The International Baccalaureate and ‘growth scepticism’: a ‘social limits’ framework

The number of schools offering the programmes of the International Baccalaureate (IB) hit 3000 in July 2010. Since 2004 the IB has aimed for further growth within a ‘wider access’ and ‘greater impact’ paradigm. A further 7000 schools are expected to be involved by 2020. However, there is now considerable concern about growth, especially within the ‘international school movement’ who see it as compromising quality. This recent phenomenon can be termed ‘growth scepticism’ in the same way economic growth is now questioned as desirable. This paper charts this development and argues there is room for a much wider framework of analysis, viewing the global growth of the IB within a social and moral lens. This paper takes the economist Fred Hirsch’s 1976 Hirsch, F. 1976. The social limits to growth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] book The social limits to growth as its core theoretical framework, linking growth to potential social externalities such as increased competition and the commercialization of society.     

The ‘Reality’ of School Organization

Five headteachers formed a group for the purpose of school evaluation. The approach used involved inter‐visiting and the sharing of the evaluation of each other's schools. The headteachers decided to evaluate the systems operating in their schools, evaluating each other in turn having involved the deputy in collecting staff views. All schools made changes as a result of the evaluations. The need for commitment by LEA or DES to such school evaluation was considered to be important.     

The social life of Learning Analytics: cluster analysis and the ‘performance’ of algorithmic education

This paper argues that methods used for the classification and measurement of online education are not neutral and objective, but involved in the creation of the educational realities they claim to measure. In particular, the paper draws on material semiotics to examine cluster analysis as a ‘performative device’ that, to a significant extent, creates the educational entities it claims to objectively represent through the emerging body of knowledge of Learning Analytics (LA). It also offers a more critical and political reading of the algorithmic assemblages of LA, of which cluster analysis is a part. Our argument is that if we want to understand how algorithmic processes and techniques like cluster analysis function as performative devices, then we need methodological sensibilities that consider critically both their political dimensions and their technical-mathematical mechanisms. The implications for critical research in educational technology are discussed.     

Inclusion of ‘generations of human rights’ in social science textbooks

The ‘Generations of Human Rights’ (GHR) classified ‘rights’ in terms of the interests they protect and to law and legislation related to Human Rights (HR) policies. First GHR are civil and political rights, the second GHR are socio-economic and cultural rights, and the third GHR are collective and solidarity rights. This article examines the inclusion of the GHR through conceptual content analysis from current primary and secondary school social science textbooks in India. The results of the study show that GHR are explicitly and implicitly included more at secondary than primary school level. The political science and history textbooks at the secondary level generally indicate a higher instance of implicit and explicit inclusion of GHR. The null inclusion (completely missing) of GHR is more at the primary school level. In addition, while the first GHR are more explicitly included, the second GHR shows weak explicit inclusion and the third GHR is the weakest although there are many opportunities to include third GHR in social science textbooks.     

The influence of grandparents’ social class on children’s aspirations

Social class mobility from grandparent to grandchild is a relatively neglected topic. Grandparents today are often healthier and more active, and have longer relationships with their grandchildren than in previous generations. We used data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study (n = 8570) to investigate the influence of maternal and paternal grandparents’ social class on the aspirations of children at age seven. Using path analysis and controlling for family income, mother’s and father’s education, lone motherhood, and child’s ethnicity and gender, we found very small direct effects from the paternal grandmother’s social class to the grandchild’s classed aspirations, and small, indirect effects, via parents’ class, of grandparents’ class on child’s classed aspirations. Multi-group analyses found few differences by ethnicity and gender. There was no evidence that, at this age, mixed-class parentage raises the aspirations of working-class children (the ‘sunken middle-class’ hypothesis).     

PRACTICAL INSIGHTS The power of ‘already’

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The ACB of ELT…‘SLA’

SLA stands for Second Language Acquisition. Researchers working in this area are primarily concerned with understanding how people acquire a second language, both in terms of the processes they go through and the learning outcomes.     

The ‘Naturals’ and Victorian Cambridge: reflections on the anatomy of an elite, 1851‐1914

Abstract

abstract There is plenty of evidence that Britain has underinvested in education and now has a smaller base of educated manpower than many industrial competitors. While much debate has centred on what the government can do about it, the government itself now places much hope on the private sector. Yet much government and business policy is at odds with this objective which seems to owe more to romanticism about capitalism than to hard‐headed appreciation of where the market really can deliver the educational goods by creating appropriate private incentives.

     

The Relationship between the Concepts of ‘Pastoral Care’ and ‘Authority’

Abstract

The term ‘pastor’ clearly has a religious origin and is thought of in connection with providing spiritual sustenance. Such provision must be seen in relation to some concept of authority since the pastor's job could otherwise not be done.

It is likely that the connotation of a pastor in the religious sense has been carried over to the schools, especially when it is considered that schools are traditionally structures of authority.

What is necessary is to insist upon the conceptual link between ‘pastoral care’ and ‘authority’ explicitly, so as to judge the final appropriateness of ‘pastoral care’ in schools.     

‘Teaching’ or ‘support’? The poisoned chalice of the role of Students’ Skills Centres

After the 1992 Further and Higher Education Reform Act enabled polytechnics and the qualifying franchised colleges to be renamed universities or higher education institutions, the dominance of the rhetoric of skill development aggravated long‐standing schisms between further and higher education about whether or not degree‐level courses should be available in further education. One aspect of these disagreements concerns the dominance of a skills deficit model and its influence in learning and teaching. This article draws on the findings of a study into the role of a Students’ Skills Centre (SSC) in a post‐1992 university. It focuses on how and why working in SSCs is envisaged as a subordinate function, as a ‘support’ and not a ‘teaching’ role. The research study utilised both quantitative and qualitative research methods in a case‐study design to examine the nature of students’ requests for help in an SSC. The article argues that academic skills, including writing, study and key skills, are more effective if taught in a subject/disciplinary‐specific context. Hence, lecturers in the SSC had to provide intensive teaching, which, at the same time, also addressed this contextual dimension. This is a complex and highly specialised teaching process, yet, despite the yearly increase in numbers of students attending the centre for help, university managers and some academic staff refused to acknowledge the complexity of the nature of students’ learning requirements or the teaching function of the role of lecturers working in the SSC.     

The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education

Abstract

This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketization’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in which making markets involve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector.     

The Reciprocity of ‘Imitative Learning’ through Apprenticeship

Humans are proposed to have evolved to learn through observation, imitation and practice or mimesis. In this article, the contribution of imitation, as an important but poorly understood aspect of mimetic learning, is advocated to create affordances for dyadic learning. However, learning through imitation is often perceived with negative connotations perhaps framed by viewpoints individuals have derived from experiences of rote learning and repetitive work. Yet, learning through imitation plays a key role in the learning of skills, including many of the non-verbal communicative and tacit aspects of trades work. This article explores the ways trade apprentices learn, with emphasis on the contribution of imitation. Recommendations to improve the reciprocal relationships between mentor and apprentice, initiated and developed through learning by ‘imitation’, are discussed and considered.     

The social functions of teachers’ beliefs in an online class

This study presents an investigation of teachers’ beliefs about working with English learners, as constructed in online class discussions. Using conversation and discourse analysis from a discursive psychology (DP) perspective, analysis focuses on the discursive production of beliefs and the social actions achieved by this production in interaction. By orienting to teachers’ beliefs as interactionally emergent phenomena, findings highlight the ways that teachers account for their belief claims and the ways that teachers’ statements of belief work to perform certain social functions within the forum itself, including affiliation and disagreement. Implications for teacher education and for the potential of DP to contribute to research on teachers’ beliefs are discussed.     

The ‘spirit of education’ in Indonesian Pesantren

This paper employs Foucauldian theory to consider Islamic boarding school experiences in Indonesia. For some pupils ‘the spirit of education’ – a dimension of pleasure – comes to be highly valued, creating a lifelong passion for the pursuit of knowledge. Two school principals (both pesantren [Islamic boarding school] graduates themselves) articulated strong commitment to the ‘spirit of education’. Yet their respective boarding schools were very poor, not only by western standards but compared with Indonesian public schools, and conditions were austere. The embodiment of pesantren discourse as high academic achievement is illustrated by the example of Khadija – a young female pesantren graduate now studying at doctoral level in the United Kingdom. Explaining the embodied production of the ‘spirit of education’ demands looking at charismatic pedagogy, strict rules, austere conditions and sparse provision of learning resources as regimes of truth and power–knowledge relations that inhere in pesantren as lived experiences of pupils.     

The Use of Tape as a ‘Lead-Medium’

Mathematical circles in the schools of the Federal Republic of Germany are engaged in the examination and discussion of two proposed teaching reforms, the first concerned with the content of teaching and the second with its methods. The proposals stem from the 1968 Conference of Cultural Ministers, a subject of which was the establishment of ‘A Framework of Guiding Principles of Reform’. These principles provide for reforms in mathematics teaching in schools, to start in the school year 1972/73, and preparatory work has been going on in a number of places. The research includes a mathematical project on the theme: ‘Value of Digit Systems’, work on which has been carried out by the Institut für Film und Bild in association with the publishing firm of Ernest Klett.     

Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students

This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, ‘elite’ institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on-campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry in Mobilities. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (Soc Stud Sci 24(4):641–741, 1994) and Law and Mol (Environ Plan D 19:609–621, 2001) in order to analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh. The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.