The Careers Service: Threatened by Youth Unemployment ‐‐ Saved by Youth Training

Abstract

The modern careers service has its origins in the post‐war world of full employment. Unlike its inter‐war counterpart, which concentrated on finding jobs for young people, the post‐war service has been preoccupied with giving them vocational guidance. With a professional rationale resting on an assumption of genuine occupational choice for young people, high unemployment could have generated serious professional challenges to those occupationally socialised during a period of full employment Yet most of the careers officers interviewed in a Midlands conurbation maintained that though their day‐to‐day work had changed and become more difficult, their professional role, far from being diminished, had been unchanged or even extended by high unemployment. It would seem that they, like their clients, had been ‘rescued’ from unemployment by YTS. ¹ 1. The Youth Training Scheme (YTS) was introduced in 1983 as a replacement for the Youth Opportunities Programme. One key element in the new scheme was that on‐the‐job training had to be complemented by the equivalent of 13 weeks off‐the‐job training. Initially, schemes lasted for one year. However, in 1985 it was announced that in future they were to be two years in duration. In 1990, YTS gave way to Youth Training (YT). Under YT, only those training providers who offered courses leading to at least National Vocational Qualification Level II or its equivalent would be able to run schemes. The newly created TECs were to be responsible for ensuring the quality of the training.

     

'When in doubt,preserve': exploring the traces of teaching and material culture in English schools

To start with polytechnics, and so on, is like presenting a naked man with a top‐hat when what he wants is a pair of trousers. ^{1 1}D. Dilks, Curzon in India, (2 vols., New York, 1969), I, 244.

Lord Curzon, 1901

     

Die Schweiz im Abseits? Bestimmende Themen der Pädagogik zwischen 1945 und 1954

This article deals with the educational Situation in post‐war Switzerland between 1945 and 1954. The author describes three processes which took place during this period. On the basis of an analysis of two educational journals, the “Schweizerische Lehrerzeitung” and the “Schweizer Schule”, the author distin‐guishes a phase of irritation, followed by a time of isolation. The third phase (around 1954) was characterized by integrating forces which manoeuvred the educational development in Switzerland into a position between collaboration with processes from abroad and position taking. ^{1 1}Überarbeitetes Referat, gehalten anlässlich der Jahrestagung 1993 der Historischen Kommission der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehung in Thumau bei Bayreuth, 21. September 1993.

     

Charles Sturt University Extended Practicum Program: Deliberative and Serendipitous Learning

Two recent trends in teacher education in Australia have been partnerships and internships or extended practica. Both of these trends are underpinned by a recognition of the importance of site‐based learning as part of teacher education and professional development. Whilst many extended practicum programs in Australia are in their infancy, it is worth examining the grounds on which they were established and the opportunities they provide for the participants. This paper is concerned with an Extended Practicum Program (EPP) that is based on a partnership between Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, the New South Wales Department of School Education (NSW DSE) and the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSW TF).     

ROMANIAN HIGHER EDUCATION DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD

Romania has a long tradition of higher education, one which was stifled during the period of communist rule from 1948 to 1989 and is now, during the period of transition which began in 1990, beginning to re‐emerge. The system is confronted with shortages of academic personnel in a number of fields and with the financial inability to offer academic staff proper salaries or even to finance much needed improvements in infrastructure. The system, which used to be completely public, is now confronted with the mushrooming of private universities of dubious quality. The system of assessment and accreditation of the new institutions, both private and public, is described, as is the development of national standards for a final licenta ^{1 1} This degree/diploma, similar to the French licence, is the first degree/diploma of long‐cycle undergraduate higher education that is awarded in Romania. View all notes examination. The hope is that these and other reforms coupled to an annual expenditure of at least 4 percent of GNP on higher education will lead to steady improvement in the output of Romanian higher education institutions.

     

Beyond Reasonable Doubt? Researching ‘race’ in educational settings

Abstract

This article is intended to highlight some of the main features about race‐related research in education as it is configured in the 1990s. More specifically, it reflects on the status of antiracist research and addresses the thorny issue of the legitimacy of research which is explicitly ‘partisan’. In offering a position statement on partisan research I am particularly concerned with addressing the question: to what extent is the term, ‘partisan research’, an oxymoron? ^{1 1}This article started life as a contribution to the Racial Equality in Initial Teacher Education project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Reference Number F215A.E). I am grateful to Leverhulme and to colleagues on the project for their support in its initial stages. Thanks also to David Halpin, Derek Layder, Sally Tomlinson, Carol Vincent and, in particular, Martyn Denscombe for acting as ‘critical friends’ in the later phases.

     

The Cleveland Conference

Human beings whose primal impressions come from a machine — it's the first time in history this has occurred ... a cloud settles over the country from coast to coast, a cloud of visual and aural symbols creating the new kind of thought‐environment in which Americans now live. ^{1 1}Ruth Goldsen, The Show and Tell Machine, (New York: Delta Pub. Col, 1975), pp. ix, l.

The ubiquitous box influences what we squirt, squeeze, smear. It has become the predominant inculcator of values. It has changed the long standing institutions of government, religion, and family. ^{2 2}Gail West, “The Effects of T‐V: A Bibliography,” The Living Light, 17 (Fall ‘80), p. 220.

     

MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION OF FORMER JESUIT COLLÈGES IN FRANCE, 1761–1763(1)

Ever since the 19th century–when the Unitarian state came to be–Western countries have accepted the principle of (state) intervention in the interest of the child.1 ¹ Cf. G. Tillekens (Ed.), Het opgelegde leren. Hoofdstukken uit de geschiedenis van de school (Nijmegen, 1986). T. Peters and L. Walgrave, “Maatschappelijk‐historische duidingen bij het ontstaan van de Belgische jeugdbescherming”, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Criminologie, XX (1978) 2, pp.57‐70. This readiness to intervene has led to an ever expanding and increasing interventionism in the actual development of youth care.2 ² Cf. E. Verhellen, Jeugdbescherming en jeugdbeschermingsrecht (Antwerpen, 1989). With respect to any of these interventions, one can distinguish specific environmentally related effects.3 ³ Especially in matters of education, these specific environmentally‐related effects have been the object of research and compensating action. For a survey, see for instance H, Brutsaert, Gelijke kansen en leerlinggerichtheid in het secundair onderwijs (Leuven, 1986). A. Dewaele, De onderwijssituatie van de verschalende sociale groepen in Viaanderen. Een literatuurstudie met bijzondere aandacht voor de arbeidersgroep (Leuven, 1982). A. Demeyer, Het lager scolair rendement van arbeiderskinderen als sociaal probleem (Doctoral dissertation, Gent, 1975). C. Smets (Ed.), Onderwijs en vorming als hefbomen voor armoedebestrijding (Brussel, 1987). For specific environmentally‐related effects in juvenile justice, see M. Andriessen, “Kinderbescherming en gezinspolitiek”, in: P. Engelen e.a., Ouderschap in verandering (Lisse, 1986) pp. 260‐270. L. Walgrave, Uitgeleide aan de jeugdbescherming (Leuven, 1978). E. Verhellen, “Statusdelikten‐situaties: nieuwe variaties op een actueel ouder thema”, in: Het Statusdelikt (Gent, 1982) pp. 85‐103. Lower or unskilled working‐class children in particular tend to be highly “socially vulnerable’.4 ⁴ The term was launched by N. Vettenburg, L. Walgrave and J. Van Kerckvoorde in: Jeugdwerkloosheid, jeugddelinquentie en maatschappelijke kwetsbaarheid (Antwerpen, 1984). It refers to the danger encountered by population groups to suffer the negative effects of their contacts with social institutions. Yet, this social vulnerability cannot be considered apart from the overall frame of policy, in which both social institutions and youngsters with their families are actors. See, M. Bouverne-De Bie, ‘Over jeugdwerkloosheid, of: de gedwongen kwetsbaarheid van een generatie’, in: Panopticon, V (1984) 6, pp. 495–506. Findings like these raise questions as to the processes through which youth care has developed, as well as to the processes which contribute to the preservation of these specific environmentally related effects.

     

Visual Communication and the Map: How Maps as Visual Objects Convey Meaning in Specific Contexts

Abstract

This article reports the results of a case study of two maps, produced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and their involvement in a federal court case over the deployment of the Navy's low-frequency active sonar. Borrowing from Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar] approach to visual analysis, Turnbull's (1989) Turnbull, D. 1989. Maps are territories, science is an atlas: A portfolio of exhibits, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  [Google Scholar] understanding of the map, and Latour's (1990) Latour, B. 1990. “Drawing things together.”. In Representation in scientific practice, Edited by: Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  [Google Scholar] understanding of how visuals work in social contexts, the article offers an analytical approach to studying maps as powerful visual, rhetorical objects.     

Schooling cultures: institutionalizing heteronormativity and heterosexism

This paper explores how some schooling cultures in New South Wales (hereafter NSW), Australia, police and silence non‐heterosexuality through a number of institutional processes which enable homophobia and heterosexism to flourish, while normalizing and constituting heterosexuality as the dominant and only valid sexuality. The discussion shows that despite an apparent broader societal ‘tolerance’ for non‐heterosexuality, as well as legislation that condemns anti‐‘homosexual’ discrimination in education in NSW, homophobic prejudice — often in the form of silence, omission and assumption — prevails. It illustrates that schools need to be much more aware and proactive in addressing issues pertaining to this social justice issue to ensure a safe and equitable learning and teaching environment for all members of the school community.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

(Foucault, 1978 Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction, Edited by: Hurley, R. New York, NY: Vintage.  [Google Scholar], p. 27)

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

(Rich, 1980 Rich, A. 1980/84. On lies, secrets and silence. Selected prose 1966–1978, London: Virago.  [Google Scholar]/84, p.186)     

Notes on British education: an American's perspective

Abstract

This paper argues that the Scottish Education Department (SED) has dispensed with its earlier advocacy of human relations management approaches to staff development. The concept of ‘collaboration’, stressed in the National Committee for the In‐service Training of Teachers (NCITT) reports of 1984, is not mentioned in the SED's consultation paper School Teachers’ Professional Development into the 1990s. The period between 1979 and 1984 is analysed briefly. This period was typified by a declared preference for collaborative INSET. Consideration is given to the SED's consultation paper School Teachers’ Professional Development into the 1990s, and the SED's concept of ‘professional development’ is examined. The SED's management ethos as implied in Curriculum and Assessment in Scotland: a policy for the 1990s is incorporated into the analysis.     

Cumbria; An Open Tech Feasibility Study

A recent FEU paper, ‘TDLB Standards in Further Education’, advocates that in future, ‘initial teaching training’ and progression routes for staff in AFHE should be founded on ’national, competence‐based standards’. ¹ 1. ‘TDLB Standars in Further Education’, FEU, London, February 1992      

Die soziale und die demographische Dimension des Sprachgebrauchs im Brüssel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts

This article focuses on the way the 19th century language situation in Brussels was rooted in processes of modernization and migration. At the same time it aims to be the framework for interpreting the 19th century educational developments in Brussels.

After a short overview of economic, social and demographic developments in the 19th century Belgian capital, the author argues that this developments, the linguistic policy and the uneven social status of French and Dutch resulted in a socially separated language use. The language barrier between the Dutch‐speaking working class and the French‐speaking bourgeoisie only became transparent for the social subtop and certain parts of the middle class. Finally the author shows that only from the end of the 19th century onwards linguistic and social barriers started to break down, while in the same period a new Flemish elite emerged and fought against the Frenchification. ^{1 1}Dieser Artikel wurde Juli 1991 geschrieben.

     

Cultures Matter

“The center of gravity of our culture is shifting from a culture of labor to a culture of play, yet we are totally unprepared for this step. Our educational policies practically ignore the problem. . . If ever any great human emergency demanded statesmanlike management and the self‐sacrificing labor of men of goodwill, the coming of the tidal flood of leisure, the first dripples of which are already lapping at our doors, is such an emergency.” ¹ 1. Hugh Hartshorne, “Religious Education and Community Co‐operation,” Religious Education, January, 1933, pp. 40‐41

     

A Breadth‐First Introductory Curriculum in Computing

This article identifies strengths and weaknesses in the introductory course sequence in computing, ^{1 1}Read as “computer science,” “computer science and engineering”, or any similar title. View all notes and proposes an alternative sequence using a “breadth‐first” approach. This approach integrates theoretical material, includes scheduled laboratory work, and covers a broad range of subject matter in the discipline of computing. We also summarize our early experience teaching the first course in this sequence.

     

THE BEGINNING AND END OF YOUTH IN ROMAN ANTIQUITY 1

Scholars like J.H. Van den Berg and P. Ariès ^{2 2}J.H. Van den Berg, Metabletica of leer der veranderingen (Nijkerk, 1956); P. Aries, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous I'ancien régime (Paris, 1960). — not professional historians by origin — introduced a dramatic innovation in historical approaches. Influenced by their pioneering research on children in the past, many modern psychologists, sociologists or historians don't consider childhood (or youth, old age, maternal love...) as a natural, universal, ageless and self‐evident “phenomenon “ anymore. For F. Musgrove, for example, the concept of youth as a separate age of man is fairly recent. This sociologist expresses his opinion in a radical way: “The adolescent as a distinct species is the creation of modern social attitudes and institutions. A creature neither child nor adult, he is a comparatively recent socio‐psycho/ogi‐cal invention, scarcely two centuries old. [...] The adolescent was invented at the same time as the steam engine. The principal architect of the latter was Watt in 1765, of the former Rousseau in 1762”. ^{3 3}F. Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order (London, 1968²) 13 ff. ("Making adolescents") and 33 ff. ("The invention of the adolescent").

Such statements are a simplification of historical reality. The view of A. Kriekemans is more balanced: depending on the cultural environment, the term “youth “ may cover a different period of life and may be more or less complicated, involving varying levels of conflict, having its own identity, its own way of living, its own status, and its own expectations. ^{4 4}A. Kriekemans, Geschiedenis van de jeugdpsychologie (Tielt‐Den Haag, 1967) p. 298. Let us apply these. words to Roman antiquity and examine the place of youth in the human life span as well as the circumstances which made possible its existence as a separate entity. Before starting the exposition itself, it should be noted that we are dealing with upper‐class youth (we know a/most nothing about youth in the lower classes) and with the young man (girls mostly married between the ages of 12 and 15 and there was no real interval between childhood and adulthood).

     

‘Other’ boys: negotiating non‐hegemonic masculinities in the primary school

Focusing on the experiences of boys who choose not to cultivate their masculinities through hegemonic discourses and practices, this paper seeks to empirically explore and theorize the extent to which it is possible to live out the category ‘boy’ in non‐hegemonic ways in the primary school setting. Drawing upon a year‐long ethnography of children's constructions of their gender and sexual identities in two primary schools, it examines how a minority of 10‐ and 11‐year‐old white working and middle‐class boys create and seek out spaces from which they can resist, subvert and actively challenge prevailing hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinities within a peer group pupil culture which thrives on the daily policing and shaming of Other1 Following the writings of bel hooks (e.g., 1990 hooks b. (1990) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics (Boston, MA, South End Press)  [Google Scholar]) I am loosely using the term Other to conceptualise those identities located at the margins— those non‐hegemonic identities that are in some ways resistant and order‐transforming (rather than conventional and order‐maintaining) and thus cross and/or blur sex/gender boundaries. View all notes masculinities. The paper attempts to theorize more fully the inter‐relationship of hegemonic and non‐hegemonic masculinities and argues that the ways in which boys inhabit and construct non‐hegemonic masculinities both subverts and reinforces hegemonic gender/sexual relations.     

Interpreting biography in the History of Education: past and present

Epigraph

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least…. I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and ‘A’ levels, there was almost a sense that society owed us a living. (Roy Lowe, 2002 ^{1 1}Roy Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education: Is it Central or Peripheral?’ History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 492–3. )

Women were not obviously on the outside when I attended my first conference – a day conference in 1976 at what was then the Birmingham Polytechnic, now University of Central England. Many women attended although in the first years few were keynote speakers. More importantly there was little about women in the history itself except in the meetings of the Women’s Education Study Group where Carol Dyhouse, June Purvis, Penny Summerfield and Gaby Weiner were all dominant. (Ruth Watts, 2005 ^{2 2}Ruth Watts, ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 226. )

In 1967, aged 11, I moved on from my primary school in south London, and was selected to enter the local grammar school. I left most of my friends behind and began a daily routine of walking nervously through the council housing estates in my school uniform. By the time I left this school, seven years later, it had moved to one of the more prosperous suburbs of London to avoid being turned into a comprehensive. In the early twenty-first century, it is one of the leading academic secondary schools in the country, which it certainly was not in 1967. (Gary McCulloch, 2007 ^{3 3}Gary McCulloch, ‘Forty Years On: Presidential Address to the History of Education Society, London 4 November 2006’, History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 6. )     

Educational psychologists and multi‐agency working: exploring professional identity

This research was conducted in the light of the Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, London, 2003 Department for Education and Skills (DfES). 2003. Every Child Matters, London: The Stationery Office.  [Google Scholar]) agenda which highlights the importance of multi‐agency working. The research explored the professional identity of Educational Psychologists (EPs) with experience of multi‐agency working in six Local Authorities within the Midlands area. Ten EPs participated in detailed semi‐structured interviews.

Activity Theory was used to facilitate the comparison of aspects of the EPs' two work roles, as part of the Educational Psychology Service (EPS) and as part of a multi‐agency team (MAT). Each EP was asked to consider different elements of their two roles, using a series of questions designed to elicit relationships between the ways in which they worked, the contexts and the other people involved. From these questions, issues of professional identity emerged and these were then explored in more detail.

The experiences of EPs working in MATs were generally described very positively. It appeared that multi‐agency working enhanced feelings of professional identity. In some cases participants indicated that this was aided by the clarification and development of their own skills and in other cases by being afforded the opportunity to work creatively in a wider range of contexts. The flexibility of multi‐agency working appears to have presented opportunities for individuals to work to their strengths and increased positive feelings EPs have of their own professional identity.     

School‐based Teacher Training. Can it work?

The article briefly reports on a school‐based training group, citing it as illustration of a development shared by other schools which have evolved partnerships with higher education. It suggests that good mentoring practice has existed in previous years and that there is a pool of expertise in schools, which can be tapped for the benefit of teacher training in the new courses. (Implementation of Circular 9/92). ¹ Nichloas Pyke, Inspectors cast doubt on in‐school training. TES 10.3.95 article on forthcoming report by HM Inspectorate on the School Central Intial Teacher Training Scheme. (SCITT) View all notes