Teacher education: Partnerships in pedagogy?

Initial training partnerships between schools and universities can appear to be driven by the demands of external accountability. Resultant managerial models of partnership support simplistic interpretations of application of subject knowledge: competence-based assessments and reflective practice in initial teacher training. A consequent focus on “performativity” (Ball, 1994) seems to militate against an emphasis on how student teachers best learn. A Neo-Vygotskian model which incorporates understandings of teaching and learning is offered as a possible framework for initial training partnership. Data collected from an early years teaching school-university partnership programme illustrate discussion of the framework. The complexity of roles and responsibilities in training partnerships is emphasized.     

Teacher heterogeneity,value-added and education policy

This study examines the theoretical and practical implications of ranking teachers with a one-dimensional value-added metric when teacher effectiveness varies across subjects or student types. We create a theoretical framework which suggests specific tests of the standard teacher input homogeneity assumption. Using North Carolina data we show that value-added fails to empirically meet these tests and document that this leads to a large number of teacher misrankings. Thus, critics of potential value-added teacher personnel policies are correct that such policies will terminate many of the wrong teachers. However, we derive the conditions under which such policies will improve student test scores and find that they will almost certainly be met. We then demonstrate that value-added information can also be used to improve student test scores by matching teachers to students or subjects according to their comparative advantage. These matching gains likely exceed those of a feasible, value-added based firing policy.     

Teacher education pedagogy: disrupting the apprenticeship of observation

Teacher educators are challenged to enact a pedagogy that helps facilitate conceptual transitions in preservice teachers away from the naïve notions formed during their long apprenticeships of observation. This study examines one ‘educative experience purposefully embedded in meaningful pedagogical experiences’ using the three-level model of teacher learning. Findings indicate preservice teachers derived a range of learning from the educative experience, and most were found to be surfacing, confronting, and beginning to replace naïve notions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Findings also suggest several characteristics of teacher education pedagogy that disrupt the apprenticeship of observation, including the presentation of dramatically new ideas to elicit the awareness of unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning; the usefulness of affect in awakening that awareness; and opportunities to develop metacognition and process reactions through writing that surfaces prior ideas and articulates new understandings.     

Teacher blogs and education policy in a publicly private world: filling the gap between policy and practice

K-12 teachers who write about their daily work on blogs and other social media platforms share local knowledge and wisdom from the immediate view of the classroom. These first-hand retellings of everyday classroom life offer a unique critique of educational policy from the teachers’ perspective. Reporting on the analysis of 14 public-facing blogs written by New York City public school teachers, this paper highlights the possibilities held in these digital narratives by painting a picture of how teachers respond to the implementation of new educational policies.     

Visual culture and critical pedagogy: from theory to practice

ABSTRACT

This article presents an educational approach that merges ideas of critical pedagogy with those of visual culture. According to this approach – termed visual critical pedagogy – art is an integral part of the textures of society and culture and their manifold and complex visual expressions, including the more controversial and subversive among them. It objects to locking art and visual culture in art departments, and to restricting art history to a formalist analysis of ‘masterpieces’ – which represent primarily the Western art market and its underlying politics. It likewise rejects the conception of art history as the history of artists and art movements – a conservative approach still prevalent in many academic institutions. Integrating critical pedagogy with visual culture provides fertile ground for an educational practice within art classes and beyond them. Visual critical pedagogy is formulated using the concepts exposure, deciphering, representation and visibility, shared by both critical pedagogy and visual culture. These are discussed in the context of educational projects and activities planned and implemented by Jewish and Arab students enrolled in an education-through-art program in an academic college in northern Israel.     

Towards a theory and practice of policy engagement: Higher education research policy in the making

Academic engagement with higher education research policy in Australia, and with education policy more generally, is in crisis. This time around, it is not just that our theoretical tools are blunt and irrelevant (Ball 1990), so are our politics. It seems our attention has been so consumed by “what is policy” (Ball 1994a) and with challenging its claims to authority, that we have missed or ignored imperatives to engage with its production. Even though some have attempted contributions, for the most part we have been “coerced into an era of cooperation”. Getting ourselves out of this mess will take more than just better theories and new politics. It will require a degree of cooperation, to advance a theory and practice of policy engagement and to re-establish a field of education that resists the tendency to fragment and/or the temptation to defend itself “against” policy. In this paper I attempt an assessment of where we are theoretically and politically with regard to education policy and where we need to look to find new forms of policy engagement. By way of illustration, I draw on examples from AARE (the Australian Association for Research in Education) and the Australian RQF (Research Quality Framework) although the analysis is by no means restricted to these.     

Reading pedagogy, “Evidence” and education policy: learning from history?

This paper examines the report of the Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Department of Education, Science & Training (DEST) 2005) and explores the claims it makes about reading pedagogy and the centrality of particular “methods” or “approaches” to teaching backed by “scientific” evidence. Discourse analysis of the report shows that its logics allow only certain kinds of evidence to count in policy, and that it reduces difficult social and political issues to questions of technique. This allows the report to recommend an approach whereby qualitative insights and practitioners’ experience can be bypassed through valorising methods developed and verified by scientific researchers. The report’s claims are considered genealogically in the light of historical cases from the early nineteenth century, where educational reformers struggled with the issue of how to educate the children of the poor. In one, the monitorial system promoted by Lancaster in England, there was a focus on reading which made teachers or monitors artefacts of a standardised method. By way of contrast, in Scotland, a classroom approach developed by Stow (1854) made the teacher central to the process, as someone who sensitively interpreted and extended students’ experiences with texts. Stow’s approach would form the model for the modern classroom in compulsory state schooling, while the monitorial system would eventually be abandoned as ineffective. The historical cases demonstrate the dangers of approaches to policy that fail to account for the complex interplay between teacher, student and text in the reading lesson.     

新时代劳动育人高质量发展:理论、政策与实践

劳动既创造了人类又创造了教育,劳动教育是人类文明演进的基本方式。劳动育人既是马克思主义教育的思想精髓,又是中国共产党发展马克思主义教育的实践探索,更是习近平新时代教育思想的重要纲领。在价值逻辑上,劳动育人能够促进人类全面发展,促进技术转型升级和社会深刻变革。在政策逻辑上,我国劳动育人发展经历了以体力劳动为核心的重建探索期,以技术教育为旨趣的转型调适期与以五育并举为核心的全面提质期。在实践逻辑上,新时代劳动育人迫切需要从内涵、内容与内功层面解决"内涵陷于劣势""内容流于形式",以及"内功沦为把式"的现实之困,助推劳动育人高质量发展新局面的开创。     

教师教育的政策导向与体制变革

我国教师教育改革的政策导向是倡导教师职业的专业化发展和专业化管理.在此政策导向引导下,本轮教师教育改革使教师教育体制发生了三项重要的变化:专业化成为教师教育体系的内在价值导向;教师资格认证制度成为教师职业和教师教育体系的制度化联系和教师专业的品质保障;在教师专业化管理的基础上,实现了教师教育体制在职前和取后教育的全面开放.教师专业能力的常规性认证制度和专业团体参与规范的制度是专业化的必要环节,也是进一步落实教师教育改革政策所需的制度创新.