‘We've Already Done that One’: Adolescents' Repeated Encounters with the Same Artwork

This article explores the way young people's responses to an image evolve when they engage with it repeatedly. An analysis of the sequential encounters of six adolescents with a Renaissance painting reveals that, as they gained experience with the picture, the youngsters probed for increasingly deeper layers of meaning in the work. Specifically, on their second encounter with the painting, the students showed greater sensitivity to visual information, and they incorporated their own experiences and knowledge into the meaning‐making process more actively than on their first encounter. This study also shows that, once the participants had established a relationship with the artwork on their own terms, they seemed eager to discover contextual information about it. However, far from accepting this information as ‘authority’, the young viewers considered it critically and used it to deepen, expand and revise their personal visions of the painting.     

‘Tell me your story!’ – Making the ‘Other’ Visible through the Development of Collaborative Visual Narratives

This article reports on the findings of a series of participatory video art/documentary workshops designed and implemented to enhance understanding and collaboration between teenagers of diverse cultural backgrounds in the city of Pafos in the Republic of Cyprus. This research initiative was part of The Alien Trail (2017); a photographic project that explored the everyday life of refugees and migrants currently living in the island through the images of four distinguished photographers: Antoine D’Agata, Nikos Economopoulos, Bieke Depoorter and Nicolas Iordanou (Project Creator). The workshops were co‐designed by artists, educators and anthropologists in order to promote visual and multimodal communication amongst participants through short video and documentary making and collaborative drawing sessions. The findings of this practice highlight that teenagers were able to develop empathy and understanding by discussing and sharing meaning through exploring each other’s visual narratives.     

‘That’s just the way I am’: metacognition,personal intelligence and reading

Metacognition is thinking about thinking and there is fairly robust evidence that an awareness of one’s own understanding, especially in reading, is strongly linked with success. Readers who are alert to the problems in their understanding of what they read and can adopt a range of strategies to ‘fix’ these problems tend to be better readers. Kathy Hall and Julia Myers here explore how such awareness works in one child’s view of herself as a reader and suggest that such insights need to form part of a useful assessment of the child’s reading.     

Expanding Higher Education in the UK: From ‘System Slowdown’ to ‘System Acceleration’

This paper sets out to explore the implications of current patterns of participation and attainment, particularly among 16–19 year‐olds, for the further expansion of higher education in the UK. It uses a range of recent statistics on participation and attainment to describe what is termed ‘system slowdown’. It then explores a basis for ‘system acceleration’ through the development of five possible routes into higher education both for 16–19 year‐olds and for adults. We conclude the paper by looking briefly at a number of inter‐related strategies the Government could adopt to encourage ‘system acceleration’. We suggest that unless the Government is prepared to consider policy changes of this type, it is unlikely to reach the higher education participation target it has set itself and may also jeopardise the basis for a sustainable lifelong learning system for the 21st century.     

‘Download’: ‘Postcards Home’ Contemporary Art and New Technology in the Primary School

‘Postcards Home’ using photography, scanning, digital image manipulation, text and colour printing was the third ‘Download’ project devised by the education department of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England. It was led by artist Laurie Long with teachers and pupils from Pooles Park primary school in Islington, an inner city borough in North London. Based on the production of a postcard featuring an image of personal significance, the children were involved in exploring and constructing their own and others' identities whilst developing their technology skills in creative ways. The project raises interesting questions about the applicability of contemporary art practices to the primary classroom. The research is based on participant observation and includes the voices of the artist and teachers involved.     

From ‘consulting pupils’ to ‘pupils as researchers’: a situated case narrative

Schools in England are now being encouraged to ‘personalise’ the curriculum and to consult students about teaching and learning. This article reports on an evaluation of one high school which is working hard to increase student subject choice, introduce integrated curriculum in the middle years and to improve teaching and learning while maintaining a commitment to inclusive and equitable comprehensive education. The authors worked with a small group of students as consultants to develop a ‘student's‐eye’ set of evaluative categories in a school‐wide student survey. They also conducted teacher, student and governor interviews, lesson and meeting observations, and student ‘mind‐mapping’ exercises. In this article, in the light of the findings, the authors discuss the processes they used to work jointly with the student research team, and how they moved from pupils‐as‐consultants to pupils‐as‐researchers, a potentially more transformative/disruptive practice. They query the notion of ‘authentic student voice’ and show it as discursive and heterogeneous: they thus suggest that both a standards and a rights framings of student voice must be regarded critically.     

Motives for ‘Laddishness’ at School: Fear of failure and fear of the ‘feminine’

‘Laddish’ behaviours in school have been identified as impediments to the academic progress of some boys and girls. This article provides and discusses empirical evidence to support Jackson's proposal in an earlier article that ‘laddish’ behaviours may act to protect the self‐worth and/or social worth of many boys, and that ‘laddishness’ may be prompted by both a fear of academic failure and a fear of the ‘feminine’. Drawing upon data from interviews with 50 boys across two secondary schools, the article focuses upon a key characteristic of ‘laddishness’, namely, the overt rejection of academic work. It is suggested that overtly rejecting academic work serves a dual function for some boys. First, it enables them to act in ways currently consistent with hegemonic forms of masculinity in their schools. Secondly, it provides an excuse for failure and augments success.     

‘Rape’ in children

‘Rape’ as a sexual offence has been existing since time immemorial. In a country like India with her conservative and traditional society, sex is not discussed freely and a sexual offence particularly in childhood is hushed up, for fear of the victimised girl's future. Here an attempt is made to study the relavent factors responsible for ‘rape’ in children. These individual cases were followed up, rescued and rehabilitated whenever possible. This paper deals with a prospective study of 130 cases, between the ages of 6 months to 18 years from Bombay, over a period of 15 months. Over 77.68% oases were more than 4 years of age and 6.15% were between the ages of 6 months and 6 years. Shockingly, 2 young infants were of 6 months of age. Majority of these girls belonged to various slums of Bombay. 34.5% of girls were illiterate, and 79.23% had some knowledge about sex. Surprisingly 36.16% were willing victims and the criteria for including these cases under ‘rape’ was their under age i.e. less than 18 years. Of these 130 victims, 23 conceived, of which 6 delivered after full term. The remaining 17 cases were medically terminated. Of the accused, neighbours were responsible in 51.53% of cases, the remaining being contributed by employer, relative, friend and known hooligans from the same area. Some of these girls were rehabilitated and some are still in the remand home. Few girls, though minor, were married to the accused and were still keen on accepting them as their husbands against the wish of their parents.     

‘School effectiveness’: the problem of reductionism

School Effectiveness (SE), as a research paradigm and, more widely, as a set of political practices in school management and development, is examined in terms of the concept of ‘reductionism’. The article serves to systematise an ongoing critique of Effectiveness by Ball, Morley, Fielding, Slee, etc. Building upon studies by the biologist Steven Rose and colleagues of reductionism from psychology to biology, the reductionism of the Effectiveness discourse is analysed in its methodological, contextual, historical and moral aspects. Finally, the article explores the impact of SE upon the dominant model of School Improvement in England in particular, and the need for transformation within that paradigm.     

Looking Beyond ‘Skills’ and ‘Processes’: Literacy as Social and Cultural Practices in Classrooms

This article explores the thinking and research that has led to a view of literacy as social and cultural practices. Literacy is described not as an internal cognitive state or a universal set of skills and processes that individuals must learn, but as social and cultural ways of doing things through the use of text. This view adds to our understanding of literacy by switching the focus to the ways in which individuals, groups, communities and societies put literate practices to work. For teachers, this means thinking about the sorts of literacies they are trying to produce through their programmes. This implies studying classrooms and preschools as social and cultural settings where particular practices count as good work – asking which kinds of texts, ways of talking, reading, writing and behaving are preferred and why.