Retirement as a career transition in ballet dancers

This paper discusses ballet dancers’ retirement, looking at the reasons for ending a performing career and their rehirement to an alternative role(s). The findings, explore different dimensions of the reasons for retirement. It attempts to investigate and nurture alternative thoughts on chronological age, in the context of ballet dancers’ retirement. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 international ballet dancers. A qualitative approach was adopted through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), and tenets of Grounded Theory. Practical implications for career guidance practitioners are addressed in the final section.     

Generalizable aspects of the development of expertise in ballet across countries and cultures: a perspective from the expert-performance approach

The expert-performance approach guided the collection of survey data on the developmental history of elite professional ballet dancers from three different countries/cultures (USA, Mexico, and Russia). The level of ballet expertise attained by age 18 was found to be uniquely predicted by only two factors, namely the total number of accumulated hours of dance practice through age 17 and the age of first having the “idea of becoming a professional dancer.” Older starting ages were associated with a more rapid increase of weekly training, so starting ages were not correlated with amount of practice accumulated at age 17 or attained ballet performance by age 18. Different detailed developmental paths leading to elite ballet performance are described and their theoretical implications discussed.     

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women,schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.     

‘A shock of electricity just sort of goes through my body’: physical activity and embodied reflexive practices in young female ballet dancers

Participation in physical activities, in and out of school, remains heavily influenced by social constructions of gendered behaviour. In addition, the body plays a significant part in the presentation of legitimate performances of physical practice and the construction of a physical ‘identity’. The consequence is that in formalized activities many girls (and boys) are provided little chance to experience the pleasurable aspects of physical activity, as well as the added benefits of bodily confidence and knowledge. We suggest that the association of dance with other artistic forms of expression provides an opportunity to contest taken for granted assumptions about sport and physical education. The material for this paper was drawn from observations and interviews conducted with young, female dancers, aged between 9‐ and 11‐years‐old, at an internationally renowned ballet school in London.     

An exploration of arts teachers' beliefs and judgements concerning students with SEND

There is little research addressing teachers' beliefs and judgements concerning students with identified Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND), a group which is regularly cited as experiencing disadvantages in their schooling compared to peers. This paper draws on research which examined the beliefs and judgements of a set of arts teachers in an English secondary school regarding their students with SEND. Data were collected using observation, semi-structured and stimulated recall interviews. Phenomenological analysis uncovered patterns of tension in these beliefs and judgements. Teachers were able to consider some of the interactions between their students' individual characteristics and the classroom environment, and the ways these might give rise to certain educational needs; they also believed their subjects were singularly inclusive in providing for diverse needs. Nonetheless, traditional systems of educational assessment significantly affected what is judged ‘successful’ learning, which teachers tended to negatively associate with SEND. We conclude that deficit thinking about the educational capacities of students with SEND underlies teachers' judgements. Nevertheless, teachers do believe there are many ways for students to participate meaningfully, articulate and demonstrate understanding in arts subjects, which have the potential to challenge traditional notions of ‘success’.     

Educational policy and notions of citizenship in four asia-pacific societies

The future schooling scenarios prepared by the OECD/CERI (OECD, 2001) are the focus of this article, first because they provide a useful tool for futures thinking in educational settings and, second, because they provide an analytic framework to investigate how notions of citizenship are embedded in educational policies and in the organisation of compulsory schooling. This article outlines the scenarios developed by the OECD/CERI, describes how these were used to conduct a survey of educational policy-makers in the Asia-Pacific region and then uses the scenarios as a framework to investigate the embedded nature of citizenship characteristics in educational policy positions. Examples will be drawn from four societies in the Asia-Pacific region - New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan.     

Attitudes and Practices that Shape Children's Drawing Behaviour in Mainstream and Performing Arts Schools

Previous research shows that key parties involved in children's drawing perceive the value and benefits of art and drawing very differently. However such research has been restricted to the examination of children attending mainstream schooling across the UK. The present study therefore compared the views and practices of key parties involved in mainstream and performing arts educational contexts. Teachers and children were interviewed and parents completed a postal survey. Some 225 children, 115 of their teachers and 176 of their parents and carers formed the mainstream school group whilst 180 children, 42 of their teachers and 145 of their parents and carers formed the performing arts school group. Main findings indicated that pupils', parents' and teachers' views about the benefits, and how to support drawing behaviour at school and at home, varied across contrasting educational contexts. In particular, pupils attending arts‐based schools and their teachers valued expressivity over technical support, pupils reported enjoying drawing more, had higher self efficacy and foresaw engaging in the activity beyond their school years more than their mainstream counterparts. The results suggest that mainstream educational contexts could foster drawing behaviour and the related emotional benefits to a greater extent.     

Future Perfect?: Teachers’ Expectations and Explanations of their Latino Immigrant Students’ Postsecondary Futures

Teacher expectancy research has demonstrated the greatest effects for members of racialized groups. Most research has focused on students’ near-term abilities; missing are understandings of how teachers perceive their students’ future trajectories. Drawing on social mirroring and attribution theories, this study investigates how 14 elementary, middle, and high school teachers of Latino immigrant students described and explained their students’ post-high school futures. Most teachers described their students as non-college-bound, with employment likely in the service sector. They attributed their students’ futures to family related explanations more often than to structural factors. The study’s implications emphasize the need to develop deeper understanding of structural inequalities that mediate students’ trajectories including schooling factors.     

Moving house for education in the pre‐school years

This paper uses data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to examine house moves that take place in the pre‐school years, focusing on families who move for the education of their children. We present results showing that education‐ related house moves do indeed occur in the pre‐school years with particular types of parents making these education‐related moves to ensure their children attend a good primary school. We then examine whether this demand for high quality schooling is associated with a house price premia by linking the MCS data to Land Registry data and show that parents are prepared to pay significantly more to buy a house located near to better performing primary schools, even before their children reach school starting age. We interpret this as evidence of demand for school quality in the early years as parents (especially more educated and advantaged parents) ‘gear up’ their quest for what they perceive to be better schooling for their children before they start school.     

How African American Parents Understand Their and Teachers' Roles in Children's Schooling and What this Means for Preparing Preservice Teachers

Preservice teachers are socialized by their own raced, classed, and gendered experiences to expect “caring parents” to behave and contribute in certain ways to their children's schooling. Preservice teachers who come from widely divergent backgrounds from the communities in which they serve can sometimes be skeptical of parents who are not involved in children's schooling in ways that are familiar from their own upbringing. Moreover, much of the existing scholarship on parent involvement and the transition to school takes a top-down approach that discounts the important knowledge parents bring to the table. This is a study of African American parents of young children who were preparing to transition to kindergarten or first grade that proposes an alternate conversation about what we can learn from parents when we examine their ways of framing and enacting “involvement” in their children's school lives. African American parents and caregivers (N?=?25) participated in qualitative interviews. Thematic analyses of the interviews revealed that participants constructed preparation for the transition to school broadly, as preparation for the “real world.” I will discuss the implications of the study for teaching, teacher education, and future research, so that preservice teachers and teacher educators can begin to build a greater imagination for parent involvement.     

What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the deliberately speculative question of ‘What might the school of 2030 be like?’, with a specific focus on the influences of digital technologies. The article adopts the methodological approach of ‘social science fiction’ to explore the ways in which digital technologies might be used in one Australian high school in 2030 (Lakeside), and what this might mean for the people whose lives are enmeshed with these technologies. Through the co-construction of five social science fiction ‘vignettes’ about life within Lakeside, the article considers the increasing prevalence of dataveillance, digital deskilling and the de-territorialization of schooling. The article then goes on to consider changing relationships between time/place, material and coded structures, as well as the increasingly platformized and data-driven nature of schooling in the 2020s. The article ends by considering the ways in which critical scholars can continue to use the methodological approach of social science fiction writing with regard to unpacking the politics of digital education futures.     

Engaging the creative arts to meet the needs of twenty-first-century boys

As we navigate through a new form of economic era where science, technology, knowledge and services will replace consumer goods as drivers of growth, and the workplace will increasingly value creative abilities, there appears a need for an educational paradigm shift. However, within an Australian context of increasing school accountability, a great deal of emphasis is placed on standards vis-à-vis improving literacy and numeracy skills for students, and measured by high-stake testing. This current Australian agenda is also part of an ongoing concern for improving the educational outcomes and life chances of boys. Through a social justice lens, this paper offers an exploration of how an innovative and creative arts curriculum has the potential to engage and enhance educational outcomes for all students, particularly for boys who are at risk of underachieving. First, this paper offers an explanation of the changing nature of workplace trajectories and the significance of the creative arts in this shifting economic era. Concurrently, as we prepare students for an unknown future, this paper examines how engagement in the creative arts has the potential to facilitate emerging understandings about learning while providing opportunities to develop learner engagement, motivation, cognitive capacities and academic achievement. Second, while avoiding essentialist accounts of gender and recuperative masculinity politics, we recognise that ‘some’ boys are underachieving in schools and that these boys are often from lower socioeconomic communities. We also recognise that many of these boys are disengaged and invest considerable energy performing masculinities that are in opposition to, and resistant to, the formal processes of schooling including participation in the creative arts. Third, we draw on findings from recent research, including a doctoral study, to discuss perceived barriers to boys' engagement with the creative arts and implications for educational practice.     

The social field(s) of arts education today: living vulnerability in neo-liberal times

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.     

Foucault,counter-conduct and school leadership as a form of political subjectivity

Globally, a range of new schooling accountabilities have created a complex and often contradictory context in which school leaders work. For principals of low socio-economic status (SES) and disadvantaged schools, they must balance the accountability, performance and reporting requirements against the other needs of their communities. These tensions require new ways of rethinking leadership in the current educational context. This article draws on the work of Foucault, particularly the notions of power and counter-conduct, to examine the case study of one principal in a very low SES school as she negotiates her way through these new schooling accountabilities. This case study illuminates the importance of leadership as a form of counter-conduct through the constitution of the principal as a political subject or form of advocacy leadership.     

Kunqu Opera

<正>There are countless great nations which have their own elegant and delicate performing arts in the world.And they profoundly represent their nations’spirits and hearts.While Italy has opera;Russia has ballet;Britain has Shakespeare’s drama,all these tend to be the resource of the national pride and confidence.So what’s elegance and pleasure we have in China?There has ever been hold a special exhibition in National     

The Future of Teacher Education: Framing the questions that matter

As we enter the new century, there are multiple debates about what teachers need to know, who should provide education for teachers, how teachers should be certified and licensed, and what role (if any) university-based teacher preparation should play in school improvement. The author argues that the future of teacher education in the United States depends to a great extent on the ways three fundamental questions are framed: the knowledge question, the learning question, and the outcomes question. To a great extent, the ways these questions are framed and their larger agendas for the purposes and consequences of schooling will determine the future of the field.     

The Mothership Connection: Utopian Funk from Bethune and Beyond

In this paper, educational pathways emerge from the nexus of ancient narratives and future possibilities. Such imaginings are as much attributed to the African American intellectual tradition as to contemporary Afrofuturisms, including those born in histories of Blackness. The overlay of what was and what is not yet is significant because it engenders educational potentialities that are central to aesthetics and onto-epistemological wonderings. The author uses seminal dialogues from scholars like Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Julia Cooper as a springboard for envisioning Afrofuturisms in which schooling functions to transgress the assemblages of violence and capital of shame that pervade classrooms and corridors contemporary education. Not unlike the call of Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, bell hooks, Octavia Butler and other Afrofuturist activists of the feminine, this paper (re)imagines schooling from the roots of its past and the future conditional they portend.     

Head start children''s conceptions of and expectations for their future schooling

This study examined children's conceptions of and expectations for their future schooling, determined whether participation in a Transition Demonstration could affect these, and explored how these are related to children's academic achievement. Two cohorts, 151 former Head Start children completing kindergarten, and 171 children completing Head Start, were assessed. Two major themes in children's conceptions of school emerged: play and the cognitive or learning environment. Children realistically talked about the work of school becoming less play centered, more difficult, and more centered on academics as they moved from grade to grade. Children in the Demonstration group in both cohorts gave significantly more responses to the questions than those in the Comparison. Children's expectations for their future schooling were optimistic. There were several small but significant correlations between children's conceptions and expectations for school and their academic achievement as measured by subtests of the Wood-cock-Johnson-R.     

Catholic education in Zambia: mission integrity and politics

This article provides the history of Catholic state-aided schooling in Zambia for over a century. It notes how the Catholic Church came to view its school to be a pivotal means of church development. By cooperation with the state it entered more fully into the nation’s future by offering high-quality state-sponsored schooling. This proved to engender its acceptance because this is what the younger generation of Zambians treasured. Progressively, the Catholic school faced a major challenge by becoming embedded in a paradigm of learning that ran counter to its religious mission. It will be argued that this dilemma remains and that the future of the Catholic school in Zambia and beyond pivots on a satisfactory outcome if it is to make a distinctive contribution.     

“I think at first glance people would not expect me to be interested in science”: Exploring the racialized science experiences of high school students of color

The underrepresentation of high school students of color in advanced science courses and the need to increase racial diversity in science fields is well documented. The persistence of racial disparities in science suggests that factors influencing participation include and extend beyond those currently being explored. This study explores how high school students of color make sense of racialized narratives about who does and can do science in circulation in society and their lives, and how this shapes their positioning and identity construction in science. Using interviews and surveys this study examines youths' accounts of their racialized science experiences, including how they envision scientists, make sense of racial disparities in the science community, and navigate their positioning in science. In addition, this study examines how youths' sense of their science ability, as a salient aspect of science identity, shapes the forms of navigation accessible to them, and thus, the futures they imagine in science. By sharing the complexity of students' sense making and the tensions they express as they negotiate their personal goals, science experiences, and messages they receive from racialized narratives, findings highlight the disproportionate work youth of color in this study do, as well as their resilience to navigate racialized narratives in science. This research sheds light on the experiences of high school students of color at a time in their schooling when they are making decisions about who they can become and the possible futures available to them. Implications from this study promote centering race within a critical, sociocultural, and ecological context when exploring identity construction for youth of color in science. Furthermore, findings underscore the need to create learning experiences that provide opportunities for youth of color to author narratives for their own possibilities of belonging and becoming in science in order to support inclusive pathways.