Pedagogies for the ‘Dis‐engaged’: Diverse Experiences of the Young People’s Arts Award Programme

Art education is often praised for its engaging programmes and inclusive pedagogies, with many initiatives created with the intention of widening access for those who are deemed to be lacking. This article investigates one such programme – the young people’s Arts Award, which is a nationally recognised qualification for young people aged 11–25. I call upon a range of pedagogies in order to critique the Arts Award within the context of informal and alternative education settings in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a 12‐month ethnographic study, the research was conducted across five diverse programmes which included youth work projects and alternative provision. I present two cases – ‘learning to be an artist’ and ‘learning to behave’ – which demonstrate a hierarchy of pedagogy in the application of this programme across these particular contexts. Artists’ Signature Pedagogies are used as an analytical framework to explore the affordances of working with artists through the programme. Further, I engage with the Pedagogy of Poverty to demonstrate that young people who were classified as ‘dis‐engaged’ were more likely to receive lower quality programmes, low‐level work and over‐regulated teaching. I argue that despite changes to the ways that young people access art education, there continues to be unequal opportunities. This finding is significant for not only creative practitioners and youth arts workers, but also arts education policy makers and programmers.     

Conditions for mental health in education: Towards relational practice

There are concerns globally about the emotional wellbeing and mental health of young people and in this paper a critical orientation comprises both theoretical and empirical data sources. The case is made that (1) the medical model of mental health – that of problem identification, diagnosis and medical treatment at the level of the individual – is not appropriate for the vast majority of children and young people in schools and (2) relational approaches would be more sensitive in responding to the complexity of the ‘conditions’ in the schools, homes and communities in which young people live. Articulations of these conditions in the literature are explored while we also draw on empirical data from part of an evaluation of a school-based teacher-training programme in which interviewees and respondents mapped out their own conditions for emotional wellbeing and mental health. We conclude with proposals for relational approaches which (1) acknowledge the links between affect, cognition and school climate and culture, (2) foreground mental health and poverty as impacting on young people’s emotional wellbeing in their communities, families and schools and (3) attend to voice – providing spaces in which young people can develop their own ‘preferred narratives’ concerning emotional wellbeing and mental health.     

Developing a learning-centred framework for feedback literacy

Abstract

There is an increasing focus on notions of feedback in which students are positioned as active players rather than recipients of information. These discussions have been either conceptual in character or have an empirical focus on designs to support learners in feedback processes. There has been little emphasis on learners’ perspectives on, and experiences of, the role they play in such processes and what they need in order to benefit from feedback. This study therefore seeks to identify the characteristics of feedback literacy – that is, how students understand and can utilise feedback for their own learning – by analysing students’ views of feedback processes drawing on a substantial data set derived from a study of feedback in two large universities. The analysis revealed seven groupings of learner feedback literacy, including understanding feedback purposes and roles, seeking information, making judgements about work quality, working with emotions, and processing and using information for the benefit of their future work (31 categories in total). By identifying these realised components of feedback literacy, in the form of illustrative examples, the emergent set of competencies can enable investigations of the development of feedback literacy and improve feedback designs in courses through alignment to these standards.     

Using the inquiry-based learning approach to enhance student innovativeness: a conceptual model

ABSTRACT

Individual innovativeness has become one of the most important employability skills for university graduates. In this paper, we focus on how students could be better prepared to be innovative in the workplace, and we argue that inquiry-based learning (IBL) – a pedagogical approach in which students follow the inquiry-based processes used by scientists to construct knowledge – can be effective for this purpose. Drawing on research which examines the social and cognitive micro-foundations of innovative behavior, we develop a conceptual model that links IBL and student innovativeness, and introduce three teacher-controlled design elements that can influence the strength of this relationship, namely whether an inquiry is open or closed, discovery-focused or information focused and individual or team-based. We argue that an open, discovery-focused and team-based inquiry offers the greatest potential for enhancing students’ skills in innovation. This paper has several implications for higher education research and practice.     

Art Education for Understanding: Goodman,Arts PROPEL,and DBAE

‘What is art for?’ This provocative question was the motto of the 31st Annual Convention of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) held in Atlanta, Georgia, 1991. As a visiting scholar for a semester at Harvard Project Zero, I had rich opportunities to study art education programmes in higher education and public schools all over the United States. As a consequence, I felt complelled to reformulate the NAEA question, and ask ‘What is art education for?’ This essay argues for the importance of understanding and meaning-making in art education. It starts with a review of some common rationales for the teaching of art that stress both the alleged ability of the arts to promote ‘good’– i.e. creative, harmonious, and civilised – characters and the instrumental value of the arts as a means of communication. These rationales are then evaluated within the context of Nelson Goodman's philosophy, which emphasises the primary role of curiosity in the arts. The following two sections discuss the rationales, contributions and limitations of two art programmes that are currently being carried out in the United States: Arts PROPEL and Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE). Arts PROPEL has introduced long-term, open-ended projects that integrate production (making) with perception (learning to ‘read’ art works and observe the world closely) and reflection (thinking about one's work and the works of others). The DBAE curricula are sequentially organised and integrate content from the disciplines of art creation, art criticism (learning what to look for and how to interpret), art history (studying contexts and alternatives of taste and style), and aesthetics (building a personal philosophy of art). In the final section, Arts PROPEL and DBAE are compared. In the context of previous rationales for the teaching of art, the similarity in aims of these programmes stand out as more important than the differences in approach. Neither do these programmes overstate the humanising power of art, nor do they focus on visual literacy per se. Instead, both programmes emphasise the role of reflection, interpretation, and understanding in art. Productive and analytic art activities are used as important vehicles in making sense of the world and of ourselves. It is concluded that Arts PROPEL and DBAE offer promising and supplementary approaches to promote curiosity and to teach art for the sake of understanding.     

Gender stereotypes and gendered vocational aspirations among Swiss secondary school students

Background: Horizontal gender inequalities appear to be rather stable, with girls more often choosing ‘female’ service professions, and boys choosing career paths related to science, technology, engineering or Mathematics.

Purpose: Non-egalitarian patriarchal gender-role orientations and gender associations (perceived femininity) of the school subjects German Language Arts and Mathematics are theorised – triangulating different theoretical backgrounds – and empirically analysed as a major predictor of gender-typical vocational aspirations, considering interest in these school subjects as a mediating factor. Furthermore, we focus on a patriarchal relation of father’s and mother’s workforce participation as a root of gender-role orientations, and teacher gender in regard to its impact on gendered images of subjects.

Sample: Empirical analyses are based on survey data from eighth-graders (around the ages of 14 and 15 at the time of data gathering) in the Swiss canton of Bern. The sample only encompasses children from two-parent families, as patriarchality in terms of differences in workforce participation between father and mother is taken into account.

Design and methods: The research issues are analysed employing structural equation models. The statistical package Mplus allows for an analysis of the two dependent dichotomous variables ‘gender-typical vocational aspiration’ and ‘gender-atypical vocational aspiration’. The hierarchic structure of the sample (school class clusters) is taken into account.

Results: Findings reveal different patterns for boys and girls; for boys, gender-typical (male) vocational aspiration could be explained to a small extent via gender-role orientations, interest in Mathematics and gender associations of school subjects; for girls, the factors under consideration could be empirically linked to ‘atypical vocational aspiration’. Teacher gender only has an impact among girls: if girls are taught by a female Mathematics teacher, they perceive the subject as a bit more female and show a higher interest in this subject. Their likelihood of having a gender-atypical vocational aspiration is a bit higher than among girls with a male Mathematics teacher who perceive the subject as a bit less female and, thus, show somewhat lower interest in this subject.

Conclusions: There are still links – although weak – between gender stereotypes and vocational aspirations. Gender-role orientations are rooted in the family. A sensitisation towards gender stereotypes and their impact on aspirations and career would appear to be meaningful in broadening the vocational perspectives of men and women.     

The pre-cloak superhero: a tool for superhero play and intervention

Since the early 1940s, superheroes have been used by educators and clinicians to instill community and confidence; resiliency and courage; tolerance and sharing among children. Through superhero play, the early childhood classroom has become a laboratory filled with capes and costumes. In the therapist’s milieu, the empowered superhero provides a model for children to aspire to. But both of these environments – the classroom and the counselor’s office – use the fully powered superhero. While the literature attests to health benefits provided through use of the empowered superhero, this article draws attention to a resource often overlooked: the pre-empowered, pre-cloak superhero. As many popular superheroes (~86%) were orphaned or abandoned, prior to acquiring superpowers, the article focuses on the adversities they share with these two specific groups of vulnerable children. With orphaned and abandoned children as the treatment group of focus, the article proposes environments for pre-cloak interventions. In addition, the article proposes a dual-stage program, which would combine pre-cloak interventions with superhero play. For the educator and clinician, possibility awaits through this expansion of the superhero palette.     

Greening steel work: Varieties of Capitalism and the ‘greening’ of skills

An important driver of change in work, employment and skills is European Union policy aims of sustainable economic growth and the cultivation of a green economy. Part of the latter – which is supported by increasing environmental regulation – focuses on the development of a ‘green skills agenda’, which involves the ‘greening’ of existing occupations as well as meeting the skill needs of new environmental sectors and occupations. In this paper, we compare attempts to ‘green’ work and skills through an examination of engineering apprenticeships within the German and British steel industries. We argue that efforts to ‘green’ skills are taking place at varying degrees of intensity, mostly because of variations in institutional context. The evidence we present suggests that implementation of change is much more dynamic in the context of Coordinated Market Economies such as Germany, where development is shaped by robust VET frameworks and wider processes of environmental innovation. In contrast, within Liberal Market Economies such as the UK, there are significant barriers to the vision for and investments in skills generally, as well as those necessary for greening the labour process, with an extant development paradigm that is driven by short-term benefits and a limited focus on environmental compliance.     

‘It’s all about standardisation’ – Exploring the digital (re)configuration of school management and administration

Schools have long made use of digital technologies to support the co-ordination of management and administrative processes – not least ‘management information systems’, ‘virtual learning environments’ and other ‘institutional technologies’. The last five years have seen the convergence of these technologies into integrated rather than separate systems – thereby allowing institutionally-related data, resources and other services to be accessed and used by school leaders, administrators, teachers, students and parents. Many commentators see the supposedly ‘open’ nature of these integrated systems as somehow democratising and decentralising the organisation of schools. However, this paper offers a detailed account of how the social relations of schools and schooling shape and bound the use of institutional technologies. Drawing on interview data from twelve ‘early adopting’ schools in England, the paper discusses how the implementation of integrated institutional technology systems is shaped by a set of organisational, bureaucratic and disciplinary concerns. In particular, the paper illustrates how these technologies strengthen existing ‘top down’ patterns of social power and control through a series of data-driven processes. The paper therefore considers how the systems are used to reinforce a wider ‘conservative modernisation’ of schools – intensifying the managerial control of curricula, the standardisation of labour processes and the accountability of educational practices.     

Teachers’ epistemic cognition in situ: Evidence from classroom assessment

Assessment tasks require the coordination of multiple knowledge-related goals for various audiences, and therefore provide an authentic context to observe teachers’ epistemic cognition in practice. In this instrumental case study, we investigated seven, fifth grade English Language Arts teachers’ epistemic cognition as they evaluated students’ classroom assessments. Our analyses revealed that the components of epistemic cognition identified in the literature emerged in these teachers’ assessment processes. Moreover, we found evidence that teachers’ epistemic cognition was iterative and nuanced, and required shifts in aims and reliable processes. This resulted in teachers forming new kinds of “epistemic matters” and questions beyond those ideas noted in existing models of epistemic cognition. Significance and implications are discussed.     

Habitus and the psychosocial: Bourdieu with feelings

This paper explores the potential of habitus to provide a window on the psychosocial. The paper works with a notion of psychosocial study as inquiry into the mutual constitution of the individual and the social relations within which they are enmeshed. At the same time it attempts to deepen and enrich notions of habitus. Although the strong focus on agency and structure has overshadowed the role of emotions and the emotional life of individuals within conceptualisations of habitus in Bourdieu’s work, the paper argue that there are strong links between the psychosocial and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Drawing on empirical data on the affective aspects of living in an unequal society, the paper seeks to develop a psychosocial understanding of habitus that allows for a better and richer understanding of how the exterior – wider social structures – is experienced and mediated by the interior, the psyche.     

The Bachelor of Arts: slipping into the twilight or facing a new dawn?

Undergraduate students have historically engaged with the humanities and social sciences through the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree programme. Recent experiences suggest that the relevance and the value of the degree to the modern world is now being challenged: populist press questions the value of the humanities to the modern knowledge economy; public funding for teaching in the social sciences and humanities in higher education has been slashed in the UK and elsewhere; humanities and social sciences schools and departments in the USA, New Zealand and Canada rationalised and restructured; BA programmes in some Australian universities closed. All seems to suggest that the sun is setting on the BA. This paper argues that, in Australia at least, these actions have been made on the basis of a flawed understanding of contemporary BA programmes. It asserts that the contemporary BA is a very different creature to that of even the recent past. The paper offers a new definition of the contemporary Australian BA degree programme developed as a result of a comparative historical analysis research study across 39 Australian institutions. It extends an argument that perhaps the time is right for a re-examination of what is meant by ‘BA’ – before we declare the degree a relic of the past.     

The ethics of interpretation: the signifying chain from field to analysis

This paper attempts to describe the relationship between the embodied practice of fieldwork and the written articulation of this experience. Starting from Valerie Hey's conceptualization of ‘rapport’ as form of ‘intersubjective synergy’, a moment of recognition of similarity within difference – similar in structure to Laclau and Moufffe's conceptualization of hegemony – the paper explores how we can understand these moments of recognition as positioned within a complex web of signifying chains that interlink social, psychic and linguistic means of representation. Laclau and Mouffe's logics of equivalence and difference and Lacan's account of the production of meaning through metaphor and metonymy provide a theoretical language through which to explore chains of meaning in two fragments of data drawn from a study comparing disciplines and institutions in higher education. My argument is that an awareness of these processes of production of meaning is necessary to the development of an ethical mode of interpretation.     

Employability and higher education: the follies of the ‘Productivity Challenge’ in the Teaching Excellence Framework

This article considers questions of ‘employability’, a notion foregrounded in the Green and White Papers on the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The paper first questions government imperatives concerning employability and suggests a series of mismatches that are evident in the rhetorics in this area. This summary opens up elements of what I am calling the first ‘folly’ in the field. The second section of the paper considers recent research with individual academics engaged in employability activity. This research suggests another series of mismatches in the aims and outcomes of ‘employability initiatives’ and opens up a further series of ‘follies’ in the day-to-day practices of academics and students’ responses to them. The third section of the paper turns to academics’ reports of student behaviour in relation to the outcomes of their degree. This section develops an argument that relates to the final ‘folly’ associated with the current focus on employability. I argue that students’ focus on outcomes (which at face value suggests they have internalized the importance of employment) is contributing to the production of graduates who do not have the dispositions that employers – when interviewed – say that they want. The highly performative culture of higher education, encouraged by the same metrics that will be extended through the TEF, is implicated then in not preparing students for the workplace.     

Peer assessment use,its social nature challenges and perceived educational value: A teachers’ survey study

The implementation of peer assessment (PA) in the classroom faces considerable interpersonal challenges. In this quantitative survey study (N = 225) we focus on the current use and format of PA among secondary education teachers in Flanders and explore teachers’ awareness of these interpersonal challenges. We validated an instrument for measuring teachers’ awareness which was then used to investigate how this awareness level relates to their conceptions of the educational value of PA. SEM results show that teachers are slightly to moderately aware with regard to their students’ concerns about the impact of interpersonal processes in PA as well as the importance students attribute to anonymity within PA. This study illustrates that teachers’ perceived accuracy of PA is a major predictor of their belief in its educational value and opens up a new avenue for research on teachers’ awareness of interpersonal processes in PA.     

非物质文化遗产视角下中塘向氏武术传承及保护研究

文章以传承于重庆市黔江区中塘乡向氏家族的武术为研究对象,对中塘向氏武术历史渊源作纵向梳理,归纳和总结中塘向氏武术的特征和价值。同时从非物质文化遗产保护角度出发,重点关注中塘向氏武术的继承及生存状态,并对向氏武术在当下的传承提出建议。     

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.     

On cross‐cultural bridges and gaps: identity transitions among trailblazing Druze women

The emotional conflicts and evolving Identity of the first Druze women who turned to study in Israeli universities is explored in this paper. While the benefits of higher education are widely discussed, this article wishes to focus on the different, more complex effects of education on the lives and identities of women. The study examines the complex identity patterns of these pioneering women after returning to their villages on completing their studies – influenced by their uniqueness as the first women in their community to achieve academic degrees and by the intercultural transitions they experienced along the way. The narrative identity and emotional processes are derived through interview analysis of 34 first Druze women that entered universities. The findings are viewed in light of modern and postmodern psychological theories of identity discussing lacunæs in western identity theories that cannot entirely account for certain aspects of interviewees’ identities.     

Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.