Teaching,Teacher Education,and the Humanities: Reconsidering Education as a Geisteswissenschaft

In this essay Gert Biesta asks what the humanities can contribute to the field of teacher education. In addressing this question he turns to the idea of education as a Geisteswissenschaft as it was developed in the German‐speaking context in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this conception, education is configured as an interested academic discipline that engages with normative questions concerning the telos of education and does so with a focus on meaningful human action rather than human behavior. Viewing education this way highlights the role of value judgments in teaching. The values that are at stake in such judgments, Biesta argues, are not to be understood as moral values but as educational values, a view that raises some important questions about the specific nature of educational normativity. In a final step Biesta discusses how the idea of education as a Geisteswissenschaft makes a difference for the field of teacher education.     

A NEW LOGIC OF EMANCIPATION: THE METHODOLOGY OF JACQUES RANCIÈRE

The idea of emancipation plays a central role in modern educational theories and practices. The emancipatory impetus is particularly prominent in critical traditions and approaches where the aim of education is conceived as that of emancipating students from oppressive structures in the name of social justice and human freedom. What is needed to effect emancipation, so it is assumed in this tradition, is an exposition of the workings of power, as it is only when one sees and understands how power operates that it is possible to address its influence. In several of his publications the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has raised questions about the logic of this view of emancipation. Throughout his career Rancière has also worked consistently on the articulation of a different approach, an alternative way to understand and do emancipation. In this essay Gert Biesta provides a systematic reconstruction of Rancière's ideas on emancipation from three angles: political theory, political practice, and the practice of education. Biesta argues that Rancière provides us with a new and different way to understand how education might contribute to emancipation and also where and how, often in the name of emancipation and democracy, it actually hinders emancipation.     

Technology enhanced feedback tools as a knowledge management mechanism for supporting professional growth and school reform

Attempts at school reform and improvement have experienced difficulty creating and implementing feedback systems that energize and sustain change efforts. If the call for reform at all levels of education is to be met, attention must be given to establishing effective feedback mechanisms in educational institutions as they embark on improvement efforts. The purpose of this article is to describe application of an educational design metaphor to create a Knowledge Management System that provides teachers with timely and constructive feedback about their professional practice. This system includes the way in which a corpus of professional knowledge about differentiated content and instruction, classroom grouping, evidence-based practice and classroom management can be embedded in a set of tools that provides multiple stakeholders (teachers, students, administrators) the opportunity to generate feedback about instructional practice. Use of the approach is discussed within the broader context of Knowledge Management as a vehicle to extend the role of feedback in school reform and improvement within a long term pilot application in one school.     

教师专业发展与高等师范教育课程改革

职前教师教育是教师专业发展的奠基阶段,应该着眼于教师专业发展来规划和实施高等师范教育课程;教师专业发展不是教师把某种普遍的、规范的教育理论直接应用于教育实践的过程,而是融入教师个人的实践性知识不断发展的过程。据此,笔者认为我国高等师范教育课程应密切联系真实的教育情境,着力培养教师的实践能力、专业判断能力和研究教育教学实际问题的能力,帮助教师养成反思习惯,为教师终身的专业发展奠定基础。     

Democratizing school authority: Brazilian teachers’ perceptions of the election of principals

The idea of collective decision making in schools has been a popular democratic educational reform model. One of its claims is that participation in school decision making empowers teachers and improves teaching. This research investigates this claim by exploring seven teachers’ experiences with a unique democratic school reform in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the election of principals by teachers, students, parents, and staff. Results showed that the elections reshaped the school authority relations, resulting in greater freedom for teachers to introduce democratic teaching methods, while articulating the school as a democratic institution and teachers as citizens.     

女性法学教师职业倦怠现象调查与分析

女性法学教师的职业倦怠是法学教育教师研究领域中的重要问题。调查发现,女性法学教师的职业倦怠与年龄、教龄、职称、学历、教育背景等方面密切相关,女性法学教师的职业倦怠的变化曲线随着教龄等的不同呈现明显的变化,如与学历水平成反比例关系,具有留学背景的女性法学教师的职业倦怠感明显低,中青年女性法学教师是女性教师职业倦怠的主要群体。为此,应建立健全女性法学教师参与院校决策的制度支持系统,在评价的量化标准中体现对女性法学教师的人文关怀,培养其可持续的专业发展能力。     

Scholarship, Research and the Evidential Basis of Policy Development in Education

The starting point for this paper is the ongoing debate about the relation between research and policy in education. Recent developments in England and Scotland are reviewed in the context of political and academic arguments about the nature and function of research activity. The defensiveness of the research community in the face of professional and political attacks is examined critically. A case study of the Higher Still programme is used to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between evidence, ideology, values and professional practice. It is argued that the research community needs to become more politically sophisticated and to advance a clearer vision of its social function in advanced democratic societies if its potential contribution to educational development is to be realised. The dangers of a retreat to a narrow empirical role are highlighted.     

Reconsidering assent for randomised control trials in education: Ethical and procedural concerns

Despite ongoing disagreement about what kinds of evidence are most valuable to education, there continues to be an increasing push to make a narrow group of scientific methodologies the basis of educational policy and practice. This has created a growth in the use of randomised control trials (RCTs), which are considered an exemplary example of scientifically rigorous research design. Yet despite the increase in both the prevalence and status of RCTs, this article will argue that the ethics informing this research orientation remains underdeveloped, with the specific need for an agenda that grapples with assent in RCTs in both a philosophical and a methodological way. As a corrective to this, we engage with Biesta’s observation of a lack of explicit engagement with the values informing our decisions about the direction of education practice. We begin by examining assent in existing education research literature, focusing on some of the ways that qualitative and praxis-oriented researchers have grappled with the complexity of assent in research projects involving children and young people in schools. We then consider analogous debates concerning assent in fields such as bioethics and biomedicine, given the established nature of bioethics as a discipline. Finally, we turn our attention to developing an agenda that can work towards a consideration of assent in RCTs in education research, with the purpose of making transparent some of the ethical concerns that warrant attention in the design and conduct of RCT research studies in education.     

Teachers' Perspectives on Educational Research: Knowledge and context

In recent years there has been considerable debate in the UK about the impact and value of educational research. At the same time, the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), the body with responsibility for funding teacher education in England, has been keen to promote the idea of teaching as an evidence-based profession. This paper analyses the findings of a TTA questionnaire, designed to investigate teachers' views on research (which projects had previously influenced them and which issues they would like to see researched in the future) and the value they attributed to it. The findings point to the need for the concerns of teachers to be given greater weight when research agendas are set and funding allocated, but they also suggest that if research is to influence classroom practice, then it is vital that teachers are again given extended opportunities for further professional study alongside those who are conducting research.     

Large‐scale interventions in science education: The road to utopia?

This article provides commentary on the five articles in this issue on large‐scale interventions in science education for diverse student groups in varied educational settings. Using these articles as a point of departure, I discuss three challenges to science education research and practice. The first concerns the changed meaning of science education reform over the past two decades. The science education research and development community must be aware of the shifting policy and public awareness context of their work and react accordingly if it wishes for its work to make a difference in the lives of teachers and students. The second addresses the importance of teacher professional development and the role that well‐designed and internally valid research plays in developing knowledge in this area. The third discusses the chaotic and contradictory nature of educational policy in this country and argues that our field needs to align our research work with the ways in which real and impactful decisions are made about education in general and science education in particular. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 420–427, 2012     

Educational psychology within teacher education

In a context where the role of the teacher and teacher education are undergoing considerable change, the role of educational psychology in teacher preparation is discussed within a new framework. Educational psychology is now perceived as an inherent component within teacher training and professional development, having previously been an additional course and often considered irrelevant to teaching practice. The current paper discusses the relationship between educational psychology and teacher preparation. Educational psychology's contribution to teachers' professional development is delineated through the constructs of teachers' prior beliefs about teaching, reflective practice and self‐efficacy, while its contribution to the improvement of teacher–pupil interaction is viewed through the lenses of instruction theories, social and emotional learning, special educational needs and classroom management. It is argued that through a productive dialectic dialogue between educational psychology and education, educational psychology provides the knowledge defined by its field to be utilized by teachers, whereas at the same time, teachers gain a wider reconceptualization of their practice.     

Dreaming our future: Developing democratic professional practice?

This paper addresses issues in relation to recent criticism of teacher education, set in the broader context of political agitation for changes to the purposes, role and outcomes of education within society. The paper raises questions around the purpose of schooling and its role in modern societies and argues for the pedagogical importance of critical dialogue to a democratic conceptualisation of education and promotes the idea of professional education as democratic practice.     

Knowledge,judgement and the curriculum: on the past,present and future of the idea of the Practical

In 1970, Joseph Schwab published the first of four papers that argued for a turn to the idea of the Practical in curriculum research and practice. In this paper, I revisit Schwab’s original paper and explore the extent to which his case for the Practical is still relevant today. I first look at the past of the deliberative tradition in which Schwab’s argument is located. I argue that a more precise engagement with the work of Aristotle – particularly the distinction between making/production and doing, and between knowledge of the eternal and of the variable – can strengthen Schwab’s case and allow for a better understanding of the kind of knowledge and judgement needed in education. In relation to the present, I highlight three ways in which the current context has changed from when Schwab published his paper. These concern the strongly diminished space for teachers’ professional judgement; the rise of a call for evidence-based education; and the shift in curriculum studies away from practical questions. To (re)connect the field of curriculum studies and research with questions about the ‘doing’ of curriculum is, in my view, where a deliberative approach such as the one articulated by Schwab remains highly relevant.     

Educational practice,student experience,and the purpose of education—a critique of ‘Pedagogy in Practice’

The focus of the present paper is a critical discussion of the recently developed concept Pedagogy in Practice (PiP) with the intention of improving the concept for future research. PiP aims to understand ongoing educational practice from the students’ perspective by interviewing groups of students about their understanding of learning. By emphasising ‘pedagogy’ and ‘practice’ and drawing from a theoretical foundation that takes practice and action as key concepts, PiP is an appealing alternative to research in student voice, to which it is closely related. However, a critical analysis of PiP in relation to its stated theoretical sources (Bourdieu, Bernstein, Dewey) shows that the approach contradicts these sources in key areas. In PiP students’ understanding of learning is taken as basic for improving educational practice, however, PiP is developed without an explicit notion of what education is for. This paper introduces a specific formulation of the purpose and functions of education based on the work of Gert Biesta, and outlines how a revised version of PiP might contribute to future empirical research in education.     

论集体决策中的“一把手无意图”

让集体决策成为民主决策、科学决策,是党在新时期对领导班子在决策方面的基本要求.然而,在实际工作中,由于一些"一把手"将自己的意图巧妙贯穿研究讨论的过程中,许多决策看起来是"众决",实际是个人专断.因此.贯彻"一把手无意图"理念,实行"一把手"末位发言十分必要.这有利于纠正和克服走过场、"一言堂"现象,防止决策腐败;能让集体研究真正体现集体的意见和智慧,使集体决策真正成为民主决策,从而增强决策的科学性、正确性.     

Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification,Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited

In previous publications, Gert Biesta has suggested that education should be oriented toward three domains of purpose that he calls qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Many educators, policymakers, and scholars have found this suggestion helpful. Nonetheless, the discussion about the exact nature of each domain and about their relationships to each other has been ongoing, particularly with regard to the domain of subjectification. In this article, Biesta revisits the three domains and tries to provide further clarification with regard to the idea of subjectification. He highlights that subjectification has to do with the existence of the child or student as subject of her or his own life, not as object of educational interventions. Subjectification thus has to do with the question of freedom. Biesta explains that this is not the freedom to do what one wants to do, but the freedom to act in and with the world in a “grown-up” way.     

School and out-of-school science: a model for bridging the gap

Contemporary policy statements from government and reforms to science curricula in schools emphasise the importance of educating a scientifically literate public for democratic participation in science and technology. While such an aspiration is seemingly uncontentious and appears consistent with progressive educational thinking, the reality of democratic participation is problematic. I propose four frameworks for describing democratic participation in schools. The first two – deficit and deliberative democracy – fulfil a limited role for democratic participation. ‘Science education as praxis’ and ‘science education for conflict and dissent’ present more radical programmes but reflect tensions with the dominant discourse of scientific literacy and citizenship as reflected in school curricula. To operationalise aspects of democratic participation, teachers need to make explicit the role of scientific knowledge and decision‐making within each framework. While radical change is likely to meet with resistance, this process will in turn generate new discourses about the problems and opportunities of democratic participation.     

The invisible impact of educational research

Although there are policy calls for educational research to discover ‘what works’ and thereby inform decision making directly, the research literature argues instead for research to have a ‘conceptual’ impact on practice. Empirical studies also suggest that, when teachers use research, their use is conceptual; research influences the content and the process of their thinking, changing attitudes and perceptions and making educational decision making more intelligent. This study investigates the ways in which educational research has achieved impact on practice from the perspective of the researchers. A sample of highly-rated impact case studies in the UK’s research assessment exercise (REF2014) were subject to content analysis, using qualitative coding techniques. Analysis shows that most research is ‘invisible’ to education practitioners because it is embedded in educational policies, technologies, and services. This ‘invisible use’ is unlikely to realise the conceptual benefits claimed for research utilisation. If educational research is to make educational decision making more intelligent at its point of use, it will be necessary to re-think current notions of quality in research impact.     

批判与超越:警惕标准化测验对好教育的误读——基于比斯塔教育测量思想的省思

基于证据的测量文化在教育理论和实践领域均备受追捧,测量数据被看作“客观”与“科学”的代名词。但通过专注于结果“有效”的标准化测验,教育质量真的能获得提升吗?通过比斯塔的教育测量理论发现,标准化测验在推动教育改进和绩效问责的同时,遗失了教师专业判断的价值、无法被测量数据所衡量的事物、教育本身弱点所保存的开放性与可能性、关涉主体存在的教育目的等方面,而后者正是好教育区别于普通测验训练的根基所在。由此得到,标准化测验无法确保带来好教育;好教育也应包含着主体以成熟的方式来到与他者共存之世界的理想;在所谓的测量时代里,警惕一味追求安全稳定的技术性测量对好教育的扼杀是非常紧迫的事。我们应追求工具性与人文性融合的好教育衡量方式。     

Age is more than just a number! The role of age and maturity in the processes leading to early school leaving in Flanders (Belgium)

In many educational systems, age is used as a criterion to organise education. Children's age is used to group students together and indicate entry into particular programmes. The use of age for organisational purposes in education stems from the idea that age provides an indication of the development of children, which is associated with teaching and learning. However, more far‐reaching consequences of age‐related educational practices are insufficiently recognised in policy and academic research. Qualitative methods are used to study students and school personnel in diverse types of educational institutions in Flanders (Belgium) to assess how age and age‐related issues matter for the students’ educational trajectories and educational decision‐making processes leading to early school leaving. Data analyses reveal that school staff members consider age and perceived maturity during evaluation procedures. Students also consider age during educational decision‐making processes: when getting older or being too old for the grade, students increasingly weigh the costs and benefits associated with getting an educational qualification and being enrolled in school and alternative opportunities. Students’ expectations related to age shape their school experiences and feelings of belonging. The findings of this study demonstrate how these educational practices add to the reproduction of inequalities through education. These results could inform debates concerning the evaluation procedures in secondary education, compulsory education and the reduction of early school leaving in Europe.