Page,text and screen in the university: Revisiting the Illich hypothesis

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text.     

Can a Teacher‐Led State Assessment System Work?

Recent implementation of Nebraska's Standards-based Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System (STARS) introduced a unique opportunity to examine the benefits and drawbacks of a teacher-led state assessment system. STARS is unique among state assessment systems in that statewide tests are replaced by locally developed assessments designed by teachers. Benefits of this system are found to be greater teacher use of results for instructional planning, greater diagnostic utility of the assessments, and gains in assessment literacy. Disadvantages include the time-consuming and stressful nature of creating localized assessments. Compatibility of STARS with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act are discussed.     

The Multiple‐Use of Accountability Assessments: Implications for the Process of Validation

Implications of the multiple‐use of accountability assessments for the process of validation are examined. Multiple‐use refers to the simultaneous use of results from a single administration of an assessment for its intended use and for one or more additional uses. A theoretical discussion of the issues for validation which emerge from multiple‐use is provided focusing on the increased stakes that result from multiple‐use and the need to consider the interactions that may take place between multiple‐uses. To further explore this practice, an empirical study of the multiple‐use of the Education Quality and Accountability Office Grade 9 Assessment of Mathematics, a mandatory assessment administered in Ontario, Canada, is presented. Drawing on data gathered in an in‐depth case study, practices associated with two of the multiple‐uses of this assessment are considered and evidence of ways these two uses interact is presented. Given these interactions, the limitations of an argument‐based approach to validation for this instance of multiple‐use are demonstrated. Some ways that the process of validation might better address the practice of multiple‐use are suggested and areas for further investigation of this frequently occurring practice are discussed.     

Education and Human Diversity: The Ethics of Separate Schooling Revisited

This article reviews the arguments in the separate schools debate in an attempt to present a view of the matter which would be acceptable in a liberal democracy. Although the case for common or inclusive schools is treated sympathetically, the burden of the argument is that public sponsorship of separate schools can be defended once certain conditions are met.     

Transparency and Opacity: Levinasian Reflections on Accountability in Australian Schooling

Abstract

This article draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to consider, from an ethical perspective, the current transparency and accountability agenda in Australian schooling. It focuses on the case of the My School website and the argument that transparent publication of comparative performance data via the website provides a basis for making things better in schooling. The article argues that while technologies of accountability may have potential benefits, they cannot provide a basis for this ethical project. Instead, the ethical experience described by Levinas arises from an encounter with opacity in the face-to-face relation with the Other, who is harshly illuminated by the transparency promised through calculation and comparison. Such encounters with opacity hold the potential to disrupt the politics of visibility promoted by transparency agendas and provide an alternative to the growing practice of ‘accountability at a distance’ based on performance data.     

Test‐based accountability: Potential benefits and pitfalls of science assessment with student diversity

Recent test‐based accountability policy in the U.S. has involved annually assessing all students in core subjects and holding schools accountable for adequate progress of all students by implementing sanctions when adequate progress is not met. Despite its potential benefits, basing educational policy on assessments developed for a student population of White, middle‐ and upper‐class, and native speakers of English opens the door for numerous pitfalls when the assessments are applied to minority populations including students of color, low SES, and learning English as a new language. There exists a paradox; while minority students are a primary intended beneficiary of the test‐based accountability policy, the assessments used in the policy have been shown to have many shortcomings when applied to these students. This article weighs the benefits and pitfalls that test‐based accountability brings for minority students. Resolutions to the pitfalls are discussed, and areas for future research are recommended. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 6–24, 2010     

Online Schooling in the United States: A Response to Saultz and Fusarelli

In this paper, we discuss some concerns and recommendations of Saultz and Fusarelli (2017), offering nuanced and detailed views of online schooling from a different perspective. This includes addressing challenges regarding online learning such as fluctuating enrollments, financial concerns, quality assurance, and accountability. In addition, we propose recommendations related to funding, better quality data, and oversight and monitoring. We conclude with a short discussion of the need for differentiated research for specific online learning contexts.     

Art and Design Blogs: a Socially‐Wise Approach to Creativity

Many images of the ‘artist’ or ‘designer’ pervade the media and popular consciousness. Contemporary images of the artist and creativity that focus solely on the individual offer a very narrow depiction of the varying ways creativity occurs for artists and designers. These images do not capture the variety of creative processes and myriad ways artists and designers work. Young creatives in particular are choosing to work with a social approach to creativity. An example of this approach is the world of blogging, a form of social media where young creatives have a very active voice. This article explores how creative bloggers, that is, artists, designers and makers who blog about their practice, use a social approach to foster creativity with a sense of community, environmental and ethical awareness, a value framework that is in opposition to the market‐driven notion of liberal individualism. Is there a way to include participation in the broader art and design blogging world as part of art and design education? What can we learn from such a social approach to learning in higher education art and design programmes? This article explores these questions and shares findings of an ethnographic approach to an analysis of art and design blogs. In doing so it argues for a socially‐wise approach to creativity in art and design education as a means of promoting values other than those usually connected to the market.     

Facilitating Meta‐learning in Art and Design Education

Art and design programmes are educationally unique in that students themselves play a central role in determining their own learning needs. To be successful in their study, art and design students are required to operate with a high degree of independence and self‐direction. Developing the skills for greater self‐reliance requires students to become aware of their conceptions of the subject of study, and of themselves as learners in a particular learning context. Developing greater self‐awareness as a learner and becoming more independent in one's learning is captured by the concept of meta‐learning. In this article I present an alternative strategy to prevalent diagnostic approaches to assist in developing a student's capacity for meta‐learning in the subject context of art and design. An inquiry cycle was created to provide a structure within which to facilitate generative thinking about learning through engaging with fundamental questions related to the subject of learning (art and design) rather than the learning subject (i.e. the student). This method represents a departure from existing approaches to engaging students in meta‐learning. A pilot study used to trial the effectiveness of this strategy is also presented here. The inquiry map, and the conceptual base upon which it was developed, were found to be useful ways to structure reflective thinking about learning and to assist in developing a student's conception of the subject.     

Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education: Challenges and Future Research in the Context of Voluntary System of Accountability

Higher education institutions are becoming increasingly accountable to stakeholders at many levels as the federal government, accrediting organizations, and the public place a stronger emphasis on student learning outcomes. Evidence of student learning that is comparable across institutions is of urgent demand. Various accountability initiatives such as the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) mark a milestone in the evaluation of instructional effectiveness of higher education using standardized outcomes assessment. Although the current accountability initiatives hold great potential in evaluating institutional effectiveness, some design and methodological issues need to be addressed before outcomes assessment can be best utilized. In this paper, I (a) review the need for outcomes assessment in higher education, (b) discuss the VSA initiative, (c) summarize the most prominent challenges facing outcomes assessment for accountability purposes, and (d) discuss future directions of research in advancing accountability assessment in higher education.     

纽约中小学质量问责:“进步报告”及其启示

纽约市从2007年在全市公立中小学中开始实施进步报告。进步报告从学生进步、学生成绩和学校环境三个方面对学校的教学质量进行评价,同时对学校在促进每一位学生进步方面进行质量审核。进步报告作为一种对中小学教育教学质量评价和问责的工具和手段,其中所体现的评价指导思想和评价方法,对于我们反思我国中小学的教育教学质量评价不无启发和借鉴作用。     

Agency and Social Construction: Practice of the Self in Art and Design

Learning in the arts has the potential to be a co‐constructive means of inquiry for students, which enables experience of the self in relation to practice. This research explores a practice‐based investigation of agency as self‐definition, amid normative social constructions of the subject. The focus for data analysis is a project taught to BTEC Level 2 Art and Design students in a deprived area of North London (2010–12). A dialogue is presented between the implications for Sartre's theory of free‐will and a Foucauldian critique of social construction. Applications for this comparative theory are discussed here as a form of resistance to the compression of learning identities in art and design, and across the curriculum. This is an approach which encourages emancipated self‐representation, acknowledging cultural diversity, for a discursive environment viable at all levels of study. In exploring the data, a positioning of free‐will with social responsibility is identified as an inclusive forum for creative understanding, and the tolerance of difference.     

Market accountability in schools: policy reforms in England,Germany, France and Italy

This article concentrates on the policy reforms of schools in England, Germany, France and Italy, from 1988 to 2009, with a focus on the introduction of market accountability. Pressing demands for organisational change in schools, shaped by the objectives of ‘efficiency’ and competition, which were introduced in England in the 1980s, have been adopted in other European countries, albeit at a slower pace and within the continuing need for domestic institutional conformity. How does the increasing predominance of market accountability in state schools change traditional bureaucratic and professional accountability relationships between politicians, managers, professionals and users? The article argues that despite some evidence of convergence between different education systems, England remains the outlier and continental European countries have been much more reluctant to adopt choice and competition policies.     

Evaluating the individual and combined impact of national leadership programmes in England: perceptions and practices

The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) was launched in 2000 with a remit to supervise and further enhance educational leadership development initiatives in England and Wales. Its corporate plan for 2003–07 set out a series of key objectives, which include a commitment to demonstrate the impact of the NCSL on school leadership. Some empirical evidence is beginning to emerge regarding the efficacy and impact of programmes delivered under the aegis of the NCSL but systematic studies of the ways in which school effectiveness is enhanced in schools that have been subject to multiple interventions in leadership development are less visible in the literature. This article reports on a study that included both a questionnaire survey and case studies of 10 schools which required school leaders, at all levels from middle managers to headteachers, to reflect on the impact that national programmes, both individually and cumulatively, were having on their personal professional development and on their schools as a whole. Findings of the study suggest that there is evidence that national leadership programmes are impacting positively on leadership in schools although the level of impact appears to be variable across programmes. The paper is offered as one contribution to the International Study of the Preparation of Principals (ISPP) project based at the University of Calgary.     

Self‐Assessment in Art Education through a Visual Rubric

A tool for self assessment in secondary art education was developed and tested. The tool includes rubrics for assessing production and reception activities in art education and consists of visual and text rubrics. The criteria in the rubrics are based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Literacy which was developed by The European Network of Visual Literacy (ENViL). The way teachers and students use the rubrics, whether they consider them helpful and to what extent students’ self‐assessments are in line with teacher assessments was studied. It was concluded that teachers work with the rubrics intensively and both students and teachers appreciate its visual form. However, it was found that the agreement between teachers and students about the students’ scores was moderate and needed to improve. The results show that it is untrue that students, or boys in particular, overestimate their own performance in art education. The current study contributes to the development of feasible and valid assessment criteria and instruments in secondary art education.     

Expressing the Not‐Said: Art and Design and the Formation of Sexual Identities

Central to this paper is an analysis of the work produced by a year 10 student in response to the ‘Expressive Study’ of the art and design GCSE (AQA 2001). I begin by examining expressivism within art education and turn to the student's work partly to understand whether the semi‐confessional mode she chose to deploy is encouraged within this tradition. The tenets of expressivism presuppose the possibility that through the practice of art young people might develop the expressive means to give ‘voice’ to their feelings and come to some understanding of self. I therefore look at the way she took ownership of the ‘expressive’ imperative of the title by choosing to explore her emerging lesbian identity and its position within the normative, binary discourses on sex and sexual identity that predominate in secondary schools. Within schooling there is an absence of formal discussion around sex, sexual identity and sexuality other than in the context of health and moral education and, to some extent, English. This is surprising given the emphasis on self‐exploration that an art and design expressive study would seem to invite. In order to consider the student's actions as a situated practice I examine the social and cultural contexts in which she was studying. With reference to visual semiotics and the theoretical work of Judith Butler, I interpret the way she uses visual resources not only to represent her emerging sexual identity but to counter dominant discourses around homosexuality in schools. I claim that through her art practice she enacts the ‘name of the law’ to refute the binary oppositions that underpin sex education in schools. This act questions the assumptions about the purpose of expressive activities in art education with its psychologically inflected rhetoric of growth and selfhood and offers a mode of expressive practice that is more socially engaged and communicative.     

Cooperative Governance of Successful Public Schooling: Successes,Frustrations and Challenges

In search of embodying values that underpin democracy at school level, the objectives of the article include exploring expectations generated by the constitutional dispensation (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 108/1996, section 41) and delineating those moulded by the South African Schools Act (84/1996, Preamble). While the latter formally signify a State-education-partnership, the intention for teachers, learners and parents to accept especially governance responsibilities towards school democracy prompted our focused three-way alliance between parent-teacher-learner parties for the purpose of this article. Our conceptual framework is informed by Permuth, Mawdsley and Silver (2015), who contend that the essentially new facet of moving towards integrating qualitative research with doing traditional legal research could expand legal reasoning and even complement it with empirical credibility. Authenticated by Adler (2015), the article therefore combines focusing on cooperative governance as an act to shape schooling in the traditional legal way (by asking what questions) with qualitative research features to inform us by also asking how and why questions. We chose a documentary design with a comparative angle; selected documentary resources; and took an exploratory approach to gain understanding and weigh the investigated documents by comparing and appraising primary and secondary sources. We also regarded whatever was embedded yet not recorded as similarly important to what was recorded and how a specific concept was extended (De Waal and Serfontein 2015). Reviewing relevant case law, we present an overview of cooperative school governance progress; a constitutional challenges-based intervention; continuous acceptance of responsibility and accountability; and successes, frustrations and challenges concerning the future pathway to successful schooling. Given the snowballing set of demands on public schools, the catch is for partners to know each other's strengths and weaknesses so that balanced contributions will cause governance towards quality education. The drastic parental governance and leadership role-change, with higher moral-social responsibility levels, calls for carefully designed conferences to guide parent-partners’ exercising the necessary discretion underpinned by critically considering the significance of serving society.     

Using Thematic Analysis to Facilitate Meaning‐Making in Practice‐Led Art and Design Research

This article argues that thematic analysis could aid artist‐researchers in enhancing the arguments they construct in their fields of interest as they move through research projects. It discusses some of the distinctive features and obstacles of practice‐led research in art and design and relates them to the use of thematic analysis. Artistic research often includes acts of interpretation, where the artist‐researcher reflects on his or her artistic work process and the context of the artefacts created during the process. A systematic thematic approach is important for the whole process, because it supports the separate work periods of artmaking and conceptualising and binds them to the study. In its theoretical freedom, thematic analysis provides a flexible and useful research tool that can bridge the two realms of knowing in practice‐led research, potentially providing a rich and synthesised account of the creative experience. The benefits of thematic analysis will be demonstrated by examining two examples.     

Literacy assessment that counts: mediating,interpreting and contesting translocal policy in a primary school

In Australia, as in many western education systems over the last two decades, discourses of accountability and performativity have reshaped education policy that has in turn reorganised the work of school leaders and teachers. One of the effects of this reorganisation is increased attention to the production, analysis and display of student achievement data. In this paper we examine in detail a sequence of the production and reading of literacy assessment data in a small Catholic school. Our analysis uses institutional ethnography's concept of the ‘active text’, the text as occurring in a specific place and time even as it is articulated to social relations beyond its immediate context. Through this process we learn from those involved how their everyday work brings into being formalised, textually authorised processes in a local site that ensure the school meets accountability requirements, while enabling teachers to resist standardisation of literacy teaching and assessment.     

Connecting with the World of Work: horizontal accountability processes in institutions providing Vocational Education and Training (VET)

In VET systems, connectivity with the world of work has been on the agenda for many years: for Western and Southern European countries, since the 1980s as a consequence of the 1973 oil crisis, and then for Central and Eastern European countries, since the early 1990s. In the last few decades, awareness has grown that European prosperity depended heavily on the skills of the workforce and the innovativeness and competitiveness of the economy. In the EU, it has long been acknowledged that VET plays a key role in integrating young people in the labour market and providing skills and competences that foster innovation and entrepreneurship. More recently, VET has also been seen as a precondition to overcome the current economic crisis in Europe. This article analyses how institutions that provide VET can address these demands. It begins by describing European VET policy, characterising it as soft governance. Furthermore, based on data and insights from CEDEFOP and OECD research and publications, an overview is given of strategies and measure es and of the practice of VET providers connecting and cooperating with the world of work throughout Europe. The article goes on to analyse in greater depth the concept of horizontal accountability and stakeholder theory, providing a framework to study the external orientation and connectivity with the world of work of VET colleges in The Netherlands. The Dutch VET system is described and compared with other systems in Europe. Drawing on empirical data, the horizontal accountability processes in which Dutch VET colleges engage are unravelled, examining with which parties and about what they connect. Finally, some conclusions are proposed.