Resilience and loss in work identities: A narrative analysis of some retired teachers’ work‐life histories

The article examines the importance of ‘emotional labour’ in the constitution of the ‘teacherly‐self’. Deriving from a research project on work and social identity, the article explores the ways teachers have negotiated the radical changes in the profession in recent years, and uses the notion of ‘teacher resilience’ to explore the ways teachers have reacted to the effects of neo‐liberal reforms to education; reforms that have powerfully impacted on the more child‐centred ways of working in the classroom and school environment. Using narrative analysis of the work‐life histories of these retired teachers, recorded using oral history methodology, the authors examine structures of feeling that turn on notions of emotional labour and commitment, resilience and loss in relation to the occupational identity of teachers.     

Markets,schools and the convertibility of economic capital: the complex dynamics of class choice

While economic capital is not synonymous with cultural, social or symbolic capital in either its constitutional or organizational form, it nevertheless remains the more flexible and convertible form of capital. The convertibility of economic capital has particular resonance within ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. The state’s reluctance to fully endorse an internal market between schools has resulted in middle‐class parents using their private wealth to create an educational market in the private sector to help secure the class futures of their children. Using data from recent studies of second‐level education in Ireland, and data compiled on the newly emerging ‘grind’ schools (private tuition centres), we outline how the availability of economic capital allows middle‐class parents to choose fee‐paying schooling or to opt out of the formal school sector entirely to employ market solutions to their class ambitions. The data also show that schools actively collude in the class project to their own survival advantage.     

Measuring students’ transition into university and its association with learning outcomes

Previously we showed how we measured pedagogy and revealed its association with learning outcomes of sixth‐form college mathematics students. In this project we followed a similar approach to the study of university transition. We particularly sought to identify the students’ perceptions of the transitional experience, and measure the association with learning outcomes. We drew on longitudinal surveys of students entering different programmes in five universities. Following them into their first year or so, allowed us to track their ‘disposition to complete the course’ and their ‘disposition to study more mathematics’, inter alia. We developed and validated two ‘fit‐for‐purpose’ measures of students’ perception of their transition, one we call ‘perception of the transitional gap/jump’ and one we call ‘degree of positive feeling about the transition’. We report some statistically and educationally significant associations between these and the students’ developing dispositions, and discuss the prospects for this approach to studying transition.     

Playful reflection: an investigation into the kindergarten project ‘Play in physiotherapy with children’

This article investigates adult learning in an action research (AR) project called ‘Play in physiotherapy with children’, conducted in Tromsoe Municipality, Norway, in 2010–2011. The project's objective was to explore how a play-based intervention approach would affect professional collaboration and child development. It was designed as a small-scale project, organized around two children with motor delay and their professional teams of teachers, physiotherapists and special pedagogue in two different kindergartens. It was situated in the kindergartens, and lasted for 16 weeks. The professional participants were invited into a process of action–reflection cycles as co-researchers. Video was a core tool in the design. Treatment sessions with the children were filmed during the action phases, and were the focus of attention in the reflection meetings. The two professional teams evaluated the video-reflection meetings as crucial to their learning and change. The focus in the article is on the learning in the reflection meetings during the AR process. We discuss two aspects of the space of reflection that was created during the project. First, we look into the role of video in reflection, and discuss how this can be understood with the help of concepts from Bourdieu's ‘theory of practice’. Second, we reflect on the role of play and playfulness in reflection and change among grown-ups. To do this, we use perspectives from phenomenological theory on play and playfulness from Buytendijk and Gadamer. We conclude that the use of video-reflection is a potent tool in AR processes. Concepts from Bourdieu's ‘theory of practice’ illuminate why, and also contribute to the understanding of the experienced change. Further, we argue that theory on play can help AR practitioners to understand the mechanisms of engagement and involvement that are crucial in AR processes.     

‘Nothing to do’: The impact of poverty on pupils' learning identities within out‐of‐school activities

This article reports the findings of a project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which explored the participation of children in out‐of‐school recreational activities. The experiences of children living in poverty were compared and contrasted with their more affluent peers. The aim of the project was to explore these out‐of‐school activities as sites of learning and to identify the impact of the children's experiences on the development of individual ‘learning identities’. Through in‐depth interviews with 55 children it was concluded that there were substantial differences in levels of participation and in the learning gained from these activities by two different groups of children, and stages in the development of their different dispositions towards the activities were shown. Attempts to identify the roles occupied by the children within a community of practice led the authors to question the extent to which the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ can adequately account for the activity within such a community.     

How does writing for publication help professional development of teachers? A case study in China

Publications by teachers reporting results or case studies of school-based teacher inquiry activities benchmark their professional development by indicating they have a ‘stance of inquiry’. Such papers also disseminate valuable knowledge to the education community for sharing. Essay or case writing has always been a part of school-based teacher learning in China. The small-scale qualitative study reported here examines the impact of producing publications on the professional development of teachers within the context of educational reform. Findings show that producing publications contributes to teacher development in three ways. First, an expanded knowledge base gives the teachers new understandings of student-based learning. Second, teachers obtain insight into their practices by making their tacit knowledge explicit. Third, teachers have a sense of achievement by theorising personal experience. Publications serve as ‘boundary objects’ which can potentially help teachers achieve and develop their professionalism by disseminating individual knowledge into the public knowledge domain with transformative learning. Such developments, however, normally tend to focus on expanding local pedagogical practice. More emphasis on the notion of ‘teachers as researchers’ through critical reflection may help teachers perform as transformative intellectuals whilst searching for ways to retain teachers’ voices in their written publications.     

Retelling herstory: to be a female Bedouin teacher differently

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion on education in Palestinian/Bedouin society in the Negev in Israel and it proposes the narrative of female trainee teachers as the basis of an analysis of the changing status of Bedouin women and their community. The academic discourse on teaching in Bedouin society ignores the potential existence of an alternative discussion outside the dichotomous area of ‘traditional and modern’ and/or ‘Jewish and Bedouin’. Bedouin society in the Negev constitutes a particularly interesting case for a meaningful study of the perception of teaching, chiefly because education has already become a significant practice in the life of a community that seeks integration into Israeli society. The teaching profession gives Bedouin women from the Negev a relatively new opportunity to integrate into education and employment and by so doing they reconstruct a new educational discourse.

Il’il: When we were little, we used to laugh about me—hmm—a teacher. Me with pupils, and I’d teach them, like the teacher who used to teach us, with a little board, and I write for them and they are my pupils, as it were, and I give them tests and all sorts. And I love the profession very, very much because I love the pupils…

Nura: I loved learning but this isn’t the profession that I want to study—to be a teacher … You can help someone in this profession. I see myself going in that direction … First of all, you have to give, to impart something to the children in front of you, who have come to learn. You have to give to these children, to be conscientious. You don’t just come. You haven’t chosen the profession because you wanted to, but you have to cope with it.     

Empowering children to speak up and act on social justice issues: The use of folktales and collaborative storytelling as tools of social imagination

Over the last decade, various organisations, scholars and educators across the globe have been arguing for the need to foster dialogue between and with children regarding the world they want to have, in terms of both justice and sustainability. Research has shown that stories and storytelling have a world-making and world-changing character that may trigger children’s social imagination on social justice issues and help them play a participatory role in society. In this context, the study presented here aimed to empower children to speak up for their beliefs and to become active agents of change in relation to social justice issues. To meet our research goals, we developed workshops around traditional folktales, which we implemented in four schools in Cyprus. During these workshops, we promoted critical dialogue for social justice issues through pertinent collaborative storytelling activities. Collaborative storytelling is a method that can involve participants in critical dialogue, enabling them to produce innovative and creative counter-stories. This can potentially deepen their perceptions about social justice, while also allowing them to communicate the knowledge they have built in engaging and accessible ways. Data collection included observations during workshops, as well as post-implementation interviews with a purposive sample of child participants. Our findings suggest that the children deployed either a ‘we are all different’ or a ‘we are all the same’ discourse to define social justice. Nonetheless, as the project progressed, they seemed to gradually turn to a ‘we need to see injustice to be able to act against it’ discourse. This project aims to contribute to academic discussions on promoting dialogue with children on social justice issues, and cultivating children’s metacognitive skills about societal injustices.     

‘Support our networking and help us belong!’: listening to beginning secondary school science teachers

This study, drawing on the voice of beginning teachers, seeks to illuminate their experiences of building professional relationships as they become part of the teaching profession. A networking perspective was taken to expose and explore the use of others during the first three years of a teacher’s workplace experience. Three case studies, set within a wider sample of 11 secondary school science teachers leaving one UK university’s PostGraduate Certificate in Education, were studied. The project set out to determine the nature of the networks used by teachers in terms of both how they were being used for their own professional development and perceptions of how they were being used by others in school. Affordances and barriers to networking were explored using notions of identity formation through social participation. The focus of the paper is on how the teachers used others to help shape their sense of belonging to this, their new workplace. The paper develops ideas from network theories to argue that membership of the communities are a subset of the professional inter‐relationships teachers utilise for their professional development. During their first year of teaching, eight teachers were interviewed, completing 13 semi‐structured interviews. This was supplemented in Year 2 by a questionnaire survey of their experiences. In the third year of the programme, 11 teachers (including the original sample of eight) were surveyed using a network mapping tool in which they represented their communications with people, groups and resources. Finally, three of the teachers (common to both samples) were then interviewed specifically about their networking practices and experiences using the generation of their network map as a stimulated recall focus. The implications of the analysis of these accounts are that these beginning teachers did not perceive of themselves wholly as novices and that their personal aspirations to increase participation in practical science, develop a career or work for pupils holistically did not always sit comfortably with the school communities into which they were being accommodated. While highlighting the importance of trust and respect in establishing relationships, these teachers’ accounts highlight the importance of finding ‘peers’ from whom they can find support and with whom they can reflect and potentially collaborate towards developing practice. They also raise questions about who these ‘peers’ might be and where they might be found.     

Global-local divides and ontological politics: feminist STS perspectives on mobile learning for community health workers in Kenya

ABSTRACT

This theoretical paper argues that Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can help advance the emancipatory project in critical Ed Tech research. To support this claim, we deploy Tsing’s concept of ‘scale-making projects’ (2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) to connect ‘global’ narratives to ‘local’ users in a mobile learning project for Kenyan health workers. Drawing from this exemplar case, we discuss more broadly how FSTS provides useful theory and methods for tracing the trans-national power relations of digital technologies ‘on the ground’. The paper concludes by advocating for new forms of emancipatory Ed Tech research – ones framed not only within oppositional pairings such as ‘global’ versus ‘local’, but which elucidate how binaries themselves are constituted through far-flung trans-national arrays of sociomaterial practice.     

Why do long‐serving teachers stay in the teaching profession? Analysing the motivations of teachers with 10 or more years’ experience in England

This paper examines the reasons why long‐serving teachers remain in the teaching profession. Interest in teacher retention has grown in recent years, both in the UK and internationally, due to concerns over teacher shortage. However, most research on retention has focused on why teachers leave; this paper aims to fill the gap in our understanding of the positive reasons why long‐serving teachers stay in the profession, and how these reasons change over time. We define ‘long‐serving teachers’ as teachers who have taught for 10 years and more. We draw on a subset of data from an existing, broader study (Menzies et al., 2015 ) on why teachers enter and stay in the profession. In this paper, we draw on questionnaire findings from over 900 teachers with 0 to over 30 years’ teaching experience, and interviews with 14 long‐serving teachers, to understand why long‐serving teachers enter and, more importantly for our purposes, stay in teaching. We find that teachers’ motivational patterns are highly complex and influenced by school‐level and policy contexts. Nonetheless, two prominent retention factors are identified: teachers’ perceived professional mastery and altruistic reasons. Perceived professional mastery is particularly important due to its mutually reinforcing analytic relationships with other reasons. We find that teachers’ identification with intrinsic, altruistic and perceived professional mastery reasons become stronger with years of experience, but in some cases, paradoxically, so does their identification with extrinsic reasons. From our evidence, we suggest policy implications for enhancing the retention of long‐serving teachers.     

Being a ‘professional’ primary school teacher at the beginning of the 21st century: a comparative analysis of primary teacher professionalism in New Zealand and England

This article analyses findings from two studies conducted collaboratively across two educational settings, New Zealand and England, in 2001–2002. These studies examined the impact of national educational policy reforms on the nature of primary teachers’ work and sense of their own professionalism and compared these impacts across the two countries. Adopting a policy ethnography approach, using in‐depth interview data from samples of teachers in each country, it is argued that there have been discursive shifts in the meaning of the three key terms, autonomy, altruism and knowledge, embodied in the classical professionalism triangle. These shifts reflect policy‐makers’ moves from a ‘professional‐contextualist’ conception of teacher professionalism towards the ‘technocratic‐reductionist’ conception that accompanies neo‐liberal educational reforms in many countries. Teachers in both countries experienced increasing constraints on their autonomy as they became far more subject to ‘extrinsic’ accountability demands. Whether these demands were perceived as enhancing or diminishing teacher professionalism depended on the manner in which they were filtered through the profession’s defining quality, namely teachers’ altruistic concerns for the welfare of the children in their care.     

Probing into Pupils’ Moral Judgement in Environmental Dilemmas: a basis for ‘teaching values‘

In the frame of the international project ‘Environment and School Initiatives’ (ESIP), a pilot study has been carried out with the aim to elucidate existing levels of moral reasoning in environmental dilemmas (in analogy to Kohlberg) in a group of 11‐ and 15‐year‐old students. Beside the age‐related differences, also indications for differences between boys and girls were found. The content analysis of students’ justifications show different images about the relationship humans‐nature (humans as users, preservers, admirers, respecters). The main aim was to give teachers a better insight into pupils’ moral reasoning in environmental dilemmas and thus a basis for guiding discussions in the sense of moral discourse. These discussions, embedded in other experientially based activities, can hopefully contribute to the clarification and development of environmental values.     

Joining the goblins: fictional narratives and the development of student‐teachers’ reflection on practice in the further education sector

This paper explores ways in which student‐teachers in the Lifelong Learning sector are able to draw on fictionalised accounts of their own teaching practice experiences in order to gain a clearer understanding of their models and expectations of professionalism, and of how they, as individuals, locate their current position within the profession as a community of practice. It argues that the translation of experience into fiction – in this case specifically in the form of fairy tales – can be usefully applied in order to enhance and encourage reflection on practice as part of an action research cycle. Drawing on the evidence gathered, the paper goes on to suggest that student teachers’ main preoccupation at this stage of their development is not so much with meeting ‘standards’ of professionalism as with questions of behaviours and practices that will lead to a sense of belonging and acceptance; and with the need to transform their status, in relation to the profession, from that of outsider to insider.     

Management as ideology: the case of ‘new managerialism’ in higher education

The paper explores ideological conceptions of management, especially ‘new managerialism’, with particular reference to their role in the reform of higher education. It is suggested that attempts to reform public services in general are political as well as technical, though there is no single unitary ideology of ‘new managerialism’. Whilst some argue that managers have become a class and have particular interests, this may not be so for all public services. The arguments presented are illustrated by data taken from a recent research project on the management of UK higher education. It is suggested that managers in public service organisations such as universities do not constitute a class. However, as in the case of manager‐academics, managing a contemporary public service such as higher education may involve taking on the ideologies and values of ‘new managerialism’, and for some, embracing these. So management ideologies do seem to serve the interests of manager‐academics and help cement relations of power and dominance, even in contexts like universities which were not traditionally associated with the dominance of management.     

李翱“诚”的思想及意义

唐代儒家学者李翱在《复性书》中提出具有本体色彩的“诚”概念,李翱认为至诚不但可以修性,而且可以化物育物。至诚发挥到最高阶段,就能达到尽人、物之性,就能实现赞天地之化育、与天地参的理想境界。李翱力求将主体的人道与本体的天道之间因明诚而融为一体,最终达到天人合一的理想境界。     

“I think it fits in”: using process drama to promote agentic writing with primary school children

Set against the backdrop of children being ‘alienated’ from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the children's historical creative writing in relation to the drama lessons which are differently framed by the teachers. Building upon a theoretical model of process drama as involving ‘embodied experience’ and writing as problem‐solving, a case is made that process drama can lead to what we term ‘agentic writing’. Agentic writing, we demonstrate, involves children actively translating their embodied experience of process drama into writing by making a range of intertextual borrowings. These borrowings serve both to capture and transform their embodied experience as the children gain agency by standing outside language to achieve ‘double voicedness’ and in doing so write sophisticated texts. Seeing the relationship between process drama and writing in this light, we argue, provides a means of reconnecting children to the act of writing.     

Through a different lens: exploring Reggio Emilia in a Welsh context

In Wales, concerns about the perceived over‐formalisation of young children’s educational experiences led to the introduction of a Foundation Phase Framework for children aged three to seven years that advocates a more holistic, play‐based approach. Following the staging of the Reggio Emilia travelling exhibition, funding was secured for a project in which teachers explored Reggio philosophy and practices as a means of gaining insight into their thinking and pedagogy. Given the introduction of the Foundation Phase, the project also intended to support teachers’ explorations of child‐led learning. Looking at their practice ‘through another lens’ exposed teachers’ commitment to an approach dominated by prescribed, subject‐related outcomes. This approach influenced the way in which the teachers interpreted key aspects of Reggio philosophy and contributed to their difficulties with ‘supporting’ child‐led learning. The paper concludes that moving away from a ‘subject‐centred’ approach, particularly when the Framework includes prescribed learning outcomes, may be extremely challenging for teachers.     

Can research realise a bit of utopia? The impact of action research on the policy of childcare in Flanders

For the past 10 years, there has been ongoing research at the University of Ghent on professionalism in childcare (the 0–3 age group) in the Flemish Community of Belgium. This research has been inspired by the ‘Contesting Early Childhood’ movement, which is based on the premise that pedagogic research can lead to social change. The first studies dealt with the relationship between gender and professionalism (2002–2010). These ‘Men in Childcare’ studies were embedded in a campaign to increase the number of male workers. Between 2005 and 2008 a PhD study focused on the de-professionalisation that has taken place within the Flemish childcare sector. This study, ‘The construction of a new profession’, was part of a large European Social Fund project involving many partners across Europe. This article aims not only to shed light on the results of these studies, but also to delve into the influences that these projects and studies have had on political decision-making through their embedding in large ‘communicative spaces’.     

‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development

The aim of this article is to analyse how good intentions in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) discursively construct and maintain differences between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The empirical material consists of textbooks about sustainable development used in Swedish schools. An analysis of how ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are constructed and maintained is done with help from critical race theory, whiteness studies and Popkewitz’ notion of double gestures, exclusion through intentions of inclusion. The analysis departs from five dichotomies: tradition/civilisation, dirtiness/purity, chaos/order, ignorance/morality and helped/helping. We consider these dichotomies as cogwheels operating in an ‘Otherness machinery’. Through this machinery, ‘We’ are constructed as knowing, altruistic, conscious and good. The Other is simultaneously constructed as ‘uncivilised’ or as a ‘bad’ Other in need of higher moral standards. With help from these two Others, ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ is formed. The ESD project could then be understood as a colonial and excluding project, and we ask how it is possible to avoid that ‘our common world’ only belong to ‘Us’?