Learning to Teach About Ideas and Evidence in Science: The Student Teacher as Change Agent

A collaborative curriculum development project was set up to address the lack of good examples of teaching about ideas and evidence and the nature of science encountered by student teachers training to teach in the age range 11–16 in schools in England. Student and teacher-mentor pairs devised, taught and evaluated novel lessons and approaches. The project design required increasing levels of critique through cycles of teaching, evaluation and revision of lessons. Data were gathered from interviews and students’ reports to assess the impact of the project on student teachers and to what extent any influences survived when they gained their first teaching posts. A significant outcome was the perception of teaching shifting from the delivery of standard lessons in prescribed ways to endeavours demanding creativity and decision-making. Although school-based factors limited newly qualified teachers’ chances to use new lessons and approaches and therefore act as change-agents in schools, the ability to critique curriculum materials and the recognition of the need to create space for professional dialogue were durable gains.     

Impressions of ICOTS II

The following short contributions are from people who attended the Second International Conference on Teaching Statistics held in Victoria, August 1986     

Doing time in the sociology of education

Abstract

This article is both an editorial introduction for this special issue and a distinctive contribution in its own right. The article seeks to extend a dynamic and multiple conception of time to the sociology of education to think beyond the clock time associated with modernity and industrialisation. This need is illustrated through an account and critique of E.P. Thompson’s canonical account of clock time. The article argues that this construction of clock time implicitly frames most work in the sociology of education. The concept of ‘timespace’ offers a way to go beyond both clock time and the current ‘spatial turn’ in the sociology of education that prioritises space over time. It is shown how computerisation also ushers in a new temporality, which works simultaneously with clock time and perhaps presages the move from a disciplinary to control society. The article accepts that there are multiple and dynamic temporalities and correlatively supports a working together of historical and sociological imaginations towards a sociology of education that acknowledges and works with multiple temporalities, empirically, methodologically, theoretically and in research writing.     

International comparative studies in teaching and teacher education

This review of eight papers published in Teaching and Teacher Education over the past twenty years shows how the profession has been impacted by the forces of globalisation. The impact varies in different contexts, according to local factors. The review looks at papers that use explicit international comparisons as a means to bring local contextual characteristics into sharp relief, and discusses the values and pitfalls of this approach. The review concludes by suggesting a possible future agenda for international comparisons, one that seeks answers to the domestic challenges of the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All by looking for solutions overseas. However, international appropriation needs to remain highly sensitive to the cultural context of implementation.     

The OECD and the expansion of PISA: new global modes of governance in education

This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful ‘products’ and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policy‐makers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA‐based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.     

The activation,appropriation and practices of student-equity policy in Australian higher education

Current national reforms in Australian higher education have prioritised efforts to reduce educational disadvantage within a vernacular expression of neoliberal education policy. Student-equity policy in universities is enmeshed in a set of competitive student recruitment relations. This raises practice-based tensions as universities strive to meet specific institutional targets for low-socio-economic status (SES) and Indigenous student participation, whilst broadening participation more generally within the sector. This paper seeks empirically to trace the activation and appropriation of federal policy through two sites of higher education policy practices: a state government-sponsored equity practitioner body and two differently positioned universities, Dawson and McIllwraith, as they engage with low-SES schools. Working together Dorothy Smith’s insights into the textually mediated activation of local practices, Levinson and colleagues’ concept of the local appropriation of authorised policy, and Bourdieu’s notion of the contested field, we demonstrate that the generation of state level and institutionally specific policies for student-equity practices not only articulates to federal policy, but also appropriates the ruling relations of mandated policy. Further, the scope of these creative local appropriations is organised within a hierarchical academic field through which particular institutional imperatives, as well as the needs of low-SES students, are negotiated. The analysis demonstrates the vernacularisation of policy in the national rearticulation of global discourses, in appropriation at the level of the state body and in the practices of equity workers.