Enhancing participation in primary school and class councils through visual communication

In the context of citizenship education, many UK primary schools have recently set up school councils. Previous research has overlooked the importance of exploring communicative practices specific to school councils and the implications for children's participation. This paper draws on an action‐orientated research project with teachers in three Norfolk primary schools, which began with ethnographic observation of school and class council meetings. By developing alternative visual strategies for facilitating communication in meetings (based on a methodology known as PRA), teachers were able to encourage involvement by more children and enable them to have a greater voice in decision‐making. We argue that the common focus on adult procedures in school councils puts the emphasis on teaching children about their future role as citizens and can limit children's ownership of decision‐making processes. The alternative is to create contexts in which children have a sense of the democratic purposes of their school council in the here and now, by providing children with means (such as the visual strategies) that are consistent with those purposes and prioritizing action as an end.     

Effects of ICT: Do we know what we should know?

Many decades after the introduction of ICT into classrooms there are still unanswered questions about the impact of technology in the long and short term on students’ learning, and how it has affected simple and complex learning tasks. These are important for (a) forming government policies; (b) directing teacher education programmes: (c) advancing national curricula; (d); designing or reforming classroom implementation and (e) analysing costs and benefits. While a plethora of studies has been conducted on the effects of ICT in education, major policy and methodological problems have precluded an unambiguous answer to such questions as:—“Does the way in which ICT is implemented have a major/minor impact on students’ knowledge and understanding?” and “Does the impact affect the surface or deep structure of students’ thinking and acting?” To date we have had no large-scale longitudinal studies of ICT’s impact in education such as we have in the form of studies of earlier major curriculum development projects. Nor have we had many comprehensive studies of the complex interactions between various types of ICT implementation and the effects of other factors such as school-based interventions, socio-economic status and school expenditures which have been shown to have a greater impact on education compared with other previous innovations in education. Furthermore we do not know if previous research studies have used research methods that matched learning objectives to instruments/procedures. Many previous studies are vague as to the actual measures used but we can infer that standardized tests were a frequent measure. In other instances, ad hoc analyses, with criteria that may have varied from analyst to analyst and were not “blind” analyses were certainly used to measure “success.” All of these limitations and uncertainties and many more point to the need for a thorough, rigorous, and multifaceted approach to analysing the impact of ICT on students’ learning. This paper draws on previous research evidence to identify relevant research strategies to address the gaps in our knowledge about ICT and students’ learning explained above.     

Educational historiographical meta‐analysis: rethinking methodology in the 1990s

Relations among literary discourse constructed during oral storybook reading, current theories of reader response to literature, and research in classroom storybook reading are explored in this paper. Pursuing a Bakhtinian analysis of five readings of one picture storybook, the meaning‐making strategies used by kindergarten students and their teacher to appropriate literary discourse and, thereby, to define the situation in these storybook events is discussed. The paper is framed by a symbolic interactionist approach to the social negatiation of meaning, especially as meaning is negotiated in context through language.     

A survey of literature on the history of sport in Britain

Truistically, sport reflects political, ideological, economic, social and religious precepts and practices. Anthropologists, sociologists and historians for some time have produced a growing body of knowledge on sport, indicating that it can be studied from various disciplinary perspectives and shed light on issues ranging from social class conflict and gender inequalities, to nationalism and colonialism. [1 [1] Cashmore, Making Sense of Sports; Jarvie and Maguire, Sport and Leisure. ] Within the Jewish community of British-ruled Palestine, the conflict between the religious Judaic commandment on refraining from any work and the playing of sport on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest, became a public issue. This paper describes the conflict over sport on the Sabbath in Jewish Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s in two specific settlements. This conflict offers evidence of a historical approach from which to view broader historical phenomena, including ideological disagreement regarding the role of religion in modern Jewish nationalism, muscular Christian legacies and anti-imperial assertion.