Implementing Citizenship in the English Secondary School Curriculum: A Follow-Up Study

This article represents a follow-up snapshot of a group of state secondary schools in the North of England. It examines the progress of the schools in the second year of the statutory inclusion of citizenship in the revised National Curriculum. The writers use the same modus operandi as in the previous article (Calvert and Clemitshaw, 2003) to present a picture of both the management and curriculum aspects of the changes. The article draws on data from interviews with the citizenship co-ordinators (CCs) of each school, and there is an overview in the form of a grid. Readers are encouraged to look back at the previous article to track the changes that have taken place since September 2002.
The study reveals that there are some common patterns and difficulties emerging, particularly with regard to assessment and reporting and some of the problems that have always beset PSHE and pastoral care. These same issues are predictably affecting the progress of the initiative. Principally, the status of the subject, resourcing and levels of understanding, training and commitment of staff are ongoing problems. A leitmotiv running through the interviews is the constant pressure of other initiatives and their effects on change at a time of internal turbulence for a number of the schools. Some progress is being made and it would have been unrealistic to expect all schools to adopt the subject without difficulty but, in spite of the CCs' best efforts, there are still issues that might give cause for concern and that are graphically highlighted by individual cases.     

Implementing Citizenship into the English Secondary School Curriculum

This article represents a snapshot of ten state secondary schools in the north of England immediately prior to the implementation of the statutory inclusion of citizenship in the revised National Curriculum. It includes data from interviews with the citizenship coordinator of each school and offers a range of responses by schools to the change. The two authors respectively, bring to the study their experience of Educational Management and Humanities and offer two different perspectives on the management of change, curriculum planning and implementation. Practical issues of status of the subject, resources, structures and staff development sit alongside contested issues of philosophy, content, pedagogy and outcomes.
Whilst recognizing the qualities and the commitment of the citizenship coordinators, a number of issues are raised that might give cause for concern at the medium to long-term future of this curriculum development.     

Distance Education at the Crossroads

A number of issues in contemporary distance education are reviewed from the perspectives of distance education as practice and as a field of study. In the practice of distance education, government agendas are supplanted by institutional agendas, the clientele shifts from undergraduate second‐chance learners to fee‐paying postgraduates, and the models and methods are under challenge by the online revolution. As a soft–applied field of study, distance education research is susceptible to externally set agendas and prone to external criticism. Distance educators need to address these externally defined issues in terms that speak to its critics.     

Student feedback to improved retention: using a mixed-methods approach to extend specific feedback to a generalisable concept

ABSTRACT

Across the Higher Education (HE) sector student feedback is used to feed into university processes and guide decision making. In this study, data gathered allowed the authors to investigate a hitherto neglected, but important, cohort of successful students – those who succeeded when all the odds were stacked against them. The identified group of students had relatively low predictive probabilities of passing their module, and yet despite all the odds passed. These identified students were interviewed by phone which yielded a much richer data set than is often available from student surveys. The advice they considered to be important to future students included specific guidance to get ahead, to plan and to contact their own academic tutor. Based on this advice an opportunity for future students to have a flexible early start on a specific module was created. A 4% increase in the number of registered students who subsequently started the module was maintained through to module completion.     

Artemisia and Her Mentors: Partnership and Legacy

Through a comprehensive exhibition and study project, a group of high school students and women artists worked together to document the artists’ work, explore the values and issues of women’s art, envision careers, and create an exhibition and permanent teaching resources. The project’s purpose was to test a model curriculum designed to promote gender equity and positive identification among young women in art, and to make the students’ discoveries available for other students in the community. Research confirmed needs for curriculum reform: the need to present art as an appropriate and desirable career choice, to present curriculum content that relates positively to the experiences of female students, and to raise awareness of values and assumptions about women’s art-making.