Preparing future citizens for post ‘Chernobyl’ Ukraine: A national calamity brings about reform of science education

This paper responds to the challenge of how educational research might be practised in a contemporary world that is no longer necessarily organised by nearness and unity. Focusing on ethnography, it argues for what a multi-sited imaginary contributes to research in the field of education. By giving prominence to the notion of multi-sited ethnography as it has been developed by the anthropologist George Marcus this paper shows how ethnography conceived this way is now necessary in educational research. By bringing together recent concepts from anthropology with educational ethnography, it provides an analysis and reconstruction of how to go about doing ethnography in a world that is characterised by partial connections. To highlight the contributions to education of this research imaginary the paper provides an example of how to approach a specific research topic in this field. In sum, this paper makes a unique contribution to educational research by providing an ethnographic approach for the study of contemporary educational lives.     

Generating ethnographic research questions: an anthropological contribution to the study of higher education

As part of recent complex transformations, it seems that higher educational organisations are being forced to reorganise, standardise and streamline in order to survive in the new political and economic context. How are ethnographers in general going to approach these contemporary phenomena? By drawing on the conceptual history of anthropology, the aim of this article is to generate ethnographic-oriented research questions concerned with higher education. The first part of the article provides an ethnographic background, while the second part focuses on Paul Willis's reasoning on ethnographic imagination, as a prerequisite for generating alternative research questions. The third part makes explicit anthropologist Maurice Godelier's theoretical imagination, carving out some specific theoretical parts which may be used in the generating process. The conclusion then suggests a number of questions to be asked by future ethnographers of higher education. The questions are followed by a reflection upon the consequences of doing ethnography within contemporary higher education settings, which are increasingly dominated by policy-makers; ethnography is thus to be seen as an intervening instrument.     

Access to multiliteracies: a critical ethnography

This paper reports the key findings of a critical ethnography, which documented the enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an Australian elementary school classroom. The multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group is a response to the emergence of multimodal literacies in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. Giddens’ structuration theory was applied to the analysis of systems relations. The key finding was that students, who were culturally and linguistically diverse, had differential access to multiliteracies. Existing degrees of access were reproduced among the student cohort, based on the learners’ relation to the dominant culture. Specifically, students from Anglo-Australian, middle-class backgrounds had greater access to transformed designing than those who were culturally or socio-economically marginalized. These experiences were influenced by the agency of individuals who were both enabled and constrained by structures of power within the school and the wider educational and social systems.     

游戏与学习研究新进展

随着计算机游戏在图形、复杂性、交互和描述等方面越来越复杂,多种类型的游戏已经在市场上占有重要地位,计算机游戏正成为文化的一部分。游戏与学习的关系成为越来越多的研究者关注的重点。本研究综述的目的是提供关于计算机游戏产业、市场和文化等现状的一个概述;对游戏与教育相关性研究的主要进展提供概览,并对该领域的相关文献进行概述;为教育研究共同体和游戏开发商等就如何在学习资源设计中使用游戏技术进行交流提供基础;为教育共同体在教育环境中使用数字游戏的讨论提供基础。同时本研究还以恰如其分的语气承认,在现有的教育体制和学习模式下,应用游戏的一些障碍和挑战。不仅如此,在这篇研究综述中,作者还为设计者、研究者和政策制定者提出了如何将游戏的一些本质特点融入学习资源和学习环境设计中的一些方法,而不仅仅是像今天教育游戏给学生提供的似乎像糖衣的"趣味性",只是使学生完全沉浸其中。     

Creating critical‐democratic citizenship education: empowering humanity and democracy in Dutch education

Dutch society and educational policy see citizenship education as being an important task of education. The first section of this paper discusses the concept of citizenship and citizenship education, and analyses educational developments in the Netherlands. Following on from this introduction the second part of the paper puts forward a critical democratic pedagogy of citizenship education. With this proposed democratic pedagogy in mind, the third and final part of the paper goes on to analyse the discourses and developing practices of citizenship education in the Netherlands, and proposes a number of new possibilities.     

A Feminist Posthumanist Multispecies Ethnography for Educational Studies

The animal or more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences has challenged nature/culture binaries in the fields of environmental education and early childhood studies, yet the field of educational studies has yet to confront its humanist roots. In this article, I sketch a nascent conceptual framework that outlines how multispecies ethnography, as a methodology informed by critical strands of feminist posthumanism, can begin to address and redress both social and species injustices in educational studies. To do this, I first provide a brief overview of educational humanism to situate the article within the animal and more-than-human turns in education. I then define multispecies ethnography and briefly review educational multispecies ethnographic research. Next, I sketch the conceptual framework, which is guided by feminist posthumanist theories of performativity and intersectionality, providing ethnographic examples from my own research projects and the research literature. I conclude by drawing out the implications for educational studies, with a consideration of how animal performativity and intersectionality open up new lines of inquiry to explore animal concerns, as well as social ones.     

Ethnography in a virtual world

This article situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the larger political/economic changes of twenty-first century consumer capitalism and suggests that increasingly our entire social world is a virtual world and that there were very particular utopian and dystopian framings of virtual community growing out of that history. The article also situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the anthropological ‘crisis of representation’ discussion to suggest there are many parallels between the two discussions. These discussions suggest that while ethnographers have recognised that all societies are virtual except, maybe the smallest, new information technologies, and particularly, the Internet create a persistent virtual space that transforms earlier notions of the imagined society. Finally, the article suggests that educational ethnographers are in a position to discuss the new pedagogical issues that arise when attempting to do ethnography in our contemporary virtual world.     

Teaching Knowledge Application: Advances in Theoretical Conceptions and their Professional Implications

We describe and examine a view of knowledge application in schooling developed from aspects of contemporary learning theory. To situate our perspective in contemporary practice, we establish the significance of the issue of knowledge application as an educational challenge. We then review some enduring theoretical conceptions of the problem and their educational ramifications following which we introduce some developments in educational learning theory and consider their implications for teaching knowledge application.     

NAPLAN and the role of edu-business: New governance,new privatisations and new partnerships in Australian education policy

This paper provides a critical analysis of the edu-businesses currently working in partnership with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to deliver the Commonwealth government policy initiative of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). These emerging public–private partnerships (PPPs) exemplify new heterarchical governance structures in Australia, where a network of public and private agents now contribute to education policy processes. In analysing the NAPLAN policy network, this account seeks to proffer a critical analysis on the evolving PPPs in Australia and ascertains in whose interests and with what outcomes these PPPs operate. The NAPLAN policy network is analysed in relation to the contemporary state and its changing modus operandi, in which I draw on the notions of heterarchies, networks and new governance structures in education to understand these developments. Network ethnography is employed to document the network of PPPs that are associated with NAPLAN and other government initiatives in Australia, and in particular, I reflect on the activities of Pearson and the Australian Council for Educational Research to problematise what these policy networks mean.     

Multi-sited global ethnography and travel: gendered journeys in three registers

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller’s tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices.     

'You Need a Qualification for Everything these Days.' The impact of work,welfare and disaffection upon the aspirations of access to Higher Education students

This article examines the perceptions held by mature students on an Access to Higher Education programme at an inner-city college as to the social, cultural and economic significance of the qualifications they hoped to gain. Emphasising the critical potential of the students' voices, this ethnography depicts them mining their biographies in order to neutralise the educational site and imbue their Access projects with value sufficient to sustain them in taking the fraught step of returning to education. The voices of the group are saturated by tensions deriving from their experiences as disaffected workers on the peripheries of the labour market and their investment in further and higher education as the preferred means by which to escape social marginalisation and welfare dependence. Their motives and aspirations reveal a lived critique of the iconic notions of widening participation and social ex/inclusion in which contemporary post-compulsory education rhetoric is embedded.     

论中国教育人类学的学科主题

发展中国的教育人类学,其学科主题必然聚焦在中国教育的现代问题上.应在综合吸收国外各流派研究优势的同时,努力避免其缺陷,并依据中国特定的教育实践来确定中国教育人类学的学科主题.中国教育人类学应把学科主题确定在推动中国教育转向现代化发展上.应坚持综合性的教育人种志研究方法.     

Policy as numbers: ac/counting for educational research

This paper provides an account and a critique of the rise of the contemporary policy as numbers phenomenon and considers its effects on policy and for educational research. Policy as numbers is located within the literatures on numbers in politics and the statistics/state relationship and, while recognising the longevity of the latter relationship, it is argued that the governance turn and neo-liberalism have strengthened the role of numbers in contemporary education policy. This phenomenon is situated in the contemporary ‘structure of feeling’, which sees politics reduced to managing the everyday and the evisceration of a progressive imaginary. The paper then documents the impact within education, focusing both on the emergent global education policy field and on the national agenda in Australian schooling and the related rise of ‘gap talk’, both globally and nationally. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications for educational research, suggesting that we as educational researchers are also being positioned by policy as numbers.     

Recovering the Lost Métier of Philosophy of Education? Reflections on Educational Thought,Policy and Practice in the UK and Farther Afield

A Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education in November 2012 explored key aspects of the relationship between philosophy of education and educational policy in the UK. The contributions were generally critical of policy developments in recent decades, highlighting important shortcomings and arguing for more philosophically coherent approaches to educational policy‐making. This article begins by focusing on what the contributions to the Special Issue—particularly two of them—have to say about the relationship between philosophy of education and educational policymaking. It then goes on to argue that this relationship can best be understood through an exploration of education as a practice in its own right (as distinct from a subordinate practice). Such an exploration seeks to shed light on the proper métier of philosophy of education. In the course of the exploration the kind of thinking predominant in recent international patterns in educational policy is contrasted with a different kind of thinking which has yielded rich gains in Finland. Important distinctions are drawn between the inherent and extrinsic benefits of educational practice and between the internal and external politics of practice. These contribute to the articulation of philosophy of education as a distinctive discipline of thought and action which is necessary to the work of practitioners and policymakers alike.     

Mindfulness In,As and Of Education: Three Roles of Mindfulness in Education

Following the exponential rise in publications on mindfulness in education and the emergence of some critical perspectives on this field, this paper articulates three roles of mindfulness practice in education: Mindfulness in, as and of education. The three are developed based on an examination of the practice as it is shaped by two different socio‐historical narratives, which in turn manifest in different modalities of implementation and aims in the contemporary educational field. While much of the field is governed by ‘mindfulness in education’ within economic‐therapeutic interventions, equal attention is given to ‘mindfulness as education’ as reflected in a whole school approach and to ‘mindfulness of education’ in which the practice radicalises the ethos of critical pedagogy. Describing these three roles, the paper introduces readers to the practice itself, offers a framework for understanding its associations with a variety of educational aims, and critically discusses these associations as well as the diverse pedagogical possibilities that this practice brings to contemporary and future education.     

Ethnographies across virtual and physical spaces: a reflexive commentary on a live Canadian/UK ethnography of distributed medical education

This article draws on an ongoing ethnography of distributed medical education (DME) provision in Canada in order to explore the methodological choices of the researchers as well as the wider pluralisation of ethnographic frameworks that is reflected within current research literature. The article begins with a consideration of the technologically mediated ways in which the researchers do their work, a way of work that is paralleled within the DME curriculum that forms the focus of the ethnography. The article goes on to problematise relationships amongst the researchers and between the researchers and the field of research, and to consider the ways in which methodological choices are mediated. In so doing, the article proposes an acceptance of methodological pluralism that is tempered by the need to acknowledge the sometimes-slight differences that distinguish ethnographic paradigms.     

Critical thinking, education, and postmodernity: Possibilities and limitations for moral education

The contemporary educational discourse on critical thinking, as one of the primary aims of education. has been divided into the spheres of modernist defense and post-modernist criticism. Critical of both positions, this paper attempts to find a new way of employing critical thinking, especially for the purposes of moral education, by drawing on Bernard William’s concept of “ethical reflection.” It will be shown that employing critical thinking for the fostering of ethical reflection in our young students can lead them into an “understanding” of ethical, rather than “ethical knowledge,” which enables them to properly deal with moral relativism in a culturally pluralistic society. This paper then explores the educational possibilities presented by Socrates’ teaching method as an example of this employment, though not without consideration of the attendant educational limitations and dangers.     

The (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography – researching identities in borrowed spaces

The notion of site is critical to ethnography and provides a sense of spatial stability – somewhere the researcher enters in order to research what is contained within. Using contemporary understandings of space, the author reflects on two studies to explore the (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography. The first study was undertaken in a ‘real’ school utilising a multi-method approach over a long period of time. The other was conducted in community-based schools where minority language and culture are taught. Such schools operate on a part-time basis and are often referred to as ‘after hours’ schools. These operate, as if by stealth, in borrowed spaces – schools not in use by their normal classes, during normal school times. The nature of these schools necessitated utilising different research approaches. The almost transient nature of ‘after hours’ schools reinforce temporal–spatial instabilities as critical to understanding site as social rather than fixed.     

The politics of education and the misrecognition of Wales

Abstract

This paper examines the positioning of the Welsh education system within contemporary policy debate and analysis. It begins by outlining some of the ways in which education policy and provision in Wales differs from that of its neighbour, England, and then goes on to critique how these differences have been represented in both the media and by members of the educational research community. Indeed, the paper argues that these representations constitute a form of misrecognition. It is tempting to counter this misrecognition with assertions of the superiority of the ‘Welsh way’—and certainly pronouncements of a ‘crisis’ in Welsh education appear to be as much politically-driven as evidence-based. However, such an approach would underplay the very real challenges that face Wales—challenges which are both like and unlike those facing England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The paper concludes that we need a serious engagement with national divergences across the four nations of the UK—as well as elsewhere. The case of Wales highlights the need to undertake not only comparative analysis but also relational analysis if we are to enhance our understanding of the changing politics of education.     

Policy on School Diversity: Taking an Existential Turn in the Pursuit of Valued Learning?

This paper develops a 'conceptual map' by which to chart contemporary developments in policy on school diversity. In part this has been prompted by the prospect in England of (private) Steiner schools becoming more closely involved in mainstream state-funded education. Whilst generated principally by policy developments within the UK, the conceptual thinking may also have wider applicability. We conceptualise diversity in the context of a differentiating public domain and a concern with existential questions which, arguably, persists in educational policy even where narrow 'performative' criteria are dominant. Four diversity models are outlined and a policy path over time suggested in relation to these. We suggest that this may be leading towards diversity policy which affords greater recognition to different conceptions of valued learning and encourages co-operative exploration of thesse, though it is acknowledged that there remain strong contrary pressures.