The children of the educational expansion era in Germany: education and further training participation in the life‐course

In this article, we examine the social dimension of inequality in educational participation. We look at the social transmission and gender‐specific channelling of education and further training in the context of employment and family. Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data collected from a multi‐level empirical life‐course study (Hamburg Biographical and Life‐Course Panel: 1980–2006) conducted with a sample of the 1979 cohort of secondary school graduates in Hamburg, Germany, we discuss the education and further training practices in their lives – with special emphasis on social class of origin and gender.     

Self‐reflection and resilience in educational research

This article revisits the critical realist ethnographic process that was adopted in my doctoral thesis, which was concerned with the experiences of ethnic identity of white British and Pakistani British children as they started kindergarten in the northwest of England. The article focuses on the ethnography that emerged from the visits that I carried out alongside staff to children's homes before they started kindergarten and on the way in which these were portrayed and analysed in the final thesis. I conclude that the process of observation, writing field notes and then producing a fuller ethnography produced a very partial representation of the empirical world. This was problematic in that, in critical realism, what is observed in the world of the ‘empirical’ and considered in the world of the ‘actual’ forms the basis for understanding the underlying causal tendencies which point to the underlying explanatory concepts in the world of the ‘real’. I argue, however, that more careful critical realist ethnography has the potential to be a powerful methodological framework which accepts the contested nature of reality but which, unlike postmodernism, provides a means of addressing possibilities and of moving beyond ‘undecidability’.     

Creativity across Time and Place: life span and cross‐cultural perspectives

Creativity varies across time and place. With regard to variations across time, age‐related changes in the quantity, quality, and form of creative performance are examined. These changes are traced to a combination of cognitive, conative, and environmental variables. With regard to variations across place, the effect of cultural environment on creativity is examined. Culture is shown to influence the definition and expression of creativity, channeling creativity into certain task domains or social groups. The quantity of creative activity can be further affected by cultural features such as the value placed on conformity. Life span and cross‐cultural perspectives on creativity, it is argued, are integral to a comprehensive understanding of creativity.     

A maternal identity? The family lives of British women graduates pre‐ and post‐1945

In contrast to the first generations of university‐educated women, this article will suggest that later cohorts no longer transgressed conventional expectations by rejecting marriage and motherhood on the same scale as their predecessors. Post‐1945 society was a period within which theoretically women could ‘have it all’ and arguably graduate women were under even greater pressure to conform. By exploring the life‐histories of a group of women who graduated between 1947 and 1979, this article explores the individual stories behind the quantitative data to consider the attitudes of highly‐educated women to marriage and motherhood and how they have balanced their personal and professional lives.     

Education and school‐to‐work transitions in post‐communist Poland∗

Abstract

Unemployment in Poland rose throughout 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993 but the proportion of school‐leavers among the unemployed peaked in 1990. Unlike in most western market economies, the best‐ educated young people in Poland did not prove the least vulnerable to unemployment. This paper uses evidence from studies of young people in Gdansk, Katowice and Suwalki to argue that one reason why young people from professional and vocational secondary schools have not borne a heavier share of Poland's unemployment since 1990 has been the flexibility and responsiveness of these schools to Poland's new labour market conditions. Since the reforms many of these schools have contracted drastically. Some have closed. But others have thrived The latter have often benefited from favourable local labour market conditions, but their success has usually been at least equally due to their own resourcefulness in introducing new courses which teach skills that are in demand, and securing various kinds of sponsorship from employers. Three reasons are offered to explain the responsiveness of education in Poland to the changing labour market conditions: general support for ‘the reforms’, the schools’ experience of making informal deals with employers under communism, and the post‐communist authorities’ willingness to force unsuccessful schools to close and to see teachers made redundant.

     

The decentralisation of the school system in post‐communist Romania

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post‐communist education systems and the impact that governance through markets is having on public services. The paper focuses on presenting and discussing the attempts to decentralise pre‐higher education in Romania in considering the role of the state and governance in the provision of public services and the introduction of market mechanisms in education. The decentralisation of education has been proposed by the then Minister of Education Andrei Marga. Although decentralisation in pre‐higher education has been piloted for three academic years and the policy documents that introduced it have been permanently amended and updated, more than a decade later, this reform has not reached its aims mainly due to the various changes on the political scene. However, provided that no major amendments will be made to the Laws of National Education (2009), decentralisation in pre‐higher education will be a reality from 2010–11.     

The national in‐service courses for science teachers and their effect on educational reform in Mexico

The educational system in Mexico has undergone important changes in recent decades. One of the most important took place in 1993, when the compulsory character of secondary school (ages 12–15) was established. National In‐service Courses (NICs) were established as a way to bring curricular changes proposed in the reform near to the teachers. The results, according to the National Certification Exams, have not been satisfactory. In this paper, we describe the general context of education in Mexico, putting emphasis on teacher initial preparation and the reform that took place as well as the way in‐service courses are implemented, analyzing their possibilities to bring about real changes in science teaching and learning.     

Adolescents’ interest experience in daily life in and across family and peer contexts

This study examined daily experiences of interest in and across the social contexts of family and in- and out-of-school peers. Forty-two Dutch adolescents, aged 13–15 years, provided us with 2 weeks of experience sampling data on their engagement in interesting topics and activities throughout their daily lives. Findings show that adolescent daily life included a diverse range of parallel interests. School-related interests made up a substantial part of adolescents’ daily lives, challenging the idea of mere disengagement of secondary school students in academics. Findings also show that some interests are strongly bound to a specific context, while others appear across family and peer contexts. This indicates how multiple contexts can simultaneously feed interests, something that calls for further across-context research of interest development.

     

The Internet in the everyday life‐world: a comparison between high‐school students in China and Norway

Based on in‐depth interviews, this study offers a comparison of how high‐school students in China and Norway are actively constructing the Internet as an element of their everyday lives. Through the Schutzian notions of everyday life‐world, social‐biographical situation and relevance, the study has revealed striking differences between the Chinese and Norwegian participants concerning their relationship with the Net, although both have been referred to as members of the Net Generation. These are summarised in four interrelated themes that highlight the differences. Together, they shed light on the different places and meanings the Net has acquired in the young people’s lives in the two cases and how they negotiate their identities as students within the Internet‐transformed context. It is argued that these differences cannot be explained merely by the material resources in the two societies. More importantly, they have to do with the individuals’ and their families’ relevance systems.     

The reform of post‐16 education and training and the lessons from Europe

Abstract

With the future shape of Britain's post‐16 education and training still undecided policy makers are increasingly looking abroad for new models to follow. The educational debate has become internationalized. As in the late 19th century it is the pressure of economic competition from Europe which has galvanized British interest in the relative ‘success’ of training in countries such as France and Germany.

This paper examines the current use and misuse of comparative examples in British debates over reform. It analyses the systems of vocational education and training (VET) in France, Germany, and Sweden and assesses what lessons, if any, we can draw from them for the reform of British VET.     

The Communicative Method in the Teaching of Listening and Speaking English

It has been my experience as an Instructress of！lstening and Speaking English Coursethat one of the most difficult challenges Is promoting natural conversation with the students.Many students say that they want more conversation In Speaking classes,but several prob-ferns arise.For one thing,students often do not know what to talk about.They are at a lossas to how a native speaker begins a conversation.     

Self‐concept,enterprise and educational attainment in late adolescence

Abstract

This study used data obtained from a large random sample of 16‐19 year olds in four areas in U.K. and from a smaller university student sample to construct an easy‐to‐use measure of purposefulness, a characteristic lying at the core of the concept of enterprise, and to examine the relationship between purposefulness and educational attainment.

This instrument was found to be reasonably valid and reliable for both samples. Further, for women, purposefulness was positively related to educational attainment whilst for men this was not the case. The implications of this study are threefold: conceptualising enterprise in terms of a person's motivational, attributional and behavioural style has implications both for the content of, and expectations from, enterprise education and training. Second, the difference in the relationship between educational attainment and purposefulness for the two sexes suggests that there may be different opportunities that the educational system and the labour market offers to men and women. Third, this measure can be usefully employed for vocational guidance.     

‘The best students will learn English’: ultra‐utilitarianism and linguistic imperialism in education in post‐1997 Hong Kong

In September 1997, shortly after China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Education Department announced a policy which was widely seen as a restoration of 'mother‐tongue education', but which, in reality, was an elitist language selection policy. This policy, which provided for the selection of the best primary school graduates for monolingual education in English, was designed to be a cost‐effective way of training in English skills for those who had the economic and cultural capital to benefit from it. Meanwhile, the majority of students were barred from sufficient exposure to English, the language of power and wealth. In this paper, I shall show that this policy draws on a strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of English for the economic survival of Hong Kong, which was engineered by business interests on the eve of the changeover in 1997, and which helped perpetuate a form of linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, academics whose research was used to legitimize the policy, failed to problematize dominant language ideologies that have been used to justify pedagogically unsound practices and an inequitable language streaming policy. Through documenting the voices of individual educators, I am able to delineate counter‐discourses which, albeit weak and isolated, nevertheless manifested much broader educational concerns than the narrow utilitarianism and the unquestioned privileging of the learning of English skills that underlay the current policy.     

The politics of ‘lifelong learning’ in post‐1997 Hong Kong

This article is concerned with the politics of lifelong learning policy in post‐1997 Hong Kong (HK). The paper is in four parts. Continuing Education, recast as ‘lifelong learning’, is to be the cornerstone of the post‐Handover education reform agenda. The lineaments of a familiar discourse are evident in the Education Commission policy documents. However, to view recent HK education policy just in terms of an apparent convergence with global trends would be to neglect the ways in which the discourse of lifelong learning has been tactically deployed to serve local political agendas. In the second part of this paper, I outline what Scott has called HK’s ‘disarticulated’ political system following its retrocession to China and attempts by an executive‐led administration to demonstrate ‘performance legitimacy’—through major policy reforms—in the absence of (democratic) political legitimacy. Beijing’s designation of HK as a (depoliticized) ‘economic’ city within greater China must also be taken into account. It is against this political background that the strategic deployment of a ‘lifelong learning’ discourse needs to be seen. In the third section of this paper, I examine three recent policy episodes to illustrate how lifelong learning discourse has been adopted and has evolved to meet changing circumstances in HK. Finally, I look at the issue of public consultation. The politics of education policy in HK may be seen to mirror at a micro‐level, the current macro‐level contested interpretations of HK’s future polity.