‘I'm going to bring my sense of identity to this’: the role and contribution of bilingual teaching assistants

In recent years there has been a considerable growth in the number of teaching assistants (teacher aides in the USA) in UK schools and in the diversity and range of their roles and responsibilities. Although these roles vary in different parts of the UK, an increasing number of assistants now work alongside teachers to support children's learning. Some teaching assistants and instructors are bilingual in the languages spoken by children in their schools and draw on their knowledge of other languages in providing support for children's cognitive and language development. Many bilingual teaching assistants carry out similar roles to their monolingual colleagues but, in addition, are involved in facilitating communication and mediating interaction between home, school and local communities. However, their roles and contribution to children's learning are often not clearly defined and are certainly under‐researched.     

Constructing meaning in a community of learners: the ‘star’ pattern of talk

We present findings from an in-depth study on a school-based multi-disciplinary learning community in the context of practice teaching in university pre-service education. We elaborate on one of the three predominant patterns of talk identified, the ‘star’ pattern, and show how it created particular power relations in the discourse which eventually triggered occasions for learning in community. The community of learners consisted of 11 student teachers and a university mentor who functioned as a tutor responsible for facilitating the group discussion. The group met on a weekly basis throughout an entire academic year (23 meetings). Data collection included recordings of all meetings and semi-structured interviews with all participants including the mentor (altogether 25 interviews). Findings suggest that the ‘star’ pattern of talk constitutes a powerful channel for promoting learning in the context of a community of learners.     

Theology in Australian higher education: the ‘Newcastle Model’ brings theology home to the academy

This article investigates the movement of theological education away from diocesan controlled theological colleges in the Anglican Church of Australia into the mainstream curriculum of public universities. Particular reference is made to the establishment of Theology as an area of study at The University of Newcastle. Other models of theological education based on particular hermeneutic interests of Anglicanism are examined. Comparisons are drawn between those institutions seeking to maintain partisan control over theological education and those who cede control, in part or entirely, to the public university. Discussion of some historical material leading to the implementation of the ‘Newcastle Model’ is presented as this relates to church and public policy on Theology in higher education. The article argues that the place of theological education is in the academy or public university since it is there that Theology, like other public knowledge, best develops and maintains a critical intention.     

‘To be numerate is to be someone…’: Tracing the doings of students labelled ‘at risk’

Scores from the Australian National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) identify students ‘at risk’ of not meeting minimum standards deemed necessary for future success in school and employment. The NAPLAN tests include items related to numeracy but also mathematics content and skills. Research in the area of mathematics education examining the effectiveness of pedagogical interventions in improving student scores on NAPLAN and other international measures is not only shaped by the standardised testing regime, it also effectively corrals the problem within the school context. As such, it is unable to answer questions related to other factors implicated in the lives of those who continue to ‘fail’ in relation to numeracy outcomes. This paper critically examines the type of funded research being done in relation to numeracy and mathematics education, the ‘social’ turn and the disconnect between this research and the widening ‘gap’ in NAPLAN numeracy outcomes. It argues for a research approach informed by institutional ethnography that begins with the ‘doings’ of individual students labelled ‘at risk’.     

‘At least I'm the type of teacher I want to be’: Second-career English language teachers' identity formation in Hong Kong secondary schools

A teacher shortage in Hong Kong in core subjects, such as English, has led to interest in the recruitment and retention of second-career teachers. Drawing upon Wenger's (1998 Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] [Google Scholar]) theory of identity formation and using data from interviews with eight second-career English language teachers in Hong Kong, this paper explores how second-career teachers may be better supported in their professional development. The study found that second-career teachers' skills and experiences were not valued within their schools and that this was reflected in a rigid division the participants drew between the institutionally endorsed identity positions made available to them and the type of teachers they wanted to be. In response to this antagonism, second-career teachers used their position of non-participation to establish identity territories that connected aspects of their first-career identities, such as engineers and managers, to their emerging teacher identities. It is suggested that non-participation, a potentially negative experience in Wenger's (1998 Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] [Google Scholar]) framework, was deployed by this group of teachers to create the space they needed to enact their own preferred teacher identities. Implications for attracting and retaining second-career teachers are discussed.     

The ‘truth’ of academic development: how did it get to be about ‘teaching and learning’?

The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, ‘academic development’ has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge.     

The promposal: youth expressions of identity and ‘love’ in the digital age

The ‘promposal’ is a growing, North American high school ritual in which one graduating senior asks another to the prom in a creative, witty, public performance that is recorded and posted online. A YouTube search for ‘promposal’ yields over 49,000 hits, with videos receiving up to 8,000,000 views. What does the promposal reveal about the construction of gender and identity amongst teenagers in the digital era and the nature of the voices channelled, expressed or spoken? In a study of high school students' responses to the promposal as well as a discourse analysis of YouTube videos, this paper argues that: students use promposals to achieve social aims by constructing and presenting desirable identities and voices across multiple platforms; the performances of gender seen in online promposals tend to draw upon, reflect, and reify traditional, hegemonic patterns of behaviour and to amplify the male voice; and promposals are a means of announcing the debut of young people as productive contributors to the neo-liberal economy as they prepare to leave high school.     

‘I'm going to feel stressed,but now I know how to handle it’: reducing test anxiety and improving student well-being at GCSE

Test anxiety has become a widespread issue in many contemporary societies, having a significant detrimental effect on the attainment, health and well-being of many young people. This paper evaluates a school-based, multimodal test anxiety intervention framework, ‘Every Little Helps’ (ELH), developed by educational psychologists and delivered to small groups of GCSE students (aged 15–16) in two secondary schools in the North West of England. A quasi-experimental, mixed methods approach was adopted. Findings suggest that ELH is helpful in reducing test anxiety amongst GCSE students. Participants report a range of helpful outcomes including an increased sense of control and competence through increased academic attainment, enhanced control of emotions and more helpful ways of thinking. Participants also report beneficial wider impacts as a result of being able to generalise learnt skills and techniques to other aspects of their lives. Implications for educational policy and practice and future research are considered.     

Dutch children and their ‘God’: the development of the ‘God’ concept among indigenous and immigrant children in the Netherlands

In the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, as a reaction to the growing number of non‐Christian pupils at Christian schools, religious education and religious development became issues for debate. At some schools, it was the exclusiveness of the Christian tradition that dominated, and at others it was the inclusiveness. Another group specialised in inter‐religious dialogue. Our research studied the religious development of pupils from two primary schools. One is the first and only inter‐religious primary school in the Netherlands, the Juliana van Stolberg primary school. The other is a Christian school, the Prinses Margriet primary school that educates pupils exclusively in the Christian tradition. The research questions focussed on the development of the ‘God’ concept of children confronted with stories from different religious traditions. The ‘God’ concept is seen in our research as a concept that develops in an inductive way from the data. This way of conceptualising ‘development’ is coined as the prospective perspective on development. The results of this comparative research led to the tentative conclusion that pupils in our research population who were involved in inter‐religious learning, demonstrate explorative behaviour concerning their own religion and that of others. Their ‘God’ concept shows hybrid characteristics. These pupils are rooted in their own tradition, and at the same time they are ‘on the move’. This offers points of departure for the development of citizens articulating their commitments and turning imminent conflicts into inter‐religious encounters.     

Producing the ‘international’ child: negotiations of language in an international preschool in Japan

This article provides an ethnographic account of an ‘international preschool’ in Japan, describing how ideologies of ‘English’ and ‘internationalism’ are produced and consumed among the parents, teachers and directors, in their common goal of socialising an ‘international’ child.     

From ‘priceless’ to ‘priced’: the value of knowledge in higher education

This paper examines a shift in the value awarded to the disciplinary knowledge developed in universities. The instrumentalised function of this type of knowledge as it is ‘priced’ and sold in the global higher education marketplace is given a value greater than that given to its symbolic or ‘priceless’ function in contributing to society’s social meanings. This shift in value is the result of the intensive commodification of knowledge in the higher education sector itself as a consequence of fundamental changes to the global economy. Knowledge now plays a central role as a valuable productive force in the global economy and higher education is the main site for its production and sale. The weakened insularity between disciplinary knowledge’s symbolic and economic functions gives greater value to its ‘price’ rather than to its ‘priceless’ function as a creative force in creating the social meaning of the symbolic sphere of human life. We describe the way this shift in the value of disciplinary knowledge has affected its functions in the ‘knowledge economy’ era with reference to an empirical study of the internationalisation of Indonesian higher education.     

‘We came together on the idea of being “foreign”’: Teacher narratives for the teaching of immigrant and refugee youth

In the midst of an international debate about immigration, this qualitative ethnographic study focuses on the stories and teaching practices of immigrant and refugee educators working with immigrant and refugee youth at a community-based after-school programme in the Midwestern region of the USA. Using existing literature to describe the educational experiences of immigrant and refugee youth and teacher narratives to explore the pedagogies of immigrant and refugee educators, the author addresses the following questions: How do political narratives impact the educational experiences of immigrant and refugee students in the USA? How can the narratives of immigrant and refugee teachers serve as both counternarratives and sources of promising pedagogical practices for immigrant and refugee youth? With a data corpus developed through participant observation, reflexive journaling, interviews and focus group discussions, the author uses narrative analysis with teacher vignettes and asserts that educational researchers and practitioners should look to immigrant and refugee educators to enrich the research about appropriate pedagogies for immigrant and refugee youth.     

‘We dominate the basement!’: how Asian American girls construct a borderland community

This article, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, explores the ways in which eight Asian American immigrant high school girls construct a borderland community, which they call the ‘Basement Group,’ after the place where they gather at school. While the girls struggle with displacement in the borderlands, including isolation in their family homes and alienation in formal classes, they have sufficient creativity and improvisational skills to invent a borderland community where they can reject mainstream values and beliefs as well as affirm diversity and cultural hybridity. Examining the possibilities and constraints of youth-led space, this article reveals the otherwise unseen sense of belonging, desires, and capacities of these Asian American immigrant girls who navigate lives in-between multiple nation states, cultures, and traditions. The article illuminates the power and possibilities of youth-created spaces that reflect the strengths, assets, and possibilities that marginalized immigrant youth possess.     

Combining the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of teaching sustainability: the case of the business school academics

Abstract

Faculty are key to bringing about ‘bottom-up’ change for sustainability education. Yet, research is still needed on the backgrounds and experiences of change agents in universities and the challenges they face. This study focuses on the marketing discipline, a field fraught with epistemological tensions in seeking to integrate sustainability, mainly revolving around profit maximisation and continuous consumption while living on a planet with finite resources. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sustainability marketing academics in Australasia, Europe and North America. The contribution of this paper lies in the development of a sustainability educator typology linking why and how integration occurs. The sustainability ‘transformer’ wishes to engage in transformational learning, changing student mindsets, the ‘thinker’ wants to encourage critical thinking to bring about the discussion of worldviews, while the ‘actioner’ hopes ‘learning by doing’ (community projects) will provide an appreciation for sustainability. We discuss implications for those disciplines which struggle with philosophical tensions and colleague resistance to the integration of sustainability in the form of suggestions for professional development (i.e. creation of positive nature experiences) and pedagogical approaches (critical, transformative and community-service learning).     

‘It’s not about punitive’: exploring how early-career teachers in high-poverty schools respond to critical incidents

ABSTRACT

This article explores how early-career teachers working in high-poverty schools in Australia account for their decision-making during critical classroom incidents. Classroom management solutions are problematized by investigating how two teachers take up particular positions, make decisions, and enact what they believe to be ‘quality teaching’ in context. Through a combination of interviews and observations of teachers ‘in situ’, we examine what these teachers do, why they do it, what informs their decisions, and how they reflect on their actions. The complexity of teachers’ work in schools located in high-poverty areas is highlighted. We argue that both early-career teachers prefer to position themselves within ‘pastoral’, in contrast to ‘disciplinarian’, discourses, as part of constituting the school as a site of possibility and teachers who advocate for youth growing up in poverty.     

Universities in ‘the condition of publicity’: how LSE engages with the wider world

This article analyses how one institution, the London School of Economics under Anthony Giddens’s directorship, sought to occupy the ‘condition of publicity’ that is increasingly a prerequisite for university success in ‘knowledge‐society’ contexts. In particular, we illustrate how the LSE has sought to develop a brand and practice that is policy‐relevant, close to society, media‐savvy and think‐tank‐like, whilst at the same time remaining impeccably academic. Whilst one goal of the paper is the relatively modest one of giving local texture to some of the general tendencies identified in wider debates about ‘academic capitalism’, ‘the postmodern university’, and the like, we also develop some initial considerations that are intended as a contribution to the assessment of those theoretical themes.     

‘We’re not trying to turn them into middle-class Guardian readers’: constructing the offender in the probation ‘classroom’

Over the past 10 years, cognitive-behavioural programmes have come to be seen as a standard form of rehabilitation for offenders in the United Kingdom. However, the majority of research has tended to evaluate the programmes purely within the evidence-based context of the ‘What Works’ criminal justice agenda. By placing the programmes within their social and political context, this article suggests that they function as neo-liberal regimes of governance that aim to ‘responsibilise’ offenders. Through an analysis of interviews with probation practitioners, the article explores how ‘othering’ discourses relating to offenders intersected with gendered, classed and ‘raced’ social identities. Consequently, young white, working-class masculinities were constructed within this educational environment as impulsive, irresponsible and ‘cognitively deficient’. Thus, the article calls for a discursive shift away from cognitive-behavioural rehabilitation techniques and towards more genuinely inclusive, socially just, and holistic educational programmes for probationers.     

‘Whoever does not write is written’: the role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research

While McKenzie mentions in passing her concern about anthropocentrism and human oppression of the natural world, she is mostly silent about the role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research. If one takes feminist poststructuralist ideas about voice and representation seriously, surely the place of ‘nature’ in environmental education research must be interrogated? Is there space for ‘nature’ in multivocal representations of research? How might our own polyvocality include our experiences of our animality? How might we assess the legitimacy of such representations? What are the limits and possibilities of post‐post approaches to environmental education research when ‘nature’ is taken into account?