Teachers in Class

In this article, I argue for a closer read of the daily “class work” of teachers, as posited by Reay, 1998. In developing exploratory class portraits of four teachers who occupy distinctive social positions (two from working-class homes now teaching upper-middle-class children and two from upper-middle-class homes now teaching poor children), I explore the class constraints within which teachers work.     

Learning about Mentoring; the Enfield experience

Over the last few years there has been a growing body of knowledge, both nationally and in Enfield, of the expertise required for mentoring newly qualified teachers (NQTs). Coordinating the LEA support for this group we identified a gap in the provision for those in their second and third years of teaching. The article describes the efforts that were made through the accreditation of teachers' work to support teachers new to the profession to develop as reflective practitioners. This work is based mainly on the experiences of a group of teachers who were NQTs in 1992–93 and who wrote assignments that were submitted in May 1994. It is in three parts. In Part One we identify the problem as we see it; in Part Two we present our model for filling the ‘gap’; and Part Three explores the learning outcomes for the new teachers and ourselves.     

Parenting Support and the Role of Society in Parental Self‐Understanding: Furedi's Paranoid Parenting Revisited

The publication of Frank Furedi's Paranoid Parenting in 2001 was trend‐setting in the sense that it addresses parents directly in a way that is intended to be both critical and supportive, by helping parents to look through a sociological lens at their alleged predicament. Furedi's hope is that this will lead to the restoration of parental self‐confidence, which he claims to be sorely lacking in contemporary (Western?) society. I argue that such a project would be more likely to succeed if one were to hold a less dim view of the way both parents and other individuals are connected with their own society. By introducing a cultural‐hermeneutical perspective on human agency, based on a specific reading of Heidegger and Taylor, I suggest a more constructive way to reconnect parents with the ongoing conversations in their communities and to conceptualise parenting support.