‘Building up speed’, ‘trying to break free’, ‘pushing it through the pipe’: using metaphor to explore early career STEM researchers’ grant writing capability

This study demonstrates the use of metaphor analysis in needs assessment for developmental support and shows how it can be used to critically examine assumptions in the literature about the ways emerging researchers conceptualize their career trajectory. We investigated the professional development needs of a group of science, technology, engineering and mathematics early career researchers, to provide them with better grant writing support. Conceptual metaphor theory was used to explore interview data, in part to identify where training design could be modified. In the case of the group under investigation, close metaphoric analysis presented a richly embodied view of our participants’ research activity and suggested ways to provide a stronger focus on strategic and processual aspects of grant writing in such settings.     

Neoliberalism,lifelong learning,and the homeplace: problematizing the boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to explore women's learning experiences

This paper develops a critical feminist theoretical analysis of the significance of the homeplace in explaining the experiences of adult women learners. It argues that current discourses in lifelong learning are shaped by neoliberal influences that emphasize individualism, competition, and connections to the marketplace. Critical educators, drawing upon a Habermasian analysis, make some valid critiques of problems with developing an educational agenda shaped by neoliberal values, but their assessment is insufficient for explaining the persistence of gender inequalities within adult education. This is because critical theory does not adequately take up other ‘medias’ of power, such as patriarchy. A feminist lens is used to explore and complicate the perceptual divisions between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres through an examination of three focal points in the homeplace; identity, relationships, and labour. Drawing upon a social science and humanities (SSHRC) research study that looks at women's learning trajectories in Canada, and a Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) grant on women and active citizenship, examples are brought in to support the discussion. From this analysis, recommendations are made for educators, administrators, and policy makers to challenge a neoliberal agenda in lifelong learning and develop a more holistic and gender inclusive approach that troubles commonly accepted parameters of ‘public’ and ‘private’ by exploring the significance of the homeplace on adult learning experiences.     

From ‘ritual’ to ‘mindfulness’: policy and pedagogic positioning

Schools and professionals respond to statute in different ways. However, professional activity is more than mediated response to policy. Versions of pedagogy are not simply envisaged on high and enacted in the workplace. This paper examines how professional views formulate policy imperatives. It proposes that to understand pedagogy requires an understanding of the ways in which professional selves are realised in relation to the policy formation process. To do this, positioning theory is used to describe how practice produces policy. Accordingly, the paper examines the dynamic interplay between: first, the story lines unfolding within and outside school; second, the positions adopted by individuals in the course of pedagogic decision-making. Third, the illocutionary (that achieved in saying something) and perlocutionary (that achieved by saying something) effects of language. Following this ‘positioning triad’, the paper proposes ‘pedagogy as ritual’ and ‘pedagogy as mindfulness’ and how these are representative, respectively, of limiting and delimiting pedagogic discourses.     

Becoming a PI: From ‘doing’ to ‘managing’ research

While achieving research independence by becoming a principal investigator (PI) is a key aspiration for many postdocs, little is known of the trajectory from PhD graduation to first PI grant. This interview-based study examined how 16 PIs in science, technology engineering, mathematics or medicine, in the UK and continental Europe, prepared for and dealt with this career transition. Individuals demonstrated commitment to lengthy periods of postdoctoral work in a range of institutions (often involving international mobility) to achieve PI-status. Their emotionally laden journeys required resilience and self-belief, since getting a grant was conceived as partly luck. Once individuals had their grant they faced new challenges that distanced them from actively researching. Still, individuals navigated their intentions in a sustained fashion to create a distinct intellectual profile in the face of challenging circumstances. The results highlight the centrality of emotion in the journey, as well as curricular imperatives for both doctoral and postdoctoral learning.     

Curious play: children’s exploration of nature

This article explores the concept of ‘curious play’ as a theoretical framework to understand and communicate children’s experiences of free play in nature. The concept emerged interactively from three sources of inspiration: an ethnographically inspired study of children playing in nature; as a critique of the concept of ‘risky play’ being the dominant discourse on children’s play in natural environments; and from phenomenological and cultural-historical theories of children’s play and play environments. The article illustrates this interplay through an analysis of two empirical examples, and argues that curious play offers a comprehensive and existential approach to understanding the interplay of children playing in nature and children’s growth. Thus, children are conceptualized as active explorers and playful agents whilst embodying and creating knowledge, skills and understandings of themselves and their life-worlds.     

Teachers’ professional development in special needs settings: creating ‘kid-cool’ schools in challenging times

This paper explores the nature of teachers’ professional development (PD) practices in special needs/special education settings in Australia under current neoliberal and managerial conditions. The research is based on individual interviews with teachers from a juvenile justice centre and a dedicated special needs school in a regional city in the state of New South Wales. Bourdieu’s conception of social practice as contested is applied to make sense of teachers’ understanding of the conflicted nature of PD practices in these schooling settings. The findings reveal teacher PD in these special needs settings is influenced by the increased commodification of education, broader accountability pressures which seek to individualise teachers’ PD experiences, and increased attention to a narrower range of educational outcomes, particularly students’ test scores. However, at the same time, these settings also enable more localised, collaborative inquiry focused upon specific students’ needs, and PD relevant to a multi-faceted conception of students’ learning. In this way, teacher PD contributes to a focus upon student learning in all its complexity, even as it is simultaneously confined by neoliberal and managerial pressures.     

Making ‘us’ visible: Using membership categorisation analysis to explore young people's accomplishment of collective identity-in-interaction in relation to digital technology

This article examines young people's sense of self and collective identity in relation to their use of specific digital tools available at their school. We use membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to explore how a group of young people produce a collective identity-in-interaction as captured in concrete relational speech acts. Fine-grained MCA analysis of group interview talk reveals participant students operating as a collectivity to accomplish a sense of shared identity in relation to the iPad. This focus on the ways in which young people's identities are intertwined with digital technology distinguishes this article from the technicist and operational perspectives that dominate the field of educational technology research and demonstrates MCA's potential for illuminating the relationship that young people have with technology. The article contributes to a growing body of research that engages with more nuanced ways of understanding contemporary, technology-mediated learning as a process of producing not only knowledge and skills, but also selfhood—both private and shared.     

From ‘no’ to ‘yes’: postcolonial perspectives on resistance to neoliberal higher education

Various scholars have suggested ways to resist neoliberal conditions in higher education (HE). In analysing current neoliberal policies and practices in HE, I suggest that postcolonial theories of resistance can enhance our ability as faculty and administrators to understand and ‘resist’ these policies and practices. In this article, I review four modes of postcolonial resistance as described by David Jeffress (2008), mobilizing a critique of resistance as writing and cultural practice and challenging the reactionary nature of subversion and opposition. I argue that we need to place emphasis on transformational resistance, or the creation of new ways of being, knowing and doing in HE in order to transform the academy.     

Stories of practitioner enquiry: using narrative interviews to explore teachers’ perspectives of learning to learn

The Campaign for Learning’s Learning to Learn Phase 4 was a research project in which teachers undertook practitioner enquiry to explore innovative pedagogies under the umbrella term of learning to learn. In 2008, to gain greater understanding of what this process meant to the participating teachers the research team at Newcastle University undertook narrative interviews which examined three key areas: the motivation for undertaking practitioner enquiry, the experience for both teachers and students, and the support needed to facilitate success. This paper examines how the decision to use narrative interviews in conjunction with an iterative validation process supported a meaningful and ethical exchange between the teachers and researchers, where knowledge generation was foregrounded, and how despite each teacher producing a unique, highly contextual story, cross-narrative themes emerged which have enabled the research team to broaden our understanding of practitioner enquiry.     

‘Hard’ decisions and ‘tough’ choices: the business approach to university decline

This paper critically examines the solutions to university decline that emphasize selective cutbacks, in which certain areas are phased out to protect others. The experiences of two Canadian universities show that these kinds of hard decisions generate a considerable amount of political conflict. While the business perspective recommends decisive action, it provides little advice about how these actions can be implemented. It may even intensify conflict and worsen an already difficult situation. The paper argues that we need to learn about the management of both conflict and collegiality, as well as the conditions which make tough choices necessary, before we can successfully tackle decline.     

‘From Mentor to Mentored’

This paper examines one person's perceptions in changing role from being a school based mentor and teacher to being herself mentored on becoming a lecturer in education. It identifies some of the more and less successful aspects of the mentoring experience and suggests provisional guidelines to improve the present system used in one HEI (Higher Education Institution).     

Understanding: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Understanding’

The following paper is intended as an exercise in friendly criticism of one of Harvey Siegel's and Mike Smith's (Knowing, Believing and Understanding, this volume). I'm in substantial sympathy with the general thrust of their paper and my remarks merely provide some criticism of their discussion's conceptual coherence and clarity and a correspondingly slightly adjusted version of what they have to say. My focus is limited to the conceptions of knowledge, belief and understanding and their inter-relationships in terms of which they offer suggestions to science educators.     

Unequal childhoods: A case study application of Lareau’s ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ in British working-class and poor families

International authors have argued that social class inequalities can influence parental engagement in education. Lareau argued that middle-class families possess the resources to actively cultivate their children to succeed academically, whereas working-class and poor families feel they lack such resources and allow their children to develop limited and passive relations with school. This article applies a core element of Lareau’s typology of child rearing to examine disadvantaged British mothers’ experience of engaging with schools. A study involving 77 parents and caregivers of secondary school children, considered disadvantaged, sought to understand the experiences of parental engagement in primary and secondary education. Selective case studies have been chosen from this larger study, using a thematic analysis, to understand how these mothers interpreted their experiences of engaging with secondary education, their feelings of frustration, powerlessness and distance from secondary school. The stories presented illustrate that the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’ provides a contemporary class analysis framework to interpret the experiences of some disadvantaged British parents. Recommendations are made advising how Lareau’s typology of child rearing can inform policy and practice in the British education system and recommendations for future research are made with the purpose of promoting equal access to educational engagement and opportunities.     

Countering and exceeding ‘capital’: a ‘funds of knowledge’ approach to re-imagining community

This article discusses how the ‘funds of knowledge’ approach (FoK) offers a socially just alternative to the logics of capital, by drawing on knowledge assets from students’ family and community lifeworlds to build engaging and rigorous learning, supporting school–community interactions that build capacities. We explain how we applied FoK in an action research project – Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) – to design curriculum and pedagogy in schools of a high-poverty region. With reference to RPiN, we also observe how high-poverty regions, and their schools, appear to be undergoing complex unsettlements, as effects of globalisation, which raise problematic questions about who/what is ‘the local community’. We argue that this calls for new thinking, both sociological and ethical, which can refine the FoK approach to take fuller account of the diverse and complex spaces of social-historical life in new times. We conclude by considering a pedagogical approach through which learners in such regions can re-imagine hopeful forms of community.     

‘Coherence at Last’: Percival Gurrey’s Contribution to English

Reacting to incoherent English teaching in the 1930s, Percival Gurrey probed the psychological processes involved in literary appreciation. He sought ways of teaching poetry that avoided lifeless tasks such as labelling ‘poetic devices’. Later, in the 1950s, he wrote about the processes involved in learning to write. At a time when psychology dominated educational discourse, he was in touch with new developments in both literary criticism and linguistics, and he evolved a bridging theory of language, learning and development that spanned philosophy, psychology and literary theory. I connect Gurrey’s sense of wholeness of response to his reading in Coleridge. By returning to debates surrounding Coleridge I show how a new appreciation of what language accomplishes emerged. Gurrey discovered that writing has a central place in children’s development as a whole. From such hard-won discoveries a unified theory of development in talking, reading and writing duly emerged.     

Developing ‘emancipatory interest’: learning to create social change

Developing an emancipatory interest enables individuals to free themselves from the intersubjective or commonly held meanings that dominate their understanding of their current world, and subsequently change their practices. We argue that developing an emancipatory interest is critical in learning to create social change, that is, wanting to create a better world and society for self and others. In this paper we provide an insight on how to do this by drawing on research about a learning program with Australian university students. A semi-structured interview schedule using eight broad questions was administered between March and May 2011 with students involved in the program. The discussion is informed by Habermas' concept of the life-world and the use of the data analysis tool Leximancer.     

‘Let Them Eat Caviar’: Alternative pathways for university students attending to ‘unfinished business’

This paper reports on a study into the educational experiences of a group of students who are accessing tertiary education through alternative entry programmes. There were three purposes for the study. The first was to identify why the students either did not finish school or go to university after school. The second was to explore the students' stated reasons for returning to university later in their lives. The third was to share the students' secondchance experiences in their first semester as university students. The study drew on theoretical ideas surrounding how students who reject school, or who have been rejected by school, may come to view education as unfinished business in their lives. Reconnection with education coincides with wider processes of individuals defining and redefining educational identities.