Has schooling of ADHD students reached a crossroads?

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to examine and describe educational leaders’ mindset types related to schooling of students with ADHD in five municipalities with ADHD special education classes and in five pair-matched municipalities without such classes. Selection of the ten municipalities was based on the results from a nationwide survey (response rate 76%) aimed at investigating how Swedish municipalities organise schooling for ADHD students. Interview data was analysed with the use of a theoretical framework presented as a typology table describing mindsets more or less in line with either the neuropsychiatric paradigm or inclusion. The perceived neuropsychiatric influence on ADHD students’ schooling seemed to affect educational leaders’ decision making, leading to different schooling for ADHD students in different municipalities. The findings, presented as municipality profiles, are discussed in relation to the notion of inclusive education and alternative educational paths leading either towards inclusion or exclusion.     

Marginalization of democratic values: a gendered practice of schooling?

Contemporary Swedish debate is much occupied with young men's attraction to anti-democratic ideals and the fact that they seem to learn less than girls about democratic values in school. Within politics, voices have been raised in favour of putting more effort into the schooling of young people's—especially boys'—social competence and democratic understanding. This paper analyses present school practice and discusses how schools go about handling issues of democracy. This will be done by reference to empirical results from two Swedish studies carried out in the 1990s. The presentation will focus in particular on the marginalization and gendered fostering of democratic values in school. It will also touch upon the implications for the kind of masculinities and femininities reproduced.     

Teenage technological experts’ views of schooling

Utilising Pierre Bourdieu’s formula for studying social practice, this study explored the construction of technological expertise amongst a heterogenous group of New Zealand teenagers. The qualitative study employed observations and interviews with five boys and three girls aged 13–17, who considered themselves to be technological experts; their peers and/or their family also considered them to be technological experts. For seven of the eight participants, their primary site of leisure was their home computer use. This article gives some examples about how the participants’ understand schooling and its relevance to them. It engages with ideas concerning the performance of school, and argues that the participants’ practice in this field of home computer use for leisure tends to be misrecognised. The article concludes by discussing the implications this misrecognition has for the structures of formal schooling.     

Multidimensional aspects of parental involvement in Korean adolescents’ schooling: a mediating role of general and domain-specific self-efficacy

This study examined the relation of parental involvement with Korean adolescent academic achievement and self-efficacy, and the mediating role of academic self-efficacy in this relationship. We investigated the effects of parental involvement in both overall and domain-specific self-efficacy and academic achievement across three academic subjects (reading, English and mathematics). We conducted structural equation modelling analysis with the responses of 6,334 students from the Korean Education Longitudinal Survey. Our results were that first, academic self-efficacy partially mediated the relation between parental involvement and academic achievement. Specifically, domain-specific self-efficacy mediated the relations between parental involvement and academic achievement across three academic subjects (reading, English and mathematics), but these relations varied across subjects. Second, among multidimensions of parental involvement, parental participation and parental supervision had significant effects on adolescent academic achievement compared to parental expectation. This indicates that higher parental participation and parental supervision increased academic self-efficacy in Korean youth, which in turn, improved their academic achievement.     

‘Pastoral Care’ as Curriculum Discourse: a study in the reformation of ‘academic’ schooling

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the significance of the recent development of pastoral care as a distinct category of secondary school provision. It argues that existing accounts of the rise of pastoral care fail to take on board the relationship between changes in the school curriculum and their wider context. It also suggests that the separation and construction of pastoral care as distinct from the ‘academic’ is only one dimension of, and can only be understood in the context of, a changing curriculum. Pastoral care is not a ‘new’ area, but results from, and was made possible by, a reformulation and fragmentation of what counts as ‘academic’. Finally, it proposes that this consolidation of social/personal concerns under the category of ‘pastoral care’ acquired particular significance in response to tensions created through the reorganization of secondary schooling. Pastoral care provided the means by which the contradictions embedded within comprehensivization could be reconciled.     

Individual Perseverance: A theory of home tutors’ management of schooling in isolated settings

This article reports a study of parents’ management of the education of primary school‐aged children in their care in remote and rural locations of Western Australia. It presents a theory of the ways in which these parents, in the role of home tutors, “manage” the schooling of their children in a distance education regime in isolated settings. The home tutors in this study were mothers in families isolated by physical distance from centres in Western Australia, which usually provide educational, medical, financial, and retail services. In this environment, at the time of data collection, schooling was supported by print, that is, “sets” of learning materials, and by a regular schedule of interactive lessons through Schools of the Air when atmospheric conditions permitted. The conditions of outback Western Australia “present some of the worst conditions for use of electronic equipment” (Tomlinson, Schooling in rural Western Australia: The ministerial review of schooling in rural Western Australia. Perth, Australia: Education Department of Western Australia, 1994 Tomlinson, D. 1994. Schooling in rural Western Australia: The ministerial review of schooling in rural Western Australia, Perth, , Australia: Education Department of Western Australia.  [Google Scholar], p. 91). Moreover, the nature of station life on isolated sheep or cattle properties (stations) is such that mothers frequently have multiple and sometimes conflicting roles (that is, cook, housekeeper, station hand, business partner, accountant, first aid officer, wife, mother, and teacher). This qualitative study was concerned with how parents “manage” their schoolroom work as “home tutors,” using grounded theory techniques for gathering and analysing data. The term “manage” comes from the theoretical framework of symbolic interaction (Blumer, Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969 Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.  [Google Scholar]), and in this article refers specifically to the ways in which the home tutors juggle their multiple roles.     

The ‘doublethink’ of data: educational performativity and the field of schooling practices

This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educational performativity and data, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article reveals how performative, data-driven practices play out at the level of the school. This process reveals a ‘field of schooling practices’ characterised by contradictory and contested logics of deifying, delivering and denying data. We describe this as the ‘doublethink of data’, involving teachers engaging with performative processes for purposes of compliance but without any real sense of the value of doing so. The research reveals the extraordinary energy involved in this work, and cautions against these performative practices and associated technologies.     

Multiplying the origins of mass schooling: an analysis of the preconditions common to schooling and the school building process in Sweden, 1840–1900

The emergence of mass schooling is undoubtedly one of the most significant transformations that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article takes a new approach to this fundamental issue by analysing the historical conditions required for the construction of school buildings and the advent of mass schooling, in the 1840–1900 period. Using the school building process as a point of departure, the growth of schooling is tied not only to well-known factors such as industrialisation, state formation processes and the decentralisation of school systems, but also to the expansion of the market economy, modernisation of the credit market, liberalisation of the real property market, changes in local tax systems, and the expansion of the building materials market. Thus, a broader and largely novel explanation of the emergence of mass schooling is accomplished.     

Learning for All? Interrogating children's experiences of primary schooling in Mauritius

Central to the efforts of primary school reform in developing nations is the need for pupils to become more active, critical and creative learners and for primary schooling to enable all children to develop to their full potential. The question `learning for all?’ asked in the title emphasises the concern that, in developing countries, schooling and education for all do not necessarily translate in learning opportunities for all. The article discusses this idea. It is based on the assumption that takes universal quality basic education as an investment and a right and posits the necessity of micro-data in order to monitor children's learning opportunities. Examples from Mauritius are used to put forward some of the reasons impeding learning opportunities and equity inside classrooms and to highlight some of the discrepancies between policy rhetoric and the `reality’ of school.     

Systematic barriers to schooling of migrant workers’ children and policy recommendations

A population of migrant workers have appearing during the process of China’s urbanization, and is an important part of the society that cannot be ignored. In the process of integration into cities, the equal development between the rights and obligations of migrant workers is gaining attention. Especially, the issure of schooling of their children has garnered a lot of attention. All problems resulting from schooling of their children are rooted in the asynchronization between system changes and social development. Systematic barriers have become the crux of schooling problem of migrant workers’ children.     

What aspects of schooling are important? School effects on tertiary entrance performance

The purpose of this paper is to identify school effects on student performance for tertiary entrance in Australia, taking into account student-level predictors using longitudinal data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. It finds that aspects of schooling, such as positive attitudes to school and disciplinary climate, affect student performance at the student level but not generally at the school level. The socioeconomic context of schools has no effect on student performance when taking into account schools' academic context. Apart from academic context, teacher shortage, academic press, and teacher efficacy were the only school factors that had positive significant effects on student performance. The policy implications are that school-based policies are unlikely to improve performance or promote equity, but, instead, policies should focus more on students falling behind, who are found across the school system, not limited to a small proportion of schools with particular characteristics.     

Taking on Bourdieu’s ‘destiny effect’: theorising the development and sustainability of a socially just second-chance schooling initiative using a Bourdieusian framework

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people back into formalised learning and consider how this school became a significant and sustainable educational alternative. Our work during this developmental period drew us into community-based activism enacting socially just curricular and pedagogical experiments. Through networked political action for schooling justice in concert with critical friends (our university partners), the marginalised young people we worked with and supportive regional youth stakeholders, we reconstructed our professional habitus as professionals into a more enabling rendering and strived to proffer through our relational, pedagogical and curricular work with students more of a transformative habitus. Our curricular and activist work inside the community extended the field of schooling relations into a more socially just orientation. This more enabling community field merged with our schooling field and enabled us to source political capital engendering secure, recurrent school funding and a purpose-built schooling facility. We claim that the market logics of schooling significantly influenced our beginning enrolment growth trajectory, and discuss how these logics compromised our ability to break through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘destiny effect’. Since its inception in 2003, the Second Chance Community College has offered a comprehensive senior secondary schooling programme for more than 1000 young people. Throughout its 12-year history, the majority of students have gone on to secure work, apprenticeships and tertiary study but only 10% of students have successfully completed their final year of schooling.     

The concept of educación: Latino family values and American schooling

Do traditional, agrarian values put minority culture children at a disadvantage in North American schools? The available results are mixed. In this chapter we attempt to “unpack” some of the effects of traditional Latino family values on their children's early school adaptation and achievement. Our research suggests that agrarian-origin values, which differ from academic-occupational orientation of school personnel, do not necessarily work to the disadvantage of students. On the contrary, under certain conditions, these values may be complementary to those of the school and in fact serve to support educational adaptation and achievement. A key to our findings and analyses is the concept of educación beliefs among the parents in our sample. Not all strongly endorsed cultural beliefs are instantiated in ways that impact children's experiences and development. Some cultural beliefs lead to instantiation into everyday routines of families, while others seem to be readily available, expressed, and endorsed but not reliably acted on (D'Andrade & Strauss, 1992). Those beliefs that are instantiated into the daily routine are more likely to produce detectable effects on children's development, a conclusion supported by cross cultural evidence (Weisner, 1984).     

Tempered radicals: elementary teachers’ narratives of teaching science within and against prevailing meanings of schooling

Science educators and researchers have bemoaned the lack of reform-based science in elementary schools and focused on teachers’ difficulties (i.e., lack of knowledge, interest, experience) in enacting quality science pedagogy. We present compelling evidence that challenges assumptions about science education reform and draw on a practice theory perspective to examine the stories, commitments and identities of thirteen teachers, whose beliefs and practices aligned with those promoted by science education reform documents. Through ethnographic interviews, we learned about these teachers’ critical science experiences, perceived science teacher identities, and their goals and commitments. Their stories highlight institutional and sociohistorical difficulties of enacting reform-based science, the many biases, contradictions, and unintended consequences prevalent in educational policy and practice today, and emphasize how easily the status quo can get reproduced. These teachers had to work as ‘tempered radicals’, ‘working the system’ to teach in ways that were consistent with reform-based science.