Open Learning: Beyond the Institutional Approach

In the concept of ‘open learning’, the word ‘open’ is certainly the keyword. But what does this idea of ‘openness’ mean today? It is not only a matter of registration or timetable, but also a real question: how should we face the challenge of the necessary permanent updating of professional skills and knowledge? The author addresses some critical issues concerning the implementation of the concept of ‘lifelong learning’ in general and professional contexts. The proposed hypothesis emerges from an attempt to go beyond the opposition of three current approaches trying to shape the future: an institutional approach, which sees the future of education in the development of open and flexible learning systems; a social approach, which sees the future of education in the reinforcement of social exchanges as ‘knowledge exchanges’ leading to the development of a ‘learning society'; and a technological approach, which sees the future of education in the provision of easy access to knowledge via multimedia systems. Merging these approaches leads to the concept of ‘learning organization’, relying on the use of facilities provided both by ‘knowledge technologies’ and ‘knowledge transactions’.     

The Kent Mathematics Project

In bringing together two important contemporary preoccupations, namely the development of new approaches to leadership and the push to ‘personalization’, this paper argues against the poverty of much contemporary work on personalization. In its stead it proposes an approach to leadership and management grounded, firstly, on a particular view of how we become persons and, secondly and commensurately, on a particular view of education and human flourishing. It offers a four-fold typology and practical framework severally identifying ‘impersonal’, ‘affective’, ‘high performance’ and ‘person-centred’ approaches to leadership and management. Having considered the first two it goes on to explore the third and most dangerous organizational type, the high performance learning organization, which currently dominates much of contemporary advocacy and practice. It then argues for what it suggests is a more satisfactory alternative, the person-centred learning community. Having acknowledged the dangers of what it calls ‘the soulful turn’ in leadership and management it then sketches out some of the key features of what it takes a person-centred approach to be.     

Lifelong learning policies and discourses: critical reflections from Aotearoa,New Zealand

This article examines New Zealand experiences and understandings of lifelong education and lifelong learning over the past 30 years or so. It investigates the place of lifelong education and lifelong learning discourses in shaping public policy in Aotearoa as well as questions about the similarities and differences between the discourse in New Zealand and in Europe and the UK. The aim of the paper is to throw light on the following questions: what effects, if any, have notions of lifelong education or lifelong learning had on public policy discourses on tertiary education and the education of adults? Is there evidence to suggest that notions of either ‘lifelong education’ or ‘lifelong learning’ have provided a vision or sense of purpose or set of guidelines in developing public policies? Have they served to justify or legitimate new initiatives or funding arrangements? And, if so, what is the nature of this influence? Finally, in the light of this discussion the article also examines the question whether notions of ‘lifelong education’ and ‘lifelong learning’ as they have featured in the academic and policy literature are predominantly located in a Euro‐centred discourse and hence how they might be reconstituted to reflect more adequately discourses of learning and education in other parts of the world.     

Reflections on the Dilemmas and Tensions in Mathematics Education Courses for Student Teachers

The paper outlines the dilemmas and paradoxes faced by lecturers and student teachers as they interact in a mathematics education subject that deals with both mathematics as a discipline and as a language, and with appropriate pedagogies for the teaching and learning of mathematics in primary schools. For the lecturer there is a tension between comforting and challenging the students. Are they to be wooed into a more positive attitude to mathematics, at the cost of avoiding the complexity of the discipline; or are they to be challenged by the unique character of mathematics, at the risk of alienation and exclusion? The latter often returns students to their original perception of maths as a harsh and unforgiving subject which is beyond their capabilities as they struggle with unfamiliar concepts and the discomfort of ‘not knowing’. For student teachers there is, paradoxically, a desire to ‘instil understanding’ when they themselves may not fully understand. They often idealise what is good practice but deny it in their own learning.     

Inclusive Learning: the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the postschool education of those with learning difficulties and/or disabilities,in England, 1996

ABSTRACT

The Report, Inclusive Learning (1996), is the result of a three‐year enquiry into the educational needs of and provision for adults with disabilities and/or learning difficulties in England. It arose from the requirement of an Act of Parliament, in 1992, that the new national funding council for further education should ‘have regard’ for such students in all its work of funding, development and evaluation. The Committee commissioned some fundamental research into the nature and extent of provision, the actual and potential demand for further education and the current requirements of law, and also reviewed existing academic research (chiefly in English‐speaking countries). It took extensive evidence in many modes and, in particular, created a series of workshops in which the students and their advocates could speak for themselves. The outcome was the main Report and summary, together with six supplementary publications. The core of the Report is the notion of ‘inclusive learning’, which places the responsibility for providing appropriate education with the teachers, the managers and the system (ultimately, with society), rather than problematizing the student as one with a deficit. A good education system is not merely about offering access to what is available, but also the making of what needs to be available accessible: the moulding of opportunity. Thus the Report concentrates on a theory of learning and its educational consequences. It represents another step towards embracing students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities unequivocally within the general approach to learning appropriate for all students. This article summarizes the main lines of analysis and argument in the Report and its framework of recommendations to the Further Education Funding Council, teachers, managers, voluntary organizations and to the government.     

The Implications of the 'New Literacy Studies' for Literacy Education

This paper deals with the following questions:

• 1 The ‘problem’: what is the ‘Literacy Debate’ and why do such apparently arcane accounts of language and literacy have such a high profile in popular media?
• 2 What are the New Literacy Studies (NLS) and what are the new understandings of language and of literacy on which NLS are based?
• 3 . What are the implications for literacy education?

     

‘World-travelling’: a framework for re-thinking teaching and learning in internationalised higher education

In an era of unprecedented student mobility, increasingly diverse student populations in many national contexts, and globally interconnected environmental and social concerns, there is an urgent need to find new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Static assumptions about so-called ‘Western’ versus ‘non-Western’ teaching and learning approaches or ‘local’ versus ‘international’ students are inadequate for responding to the complex histories, geographies and identities that meet and mingle in our higher education (HE) institutions. In this paper, I use María Lugones’ ‘world-travelling’ as a framework for discussing international and New Zealand women students’ reflections on teaching, learning and transition in New Zealand HE. I conclude with some suggestions as to what effective pedagogy might look like in internationalised HE if we think beyond culturalist them-and-us assumptions and recognise students’ complexity.     

A logic of appropriation: enacting national testing (NAPLAN) in Australia

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students’ results on national literacy and numeracy tests – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers’ learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as ‘enactment’) of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students’ learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers.     

Manipulating the data: teaching and NAPLAN in the control society

High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the ‘good teacher’. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This article argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.     

What works,for whom,and in what circumstances? Towards a critical realist understanding of learning in international and comparative education

The article explores the potential for a critical realist approach to researching learning in international and comparative education (ICE) with a particular focus on the emerging post-2015 education and development agenda. It provides a critique of existing empiricist and interpretivist approaches to researching learning. It is suggested that whilst both have strengths, they are based on an ontologically reductionist view of learning with implications for research, policy and practice. As a ‘third’ research approach critical realism has the potential to build on the strengths whilst avoiding the pitfalls of both empiricism and interpretivism. Such an approach it is argued needs to start from an ontologically inclusive and laminated view of learning. Further, it is suggested that comparative research should focus on the development of theories of learning that are able to explain the natural and social structures and causal mechanisms that give rise to and inhibit learning at different scales and levels and in different contexts. The development of theory ought to embrace epistemological pluralism drawing critically on, cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary and mixed methods enquiry and making use of abductive and retroductive forms of inference. In this way it is argued it becomes possible to move beyond the dominant ‘what works’ agenda favoured by empiricists to critically consider what works, for who and under what circumstances.     

Personalisation: the nostalgic revival of child‐centred education?

Personalisation is an emerging ‘movement’ within education. Its roots reside in marketing theory, not in educational theory. As a concept it admits a good deal of confusion. It can refer either to a new mode of governance for the public services, or it qualifies the noun ‘learning’, as in ‘personalised learning’. The concern here is with its intellectual affinity to child‐centred education, one which the government in England has strongly denied. On balance, the government’s view of personalisation is not of a piece with what may commonly be regarded as child‐centred education. But the strong semantic accord between the terms ‘personalisation’ and ‘child‐centred education’ provokes a question: why does the government not provide a term which unequivocally distinguishes its current ‘vision’ for education from child‐centred education? By retaining the term personalisation, the government purports to do two things: first, because of its focus on personalised ‘tailored’ needs and co‐produced solutions, it adapts education even further to a consumerist society; and second, because the term personalisation strikes a chord with the discourse of child‐centred education, it blurs the fact that little to do with pedagogy or with curriculum has in fact been changed. The term personalisation generates a nostalgic appeal to better times long gone.     

Without Criteria: Art and Learning and the Adventure of Pedagogy

A key aim of this article is to present a discursus on learning and teaching in the context of art education that softens transcendent historical and ideological framings of art education and its purpose. In contrast it places emphasis upon the immanence and necessary transcendence of local events of learning that occur in whatever framing and which have the potential to extend our comprehension of what art and learning can become. It recommends a ‘pedagogical reversal’ whereby external transcendent lenses and their respective knowledge and criteria for practice are relaxed and proposes a pedagogy ‘without criteria’. A key pedagogical issue revolves around ‘how something matters’ for a learner in his or her experience of a learning encounter and trying to comprehend this ‘mattering’ constitutes a pedagogical adventure for a teacher. The notion of mattering in the context of art practice and learning cannot be divorced from the force of art which is the motive force that precipitates a potential for learning and can expand our understanding of what art and learning can become. The article is therefore premised on the idea that it is not a case of coming to understand art through established knowledge and practice but the force of art challenging us to think. The force of art, or art's event, can be conceived therefore as a process with a potential for the individuation of new worlds or to see that other worlds might be possible.     

Creating more ‘elbow room’ for collaborative reflective practice in the competitive,performative culture of today's university

We live in ‘a world of clashing interests’ [Zinn, H. (1991). Declarations of independence: Cross-examining American ideology. Toronto: Harper Collins, p. xx]. In a grapple for survival, universities choose to spend less money and time on teaching and learning, less time on robust evaluation of student learning and concomitantly less active support for collaborative reflective practice. However, the situation is even more dire than that outlined above because university management seeks to portray its focus on teaching and learning as genuine and a priority. Considerable effort is spent on encouraging teachers to compete for teaching excellence awards at the same time as universities push academics harder and harder into ‘real research’, that is, research that is not about teaching and learning. This is further exacerbated by the use of teaching quality instruments which have been criticised as unreliable indicators of student learning. This paper argues that individual reflective practitioners collecting and collaborating together can advocate for teaching in the current higher education environment but the outreach of this advocacy is likely to be limited when the advocacy remains within ‘pockets of resistance’. To further promote change from within the institution and extend the breadth and depth of an individual's influence beyond the pockets of resistance, we suggest that individuals use collaborative reflective practice-based strategies aligned with each of the dimensions of the institution's ‘cultural web’. Collaborative reflective practice has the potential to advocate for teaching beyond small groups of enthusiasts because it taps into the often hidden but heart-felt passion and commitment to teaching held by many academics.     

Beyond Democratic Justice: a Further Misgiving about Citizenship Education

This paper begins by rehearsing some commonly heard conservative and radical objections to the idea of citizenship education. I then explore another potentially radical objection, implicit in the tenets of ‘character education’ and ‘socio‐emotional learning’ but rarely stated explicitly. According to this objection, citizenship education, with its overarching ideal of democratic justice, politicises values education beyond good reason by assuming that political literacy and specific (democratic) social skills, rather than transcultural moral and emotional ‘basics’, are the primary values to be transmitted. I show how this objection is based on three major disagreements about (a) the good and the right, (b) pluralism and (c) the connection between morality and politics.     

A scientific approach in the assessment of the school-based part of the teacher education programme in Sweden

This article aims to highlight how a scientific and critical approach is used in assessment dialogues during the last period of a practical, school-based teacher education programme. The result is based on 13 assessment dialogues conducted in a course at a Swedish university, where one of the course objectives is to, ‘in a scientific way, analyse teaching situations based on learning theories’. The assessment dialogues were analysed drawing from Bernstein’s concepts of ‘classification’, ‘framing’, ‘horizontal knowledge’ and ‘vertical knowledge’. The result shows that only in a minority of the assessment dialogues are students expected to use theory as an analytical tool and to critically examine their teaching practice. The theory is used in a more instrumental way to legitimize what is considered the ‘right way’ to teach. One conclusion is that the critical tradition of academia is seldom observed despite being clearly stated in the learning goals. The link between general academic knowledge and more school-based contextual knowledge is often missing or not made visible by the students or the teacher educators, and normative content is still clearly prominent.     

Should the Cambridge primary review be wedded to Vygotsky?

The Cambridge Primary Review's (CPR) preference for a Vygotskian model of schools learners and learning rather than a Piagetian is queried. There are weaknesses and uncertainties with major Vygotskian ideas such as the ‘zone of proximal development’, ‘internalisation’, ‘joint construction’, ‘language mediation’ and educational acculturation, relative to the Piagetian, while human scientific research with babies suggesting inherited capability thrust humans forearmed into physical and social worlds gives some succour to Piaget's cause. The Vygotskian and CPR premise that teachers can push learners beyond developmentally set limits is not unadulterated good news, depending on how we judge education's acculturation purposes and depending on the kind of learners we want within our educational system.     

Globalisation,knowledge economy and comparative education

This paper seeks to introduce this special issue by setting out what seem to be some of the major theoretical and methodological issues raised for comparative education by the increasing prominence of the discourses of the knowledge economy, which, it is argued, represent a particularly strong version of globalisation and its possible relationships to education systems, and hence an especially acute challenge to comparative education. It focuses on the possible implications of these changes for each of the three elements of ‘national education system’. In terms of the ‘national’ it discusses the nature and consequences of methodological nationalism, and emphasises the emerging pluri‐scalar nature of the governance of education. In terms of ‘education’, it argues that education is now being asked to do different things in different ways, rather than the same things in different ways. In terms of ‘system’, it is suggested that the constitution of education sectors may be in the process of changing, with a development of parallel sectors at different scales with different responsibilities. Overall, the article suggests that we may be witnessing the development of a new functional, scalar and sectoral (non zero sum) division of the labour of educational governance. Finally, it addresses the question ‘what is now to be compared’ and considers the consequences for both ‘explaining’ and ‘learning’ through comparative education.     

Flexible learning in teacher education: myths,muddles and models

While there has been widespread take‐up of the concept ‘flexible learning’ within various educational environments—and equally frequent references to the flexible ‘natures’ of the computer and communication technologies that often underpin flexible learning initiatives—the relationship between technologies and flexibility is not a simple one. In this paper we examine some of the more persistent myths about technologies that are intertwined with discourses of flexibility. We highlight some of the more common ‘muddles’ that these myths can lead us in to and argue that the ‘mess’ that so often results from well‐intentioned moves to ‘be more flexible’ is largely a result of the ways that CCTs, or indeed any new educational technology or strategy, is theorized. Drawing on a recent study of online teaching and learning in higher education, we outline a new framework for examining these and related issues as they apply to teacher education.     

Mindfulness,adult learning and therapeutic education: integrating the cognitive and affective domains of learning

Although it has been given qualified approval by a number of philosophers of education, the so‐called ‘therapeutic turn’ in education has been the subject of criticism by several commentators on post‐compulsory and adult learning over the last few years. A key feature of this alleged development in recent educational policy is said to be the replacement of the traditional goals of knowledge and understanding with personal and social objectives concerned with enhancing and developing confidence and self‐esteem in learners. After offering some critical observations on these developments, I suggest that there are some educationally justifiable goals underpinning what has been described as a therapeutic turn. Whilst accepting that ‘self‐esteem’ and cognate concepts cannot provide a general end or universal aim of education, the therapeutic function—the affective domain of learning—is more valuable and significant than is generally acknowledged. This claim is justified by an examination of the concept of ‘mindfulness’ which, it is argued, can be an immensely powerful and valuable notion that is integrally connected with the centrally transformative and developmental nature of learning and educational activity at all levels. The incorporation of mindfulness strategies within adult learning programmes may go some way towards re‐connecting the cognitive and affective dimensions of education.     

An Unfortunate Distraction: the real books debate, 10 years on

This paper re‐examines some aspects of the ‘real books‐reading scheme books’ debate which erupted into the British literacy education field a decade ago. It argues that the debate was not only over‐polarised but that it did not take appropriate account of a scholarly review of related research by Professor Jeanne Chall which had been published a few years earlier. Subsequent research has further supported Chall's arguments. The paper indicates how the use of reading scheme and real books can be reconciled in curriculum programmes which are sensitive to how learning needs change in the course of early literacy development. It also notes the related significance of some current developments in the field, such as the National Literacy Project and the Literacy Task Force.