the debate. Rather than telling teachers what they should teach, this interview study involved listening to ten upper secondary school teachers in Sweden, and their arguments concerning their long‐term teaching purposes. Why should students learn particular things? The teachers’ answers revealed habits and frequently used the same arguments. These arguments recurrently dealt with what teachers particularly cared about, and five objects of responsibility were identified in the interviews. These objects of responsibility constitute the starting points of teachers’ actions and can be seen as personal anchor points within a selective tradition. These points of departure remind the teachers of their teaching aims and objectives, and at the same time, keep them within a tradition. While they help the teachers in their everyday practice, they could just as easily be seen as tacit obstacles to efforts to change environmental education into Education for Sustainable Development. The results are also relevant for science education in general. Issues identified in the study include how the same scientific knowledge could be used for different purposes in education, and the different personal anchor points for long‐term purposes of teaching based on teachers’ own ideas of good teaching. These results can be important in developing a reflection tool for teachers, which in turn can help them to reflect more deeply about how they might change their teaching practices.     

Institutional Mission Education as a Form of Teaching

This article examines how the field of religious education informs religiously based colleges and universities as they teach about their institutional missions. A discussion of the audiences, languages, and the temporal orientations of institutional mission education is intended to provide insights and parameters as mission offices chart their futures and justify their purposes to diverse constituencies. Particular attention is given to current challenges, namely the unjust structures and practices that have shaped institutions and their missions. Utilizing examples from his home institution, the author argues for a “present approach” to mission education.     

Contemporary education policies in Southeast Asia: common philosophical underpinnings and practices

This article examines the various education policies in Southeast Asian countries, highlighting the underlining philosophies and current practices in the region. The conceptual framework of the presentation includes key concepts such as access and equity, unity and identity, quality and relevance, efficiency and effectiveness. Each of these key concepts will be analysed using a framework consisting of key questions, guiding philosophies, policy options as well as issues and challenges. The article reviews policies relating to questions such as “who get access to what kinds of education?”, “how to widen access?”, “how to ensure success?”, “what kinds of education for a multicultural society?”, “how to promote national integration and social cohesion through education?”, “how to improve quality of education?”, “how to manage and administer the school delivery system?”. It draws examples from different countries in the SEA region to illustrate the issues and challenges in formulating and implementing contemporary education policies.     

Authoring Data Stories in a Media Makerspace: Adolescents Developing Critical Data Literacies

This article centers sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a social design research study about how students in a public urban high school authored “data stories” using personal data they curated, collected, and visualized. The study contributes to theoretical understandings of critical data literacies by considering the experiences and practices of adolescents enrolled in a required media arts class as they produced data visualizations drawn from their everyday lives. Findings center on two aspects of critical data literacies youth developed—understanding themselves as people capable of using data for multiple purposes and understanding data as socially situated resources for meaning-making. This study foregrounds the importance of positioning youth as authors and architects of data, making central youth perspectives in understanding the role of data in young people’s digitally connected lives and highlighting the importance of expanding what “counts” as data. It also suggests the importance of creating infrastructure to support the development of culturally relevant data practices that highlight the social, cultural, and political uses of data and its racialized dimensions.     

Examining pre-service teachers’ opinions about digital story design

Math is a subject in which students are generally not very interested and are unsuccessful compared to other courses. It has been suggested that digital stories designed for educational purposes could be used to prevent students’ lack of interest and failure in this subject. However, designing stories that are fit for purpose is important if the use of digital stories is to be successful. The purpose of this study is to investigate pre-service teachers’ opinions about how they utilized the steps of Gagne’s model while designing digital stories for math lessons. The participants in the study were 49 pre-service teachers studying at a Math Department at a Turkish state university in the spring term of the 2014–2015 academic year. The Pre-service Teachers’ Opinion Form and a Personal Information Form, both developed by the researchers, were used as data collection tools in the study, in which the qualitative method was adopted. Content analysis was utilized to analyze the data collected through open-ended questions. When the findings were examined it was seen that pre-service teachers had designed digital stories in which they often chose to attract attention by creating interesting characters in the “gaining students’ attention” step of Gagne’s teaching model, that the main character stated the objectives/topic in the story precisely in the “informing students of the objectives” step, and that the characters created repeated the previous topic in the “stimulating recall of prior learning” step. In the current study, the integration of digital story design into lesson plans in accordance with Gagne’s model was carried out and pre-service teachers’ opinions about their experiences of this process were investigated.     

Children’s Narrating as a Way of Learning About Other People’s Beliefs in Interaction with Teachers

As a genre of talk, narratives represent important building blocks in children’s learning in many fields. The purpose of the study presented in this article is to examine how teachers can encourage children’s learning about people’s beliefs through narrating. Narratives play an important part in children’s learning to understand other people and how they will act according to what they believe, think or know. This study is based on video observations of six children, 3 and 4 years old, and their spontaneous personal narratives told to teachers over a period of 8 months. The narrative analysis revealed that in most of the narratives the teachers were passive listeners or were concerned about the structure of events. The teachers seldom asked questions about the children’s mental state or disagreed with the child in ways that revealed their different beliefs. Suggestions about implications of this study are that early childhood teacher education should focus on talking with children about what they may think or believe concerning narrated events, and also reveal what they think and believe themselves.     

Dynamics of Chinese nationalistic education in Hong Kong from 1945 to 2012

‘Chinese’ is an ambiguous term, depending on whether it is taken to describe a political, linguistic, or cultural entity. While the term has often been considered to represent a politically and culturally homogeneous national identity in recent decades, this article aims to challenge this notion by examining the characteristics and practices of nationalistic education in Hong Kong since 1945. It explores how national identity has been interpreted by different Chinese states over time through different educational policies and practices. Focusing on the evolution of nationalistic education in three phases, this article presents a detailed account and analyses different nationalist narratives over six decades. It describes how different political forces define themselves and come to terms with what are often dual or competing national identities. Historical examples illustrate the challenges in policies and practices of nationalistic education.     

Women and literacy: a Nepal perspective

This article looks at adult women's experiences of literacy and literacy learning in a remote area of Western Nepal. As part of a research degree at Sussex University, I spent eight months living in a small village community where an American aid agency was implementing a development programme, comprising of a literacy class with follow-up income-generating activities for women. Drawing on an “ideological” approach to literacy research, I investigated how women and men of differing ages and economic backgrounds used literacy in their everyday lives. My research aimed to move away from the simple polarisation of women and men, traditional and developed, to analyse what meanings of literacy and gender were shared or disputed between different groups of people and how they reacted to literacy interventions by a foreign aid agency.By looking at three main kinds of literacy practices which so-called “illiterate” women participated in—existing everyday practices such as religious reading; new everyday practices such as account keeping introduced by the aid agency; and the literacy class which ran every evening in the village—this article analyses how women reacted to different kinds of literacies and what they gained from attending a literacy class. Everyday literacies tended to be seen as separate or even in opposition to the literacy class or new practices since they were learnt informally in the home. Many new literacy practices, such as form filling or keeping minutes, were viewed by both men and women as symbolic of the agency's authority but not necessarily useful. The literacy class introduced women to new roles as “class participants” and more participatory methods of teaching, but they preferred the kind of education seen in local schools so encouraged the teacher to adopt chanting methods and mirror the hierarchical teacher–pupil relationship.Though the women contested the dominant model of literacy and gender presented to them by the aid agency—that reading and writing would help in their existing role as mothers or wives or were useful for income generating—they wanted to become “educated” by attending the literacy class. They felt they gained a new identity through becoming literate and valued the additional social space that the class gave them as a group of women from differing backgrounds. Certain new practices like creative writing, though imposed by the aid agency, were welcomed by women at the class as enabling them to have a new voice.     

Opportunities for learning given to prospective mathematics teachers: between ritual and explorative instruction

The mathematics education field, including prospective teacher education program, has seen a continuous effort to change teaching practices to be more cognitively demanding, conceptually oriented and student centred. Our goal in this study was to examine how certain underlying assumptions about mathematical learning, as reflected in a skilled instructor’s discourse, align with opportunities to learn. The data included a set of fully transcribed 11 lessons from an introductory algebra course. The method of analysis was built upon the communicational (commognitive) framework and included discerning between the instructor’s mathematizing and identifying talk. This framework was extended to quantify the instructor’s identifying talk over the whole set of lessons. Our findings showed that at the surface level, the instruction in the class seemed to align with “explorative” goals. On a deeper level, however, it was more aligned with “ritual” goals that are concerned with producing narratives about people, not about mathematics.     

It's All Very Well,in Theory: Theoretical Perspectives and Their Applications in Contemporary Pedagogical Research

Current debates about educational theory are concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power and thereby issues such as who possesses a “truth” and how have they arrived at it, what questions are important to ask, and how should they best be answered. As such, these debates revolve around questions of preferred, appropriate, and useful theoretical perspectives. This paper overviews the key theoretical perspectives that are currently used in physical education pedagogy research and considers how these inform the questions we ask and shapes the conduct of research. It also addresses what is contested with respect to these perspectives. The paper concludes with some “cautions” about allegiances to and use of theories in line with concerns for the applicability of educational research to pressing social issues.     

Learning transferable skills through adventure education: The role of an authentic process

Abstract

The purpose of this study is threefold: (a) to explore what 18 adolescents learned while participating in a three week long adventure program, (b) to examine how they learned while on the program, and (c) to determine what program outcomes they considered most applicable to their home environments, or which learning is “transferable”. To address these purposes, 18 participants 13–18 years old on 14 different three-week long sail and dive training courses were interviewed. The study found that participants learned both hard skills (e.g., sailing and diving) and life skills. They learned these skills experientially, by observing and receiving feedback from others, by exposure to new and different persons, and through the authenticity of needing to learn these skills through the course design. Participants reported that the life skills were most likely to be applicable after course completion in the home environment. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Whither social theory?

What is the place of social theory in mathematics education research, and what is it for? This special issue of Educational Studies in Mathematics offers insights on what could be the role of some sociological theories in a field that has historically privileged learning theories coming from psychology and mathematics as the main theoretical frames informing research. Although during the last 10 years the term “socio-cultural” has become part of the accepted and widespread trends of mathematics education research when addressing learning, this issue gathers a collection of papers that depart from a “socio-cultural” approach to learning and rather deploy sociological theories in the analysis of mathematics education practices. In this commentary paper, we will point to what we see to be the contributions of these papers to the field. We will do so by highlighting issues that run through the six papers. We will try to synthetize what we think are the benchmarks of the social approach to mathematics education that they propose. We will also take a critical stance and indicate some possible extensions of the use of social theory that are not addressed in this special issue but nonetheless are worth being explored for a fuller understanding of the “social” in mathematics education.     

The outcomes question in teacher education

This article begins with the premise that it is possible to trace teacher education development and reform in terms of the major questions that have driven the field and the sometimes competing ways these questions have been constructed, debated, and enacted in research, policy, and practice. The author argues that currently “the outcomes question” is driving teacher education. Generally, the outcomes question includes debates about what impacts teacher education should be expected to have on teacher learning, professional practice, and student learning as well as debates about how, by whom, and for what purposes outcomes should be documented, demonstrated, and/or measured. The article identifies three major ways that the outcomes question in teacher education is being constructed in the research literature, the policy arena, and the media: outcomes as long term impact, outcomes as teacher test scores, and outcomes as professional performance. Each of these is analyzed in some detail, drawing on related analyses from policy and teacher education practice. Finally the article suggests several concerns about how the outcomes question is being constructed in teacher education, questioning some of the viewpoints that are being legitimized or undermined and drawing particular attention to the impact of these for a just and democratic society.     

Researching research: mathematics education in the Political

We discuss contemporary theories in mathematics education in order to do research on research. Our strategy consists of analysing discursively and ideologically recent key publications addressing the role of theory in mathematics education research. We examine how the field fabricates its object of research by deploying Foucault’s notion of bio-politics—mainly to address the object “learning”—and ?i?ek’s ideology critique—to address the object “mathematics”. These theories, which have already been used in the field to research teaching and learning, have a great potential to contribute to a reflexivity of research on its discourses and effects. Furthermore, they enable us to present a clear distinction between what has been called the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education research and what we call a positioning of mathematics education (research) practices in the Political.     

Assessing and accessing high human potential: A brief history of giftedness and what it means to school psychologists

The history of giftedness pertains to historical changes regarding how giftedness is conceptualized and defined, and how it serves the practical purpose of identifying gifted children and providing them an appropriate education. The past century has witnessed debates and controversies about what constitutes this elusive human quality we deem “gifted.” Overall, it has undergone significant changes from monolithic, static to more pluralistic, dynamic conceptions. The first part of this article delineates historical changes in the past 100 years in our understanding of the nature and development of giftedness, followed by the second part on the changing ways we define, assess, and identify gifted children or gifted potential for intervention purposes. The final part of this article depicts a broad trend toward expanding gifted education to a wider range of students, with the understanding that gifts and talents are widely distributed in student populations, and the deliberate cultivation of human potential should not be confined to a selected few.