Sexuality,schooling, and teacher identity formation: A critical pedagogy for teacher education

Offering an alternative to normative teacher education that excludes meaningful sexuality and gender education from its curriculum, this article presents a critical teacher education multicultural curriculum based in the United States that included an autoethnographic narrative assignment as reflective space for teacher candidates to consider their identities as shaped by lived experiences with gender and sexuality. Using a categorical analysis of a cohort of 38 teacher candidate autoethnographies, discussed are insights revealed about their lived histories. Patterns included gender identification, heteronormativity, patriarchy, sex education, schooling experiences, teacher complicity, and teacher identity effects and sense of agency along with implications for educating future teachers.     

Coping with the crickets: a fusion autoethnography of silence,schooling, and the continuum of biracial identity formation

This study explores biracial identity development in the adolescent years through fusion autoethnography. Using an ecological model of biracial identity development, this study illustrates how family, peers, and school curricula validate and reject racial self-presentations. We pay specific attention to the different forms of silence (i.e. “crickets”) that teachers and peers deploy as tactics of rejection and how racially coded artifacts such as hip-hop culture and Black Liberation texts function as validations of racial self-presentations. Overall, this study helps researchers and practitioners to understand the fluidity of biracial and multiracial identity development as it relates to everyday school spaces and processes.     

Role theory, emotions, and identity in the department headship of secondary schooling

This paper traces the emotions of 29 Canadian secondary school department heads as they engage with their own and others’ educational purposes, with the power relationships of secondary schooling and with their relationships with other individuals around them who are affected by and have expectations for their role. Such interactions have embedded within them a range of emotions which point to internal ambiguities about power and position, in middle management in particular and within educational administration more widely, which seemed perpetuated by normative educational administrative practices. The findings revealed tensions between teaching and leading, experiences of loneliness, emotional misunderstanding and the resentment that comes from feelings of powerlessness.     

Lummi identity and white racism: When location is a real place

Native students experience prejudice at the university in a fashion that is unique and apart from the experiences of all other ethnic minorities. Because the reality of Indian students is not understood, they are heedlessly placed in with other ethnic minority students in discussions about policy. But if the stories of these students could be heard and understood, and if the local political context of their encounter with higher education could be shown, it would unmask a number of presuppositions about ethnicity and education. This paper brings forth some stories about a tribal community, a regional university, and their recent history of cultural power relations. It shows how Indian students experience Identity and Ideology in ways that are in conflict with the dominant society. The way stories can unmask the historic hidden dimensions of local power in educational institutions is shown.     

Unequal experience of COVID-induced remote schooling in four developing countries

Lockdown measures during the pandemic have resulted in school closure worldwide affecting nearly 9 out of 10 students. Consequently, remote schooling has become a growing phenomenon. However, due to a lack of infrastructural capacity and widespread poverty, the experience of remote learning in developing countries may have been unequal by pupils’ socioeconomic status, gender and location. This study draws evidence from a phone survey conducted by Young Lives (YL) in Ethiopia, two states of India, Peru and Vietnam enquiring which sociodemographic groups are benefiting more from remote schooling. Logit regression results suggest that students from wealthier households, urban areas and with internet access from all countries are more likely to experience remote schooling. Pupils from higher-educated households in all countries but Peru also tend to have alternative schooling. Additionally, apart from Peru, the gender difference in experiencing remote learning is not found significant. We suggest that access to remote learning resources for marginalised students would be paramount to reduce inequality in learning loss in the global South.     

Issues of identity and knowledge in the schooling of VET: a case study of lifelong learning

This article discusses two school‐based case studies of vocational education and training in the areas of information technology and hospitality from the perspective of the agendas of ‘lifelong learning’. Lifelong learning can be seen as both a policy goal leading to institutional and programme reforms and as a process which fosters in learners identities that enable them to thrive in the circumstances of contemporary life. These case studies suggest that current approaches to vocational education and training in schools are enacting the first but not the second of these agendas. Institutional barriers are being removed and work placements drawn in to schooling programmes. However, the pedagogy, assessment and curriculum of the programmes emphasizes short‐term (and conflicting) knowledge objectives rather than orientations to flexible lifelong learning. We argue that it is teachers rather than the students who are thrust most forcibly into adopting new learner‐worker identities consonant with the attributes of ‘lifelong learners’ and the demands of the contemporary workplace.     

Politics,religion and morals: the symbolism of public schooling for the urban middle-class identity

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the ‘ordinary’ urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from ‘seeking a critical mass’ to resisting traditional methods of choice and going ‘against-the-grain’, or collectively campaigning for a brand new public school, the urban middle-class are developing contemporary methods to challenge the existing ways of thinking about middle-class choice. Drawing on this literature, this paper explores the symbolism of public schooling for relatively affluent choosers in the city of Melbourne, Australia. The positioning of public schooling as essentially secular and liberal indicates how the public school is valorised within the contemporary market place. Within a market that tends to undersell the public school, the perceived lack of organised religion and progressivism may be the unique selling point for the cosmopolitan, globalised consumer.     

A note on the effect of schooling,experience and aging on wage growth

Our analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men data suggests that changes in job experience and schooling play a large part in explaining wage growth, leaving a negative effect of chronological aging per se.     

Teacher identity past and present: What can a genealogy of schooling tell us?

ABSTRACT

The evolution of teachers’ identities in Australia highlights the struggles between state and civic over the control of schooling and also the contingent nature of the teacher identity itself. A genealogical analysis of this history makes visible these contingencies, but more importantly suggests that little reckoning has been afforded to teachers’ agency within these social struggles. This gap in understandings of teacher identity, as even potentially agentic, highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of teachers and their transformative potential. In particular, it calls for a focus on teachers within elite private schools because these costly schools are highly influential as the aspirational model for schooling provision. If teachers’ agency in these neoliberalised spaces were possible, if they could be empowered in their stewardship of the educational enterprise, then their activation would be crucial in any wider reform effort.     

Teaching Practice Stasis: racism,sexism and school experience in initial teacher education

This paper is concerned with the school experience component of initial teacher education (ITE). School experience (or teaching practice, as it is more commonly known) is widely recognised as particularly influential in the professional socialisation of student teachers. I draw on recent field‐work which I have carried out in order to explore some of the tensions and contradictions which characterise both my own and others’ experiences of working in ITE. By using aspects of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as ‘sociological indicators’ I seek to discover the extent to which school experience can play a part in the preparation of teachers who are reflective, critical and enquiring. The conclusions I reach are not encouraging. Teaching practice is characterised by ‘stasis’, a strong tendency for those most closely involved to avoid conflict or confrontation. Even mild criticism of existing classroom practices is avoided. To the extent that approaches to the appraisal of practising teachers are based on similar ‘supervisory’ models, the implication is that the effect will not be the ‘development’ or ‘improvement’ of practice so much as the reinforcement of existing practices, whether good or bad.     

Immigrant students' experience of schooling: a narrative inquiry theoretical framework

We explore immigrant students' experience of schooling focusing on Yang Yang and his family. We present insights into immigrant Chinese educational experience in Canada and bring forward a narrative‐inquiry framework for the study of student experience. We find that—contrary to some of the expectations of Chinese immigrants—family relations, student learning, and school policies are complicated, with families finding it difficult to translate Chinese educational values in the Canadian context and their children facing serious learning and social difficulties.