All the Nines: Creativity in English Curricula in England in 1919, 1989 and 2019 as a Reflection of Britain’s Place in Europe

ABSTRACT

Just after the First World War the English Association published The Teaching of English in Schools. It argues that developing children’s ‘creative spirit’ is fundamental to maintaining peace in Europe. Seventy years later, the first National Curriculum promotes a creative, unitary English appropriate for ‘a European context’.

In contrast, today’s national curriculum contains no reference to the role of English in international relations; simultaneously, all references to creativity have disappeared.

As Britain struggles to cope with the fallout from Brexit, this paper – written from a hermeneutic perspective – discusses the correlation between how each of the three documents positions English in an international context and how they value creativity. Without wishing to over–simplify complex issues, it questions how to what extent a curriculum might echo or shape national politics. It calls for a new curriculum that embraces a creative, internationalist view of English to inspire communities of the future.     

Women,capitalism and education: On the pedagogical implications of postfeminism

Abstract

We examine the emergence of the ‘postfeminist’ sensibility from feminist theory and praxis, and its relation and relevance to education. Analytical frameworks such as postfeminism and intersectionality have given equal weight to recognition-based struggles, such as those based on sexual, racial, class-based, gender-related identities. We follow Nancy Fraser’s argument that these identity-based movements have been co-opted by neoliberal politicians and bureaucratic policy-makers, and become a divide and rule strategy, neglecting the subjugating power of capital. Beginning with third-wave feminism’s emphasis on individual identity, women’s struggles have been become a part of the greater parisitic neoliberal project. We consider the implications of this docile and domesticated feminism for the education of women.     

Conceptualising transitions from vocational to higher education: bringing together Bourdieu and Bernstein

Abstract

In this paper we provide a framework for conceptualising transitions from Vocational Education and Training (VET) programmes to Higher Education (HE), by bringing together Bourdieu’s and Bernstein’s theoretical approaches with the view to attend to the often side-lined epistemic and pedagogical parameters. We utilise the Bourdieusian tools of field, habitus and capital to capture the relational, material and cultural aspects of HE transitions. In using a Bernsteinian lens we shed further light into how social agents acquire differentially structured and valorised knowledges and develop a sense of themselves as hierarchically positioned knowers. The metaphor of transitional frictions is utilised to capture the ongoing struggles that students with a VET background experience as they make the transition to HE. We argue for the need of widening epistemic access and putting in place enabling pedagogies that can ease these transitional frictions, thereby potentially increasing the chances of successful HE participation and completion.     

Estranged students in higher education: navigating social and economic capitals

ABSTRACT

Family is widely regarded as a cornerstone of student support. When family support exist as an essential form of social capital making, rupture of family ties places students in a disadvantageous position. This paper focuses on estranged students’ accounts of their experiences of higher education, highlighting how capital dynamics shape their academic trajectories. Based on interviews with 21 estranged students, our research uncovers different dimensions of estranged students’ struggles and successes as they move through academia. This paper explores the social imagination that surrounds the university student, or ‘student experience’, as resting upon family support. The authors propose that widening participation policies and practices need to be more attuned to the realities that mark estranged students’ experiences, as they are not only impacted by the scarcity of either economic or social capital, but also by the instability of interrelated capitals that contribute to precarious and volatile experiences.     

Rigoberta Menchú and David Stoll: Contending stories

This paper reconnects the major texts, Rigoberta Menchú's autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchu & Debray, 1984) and David Stoll's Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans (Stoll, 1999) with the historical contexts and continuities in which they have been and are active. Its interest is in examining them in the connections between popular on-the-ground struggles in Guatemala and the textual representations entered into in ideological struggles in North America. The writer does not dissociate herself from the latter. She takes up her position on the progressive side, recognizing Menchú's story, with all its problems, as speaking from native peoples' experiences of repression and struggles in the highlands of Guatemala. Her interest is in how Stoll's text goes to work on Menchú's, in the implicit historicity of his study that is submerged by his claim to an objective empiricism, and in how his "findings" have been progressively attenuated as they pass through media versions to simplified representations and coffee-shop gossip. While Menchú's story and vivid presence had breached the wall of silence constructed against news of the U.S. involvement in repression in Central America, Stoll repairs the breach by destroying her credibility and the credibility of her story.     

Examining the Connections between the Work We Do and Our Mental Health

ABSTRACT

Solving the issues brought forward in previous Hanna lectures and current discussion requires serious amounts of energy. This energy comes from individuals, working together, while also simultaneously working through internal struggles and challenges. Although small group and individual discussion can focus on mental health and burnout, these discussions have not been presented in public. There is little that kinesiology professionals do to discuss how self-care is approached, how to maintain or improve emotional well-being, and what happens when professionals burnout. A combination of personal experiences, research literature, and recommendations are discussed as a way to highlight the internal struggles that kinesiology professionals face while pursuing their work.     

A fair game – the neoliberal (re)organisation of social and relational practices in local school settings

Abstract

In this article, we use data from ethnography-inspired studies of eight Swedish schools. We describe and analyse how a number of neoliberal-inspired economic and political processes have (re)organised social and relational practices in local school settings. There is an increased focus on individuality in the everyday working lives of teachers, where result-centred practices, relations and professional identities have replaced notions of equality and compensatory interventions. In our study, the teachers describe an increasing focus on performativity, competition and hierarchisation. We use fairness as a lens for illuminating these changes in social relations, changes in the organisation of teachers’ practices, and teachers’ struggles with these changes. The purpose of this study is to analyse how the current reforms are enacted and how they affect the working lives of teachers, and thereby to contribute to the current discussion on how the last decades of political and administrative changes have affected educational practice.     

Children’s conversion of cultural capital into educational success: the symbolic and skill-generating functions of cultural capital

Abstract

A prominent explanation of intergenerational educational inequality is Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction theory. Indeed, previous studies have frequently shown that children’s cultural capital relates to academic outcomes. However, it remains unclear how children convert their cultural capital into achievement. While Bourdieu argued that cultural capital influences academic outcomes primarily by biasing teachers’ grades, other researchers have proposed the alternative explanation that children’s cultural capital absorption directly translates into academic skills. Using survey data on 2975 fifth graders from the German National Educational Panel Study, we disentangle these two mechanisms of children’s cultural capital conversion; and argue that the main conversion mechanism depends on the cultural capital dimension examined. The results of our structural equation model suggest that both mechanisms are at work and that the main conversion mechanism depends on the dimension of cultural capital examined.     

Halting progress: some comments on recent British educational policy and practice

The Thatcher governments have invented very little in respect of current educational policy. Long standing struggles over central‐local control and the ‘naturalness’ of academic selection are central features around which policies advance and retreat. The economic and social policies of Thatcherism have, however, accentuated the rhetoric and reality of vocationalism as a widely acceptable counterpoint to an expansion of de facto selective provision which rewards the fractions of capital and class from which it expects support. There are few grounds for expecting an early reverse to these tendencies.     

The organic crisis of Internationalism and the challenge of remembering alternative futures: Woman suffrage,parliamentarism, and anti-colonial critique in the Communist International

ABSTRACT

The function and meaning of voting can vary across political systems. Despite its diffusion as a norm alongside the global spread of political liberalism in the post-colonial period, women's franchise continues to expose key fault lines in the foundations of democratic theory. Recalling the Third Comintern's debates and activities in the aftermath of World War I, this paper explores how gender organized the left's critiques of bourgeois parliamentarism and its imperial tendencies in the early twentieth century. It draws particular attention to how, in the context of global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, the woman suffrage issue juxtaposed the promises and premises of bourgeois and proletarian internationalism, the democratic potential and limits of electoral systems and their political alternative, the soviet. From these experiences, this paper highlights the radical challenge that gender poses to the development of alternative democratic imaginations.     

Meritocracy,policy and pedagogy: culture and the politics of recognition and redistribution in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Ideas about merit and the associated notion of a meritocracy have long been drawn upon to frame and understand a range of issues central to education policy. Little attention, however, is given to how in practice and through the workings of policy, meritocracy functions as an ideology that is struggled over by various social groups and pedagogic agents. Focusing on classroom pedagogic practices in Singapore, this article explores the ways in which in an ostensibly meritocratic education system, teachers interpret and negotiate ideas about culture to engage their students in the system’s low-progress tracks. We argue that these teachers are creatively resisting, even challenging official discourses of meritocracy and engaging in what Nancy Fraser calls struggles over recognition and redistribution.     

Changing status,entrenched inequality: How English language becomes a Chinese form of cultural capital

Abstract

This paper explores how English language has gradually become a linguistic form of cultural capital in China’s zigzag journey to modernization. It situates English’s status in flux in historical context, with an analysis at both the international and intra-national level. It showcases the necessity to embed cultural capital within Bourdieu’s full framework, and evidences the arbitrary nature of this form of cultural capital for its intimate tie to power and politics. By revealing how English has been officially consecrated as a global lingua franca and then socially recognized for material and symbolic benefits, this paper implicitly problematizes the officially validated cultural hierarchy, argues that the value of a cultural capital is context-dependent, politically and socially constructed, inseparable from the field where it is produced. The present-day English manifests its symbolic power in classification and social stratification, entrenching the already entrenched inequality within and without the national state.     

Women's challenge to computer science and technology

In Norway today there are many schemes to recruit women to computer science disciplines. However, statistics indicate that the number of female students in computer technology disciplines is not substantially increasing. It may be that we have reached a limit for the percentage of women willing to enter computer disciplines as they exist today. What is needed to attract more women to enter technological fields is to enter in discussion on how these disciplines must be changed to open them up for women. This assumption is based on the different values women have from men and therefore the difficulty they have in feeling that they belong to this field. The keywords here are value conflicts and role conflicts.     

‘The fruit caught between two stones’: the conflicted position of teachers within Aceh's independence struggle†

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the challenging situation faced by teachers as professionals and members of the community in Aceh, Indonesia during the province's civil war. It reveals how teachers’ sense of agency during this period was deeply influenced by the economic/material, political and socio-cultural condition at that time – conditions and experiences which today have bearing on a place for teachers in the post-conflict peace-building process occurring in the province. During the conflict, teachers struggled to balance their strategic societal positioning – as civil servants and community members – and found themselves caught in the middle of a complex range of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces at play. This position of constraint, we argue, limited the ability of teachers to act as peace-builders during the conflict, and continues to influence teachers’ ability to function in such ways today.     

What does effectiveness mean?: A qualitative assessment of two child protection systems

BackgroundChild Protective Services (CPS) systems have not historically conducted system effectiveness research. More information is needed about the long-term outcomes of children and families served by the systems.ObjectiveTo investigate how workers within CPS systems in Colorado and the Netherlands measure and perceive the effectiveness of their CPS system.Participants and settingCPS administrators and workers in Colorado and the Netherlands from August 2015 through May 2016. At both sites, interviewees included front line employees with deep knowledge of daily mechanics and processes, as well as experts and thought leaders who possessed historical memory and perspective about their site’s CPS system.MethodsIn-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 77 participants. In Colorado (n = 36), 8 participants were state experts and 28 held county-level roles. In the Netherlands (n = 41), 17 participants were national experts and 24 worked at Veilig Thuis agencies.ResultsParticipants in both sites reported that they did not know if their system had empirical evidence to support its effectiveness, and had difficulty identifying how they would measure the effectiveness of their system.ConclusionsBoth systems lack the ability to collect data on the quality of their services and the longitudinal outcomes for the children and families they serve. Measures of good outcomes must be developed. Without longitudinal outcome data, CPS systems cannot assess the effectiveness of their practice. CPS systems might partner with the healthcare system, where the infrastructure and culture are already in place to look at quality and longitudinal outcomes.     

Employment outcomes and satisfaction levels in graduates of the gerontology master's programs in Spain

ABSTRACT

There has been an increase in the aging population in developed countries. This has led to a need for trained people in the gerontological field. The most common academic way of specializing in this field in Spain is via a master's program. It is well known that investing in human capital increases knowledge, productivity, and the probability of getting a job. The question is if these kinds of educational programs are useful to provide real preparation for students and if the programs are useful for getting into the job market. We asked graduates to supply the answers. A survey was completed by 144 graduates from the Universities of Salamanca and Seville. Most graduates selected these master's programs to increase their probability of getting a job. A total of 64.6% reported that they had got a job, 38.8% of which got one in the first 2 years after graduating. A total of 55.6% felt that they had got a job thanks to having done the master's program. The usefulness of the acquired knowledge (47.9%) and social networks (28.8%) was seemingly high when getting a job. A high percentage of students (67%) found a job in this field after completing the master's program, and they got their first experience in a relatively short period after graduating. Investment in human capital is considered useful by graduates. The labor market is interested in highly qualified specialists. To have a postgraduate degree is still an advantage in getting a job, even after the 2008 economic crisis.     

Ageing transmigrants and the decolonisation of life course

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how ageing transmigrants engage in practises that serve to decolonise life course in order to create increased opportunities to live well. It analyses the experiences of Jamaican Canadian older adults (age 60 and older) who decided to remain in Canada, return to Jamaica, or travel between countries after retirement. As transmigrants with racialised minority and diasporic backgrounds, they grapple with questions of financial, socio-cultural, and emotional well-being that become more complicated and multi-layered in later life. This qualitative study utilises multi-sited ethnography to collect data in Canada and Jamaica. It also engages with the work of cultural critic Sylvia Wynter whose conceptions of decolonisation and humanism serve to reveal more diversified life course and ageing experiences. As postcolonial nation-states, Canada and Jamaica become ambivalent and vexed sites of home, belonging, security, and movement. Through decolonisation, transmigrants learn and unlearn how to navigate these spaces in ways that illuminate the ongoing struggles and pleasures of the quotidian within the broader contexts of transnational social fields.     

On the necessary co-existence of special and inclusive education

ABSTRACT

While many distinctions between ‘special’ and ‘inclusive’ education have been made and continue to be forcefully debated, the two concepts remain strongly evident in policy and practice in many countries. This paper discusses the interrelated history of these concepts. It explores how conceptualisations of them have changed since Salamanca and reflects on whether inclusive education has, can or should replace special education. It considers the extent to which ‘special’ and ‘inclusive’ education are understood as the same or different today. The paper argues for a clear a distinction to be made between how special educators can work in support of inclusive education and the task of inclusive education which addresses the barriers to participation faced by members of marginalised groups.     

From Day School to High School: An Exploratory Study on Jewish Adolescent Girls’ Identity Development

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to be a Jewish girl today and how do Jewish adolescent girls navigate their identity? The study that I undertook is exploratory and designed to understand how three girls, who are recent day school graduates, experience the process of identity development as they begin high school. While the sample is small, the study reveals new directions for looking at Jewish girls and questions that need to be asked when researching their lives. It concludes with a few suggestions for thinking about how to conduct future research with Jewish girls.     

The struggle continues: El Centro de los Trabajadores Agrvcolas Fronterizos

As a participating student in the Border Studies Program in the fall semester of 2000, the author did a field study working as a volunteer at El Centro de los Trabajadores Agrvcolas Fronterizos (The Border Agricultural Workers' Center, or CTAF). In this ethnography, he intertwines the exploration of several different relationships. He examines the relationship between the current struggles of farm workers in the U.S. and the movement led by Cesar Chavez in the 1970s; and the relationship between the ''periphery'' and the ''center.'' He also reflects upon his own position within the progressive movement, given the social privilege that adheres to him by virtue of race, class, and sex.