Critical disability studies and socially just change in higher education

Social justice is an ambiguous and contested term that is evoked in order to address issues of enhancing participation and eliminating discrimination across various markers of difference linked to race, social class, and so on. Historically, disability has been excluded from these analyses because it has been cast in the sphere of abnormality and individual pathology. Notwithstanding considerable progress in the widening participation of disabled individuals in higher education, there are still many issues that need to be addressed in order to remove barriers to inclusion and to eradicate discriminatory regimes. The article, by Anastasia Liasidou of the European University Cyprus, uses some insights from Critical Disability Studies in order to highlight the ways in which certain dimensions of a social justice discourse need to be incorporated into debates about widening participation in higher education on the grounds of disability. Considerable emphasis is placed on the importance of adopting the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a means to mobilising socially just changes in higher education.     

Mother As Donor,Hero or Villain: New Sides of The Mother’s Image in Sergey Sedov’s “Fairy Tales About Mums”

A new model of society in post-Soviet Russia introduced novel family patterns to everyday life as well as to children’s literature, with traditional parent and children’s functions becoming subject to rethinking. The tendency to reconsider parental functions can be observed in texts from different genres, but it appears most overtly in modern fairy tales which, on the one hand, link modernity with the national folkloric code but, on the other, aim to overcome the code. Unlike many contemporary Russian authors for children, who leave little narrative space for parents, Sergey Sedov makes the mother central to his “Fairy Tales About Mums.” He describes various situations in which this figure regains the depth and comprehensiveness of a Jungian Great Mother Archetype. The author combines different fairy tales, cultural stereotypes and literary themes to create the image of a new mother who possesses various roles, some of which place her in opposition to the gender stereotype of patriarchal Russian folklore. This article uses structural, typological and motive methods of analysis to trace the transformation of the mother’s image from the traditional folktale canon to determine its activity-related and axiological aspects and to analyse various manifestations of the mother in terms of the tales’ semantic and aesthetic integrity.     

Teacher behavior and student outcomes: Results of a European study

This study investigates the extent to which the factors included in the dynamic model of educational effectiveness are associated with student achievement gains in six different European countries. At classroom level, the dynamic model refers to eight factors relating to teacher behavior in the classroom: orientation, structuring, questioning, teaching-modeling, application, management of time, teacher role in making classroom a learning environment, and classroom assessment. This paper presents results concerned with the impact of the teacher factors on student achievement. In each participating country (i.e., Belgium/Flanders, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, and Slovenia), a sample of at least 50 primary schools (n?=?334) was drawn. Written tests in mathematics and science were administered to all grade 4 students (n?=?10,742) at the beginning and at the end of the school year 2010–2011. Students were also asked to complete a questionnaire concerning the eight teacher factors of the dynamic model. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to test the construct validity of the student questionnaire. Both across and within country analyses revealed that student ratings are reliable and valid for measuring the functioning of the teacher factors included in the dynamic model. Multilevel analyses revealed that teacher factors are associated with student achievement gains in mathematics and science. Implications for the development of educational effectiveness research and for improving quality of teaching are drawn.     

Informal and Non-formal Education: An Outline of History of Science in Museums

Although a growing number of research articles in recent years have treated the role of informal settings in science learning, the subject of the history of science in museums and its relationship to informal and non-formal education remains less well explored. The aim of this review is to assemble the studies of history of science in science museums and explore the opportunities for the further use of the history of science in science museum education practice.     

An overview of web-based school collaboration: a history of success or failure?

The notion of school collaboration has become widely recognised as an effective means of fostering cultural links and supporting communication between geographically separated schools. As shall be acknowledged in this paper, school collaboration follows on from a long history of collaborative initiatives across the past 50 years. However, the introduction of digital technologies and the internet in the 1990s has raised new challenges and created new opportunities for ‘telecollaboration’ whilst the growth of social media over the past five years is seen to have transformed the ways in which online collaboration is experienced by most end users. Based on a review of the existing body of literature, this paper offers a critical overview of current models of web-based collaborative programmes – attempting to map out the complex nature of school collaboration and consider the actors and factors that can shape successful implementation into educational practices.     

Head teachers’ leadership for social justice and inclusion

This article is concerned with exploring the ways in which head teachers’ leadership for social justice is understood and enacted within the context of inclusion. Head teachers’ leadership praxis is influenced by individual understandings of social justice, as well as dominant institutional realities and policy priorities that indicate the extent to which there is commitment to the process of socially just change. This commitment is significantly manifested in the ways in which an educational system advances new forms of professionalism, effectiveness indicators and accountability regimes that are aligned with concerns about providing socially just and non-discriminatory learning communities for learner diversity.     

Motivational and affective determinants of self-regulatory strategy use in elementary school mathematics

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationships between elementary students’ reported use of self-regulatory strategies in mathematics and their motivational and affective determinants. Participants of the study were 344 fifth- and sixth-grade Greek students. Students were asked to complete self-reported measures regarding the strategies they use to self-regulate mathematics learning, their achievement goals in relation to mathematics, their self-efficacy concerning mathematics learning and achievement, the value they attribute to mathematics as a subject domain and their enjoyment of mathematics learning. Structural equation modelling confirmed a mediation model, that is, students’ mathematics self-efficacy, value beliefs about mathematics and enjoyment mediated the effects of achievement goals on reported strategy use. Results are discussed in terms of implications for elementary students’ self-regulated learning skills.     

Conducting Research into European Union Education and Training Policy: some theoretical and methodological considerations

This paper has several purposes. It introduces a new project funded by the European Commission within its Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) programme; it describes the research design of the Oxford part of that project, which is now beginning, and of a comparative study which was already being undertaken in Oxford on the implementation of the ‘European Dimension’ in education in England, Scotland and Wales; and it describes a number of theoretical and methodological problems we anticipate having to address as the studies proceed.     

Commentary: How readily can findings from basic cognitive psychology research be applied in the classroom?

The commentary discusses phenomena highlighted in the studies of the special issue such as the hypercorrection effect, overconfidence, and the efficiency of interventions designed to increase monitoring accuracy. The discussion is based on a broader theoretical framework of self-regulation of learning that stresses the inferential character of metacognitive experiences, as posited by the cue utilization approach, the interrelations of metacognition with affect, and the influence of prior knowledge and individual differences factors on monitoring accuracy. The implications of the findings of the studies for learning in the classroom are also pointed out.