(Ig)noble Lies: Personal Historicism and Richard Mulcaster’s Positions Concerning the Bringing Up of Children (1581)

Attempting to push early modern presentism to the radical, logical conclusion of a more personal historicism, this essay draws on a number of interpretive practices and theoretical insights – Stephen Greenblatt’s self-reflectivity, Toni Morrison’s ‘rememory’, Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’, bell hooks’s ‘passion of experience’, and Linda Charnes’s alternative historicism – to establish the ethical and interpretive significance of my own painful situatedness as an African American man in Renaissance/Early Modern studies. Specifically, I illustrate that significance in a reading of Richard Mulcaster’s Positions Concerning the Bringing Up of Children, a sixteenth-century educational treatise that responds, as I argue, to early modern educational access and social mobility with an insidiously complex, exclusionary admissions policy.     

International inter‐organisational arrangements in higher education: Towards a typology

Abstract

This article attempts to provide clarity in the maze of international inter‐organisational arrangements in higher education. Developments that fuel the establishment of such linkages are identified. First, the changes in the production of knowledge, changes in resource dependencies and increased opportunities for interaction through new technologies, demand interaction with other universities and organisations, in activities that previously took place within the organisational boundaries of the university. In addition, universities increasingly cross national borders. Students, scholars and employers demand and value the experience gained through international experiences. Liberalisation of trade markets and new modes of delivery expand opportunities for transnational education and the need for inter‐organisational interaction. On the basis of several classifications of cooperation in higher education and using concepts from organisational and management studies, we develop a multidimensional typology of international inter‐organisational cooperation. Critical dimensions identified in this typology are size, scope, nature of integration and intensity.     

A Survey of Opinion on Methods of Professional Development for Secondary Heads

This paper describes a school management development programme aimed at developing managerial skills and responsibilities across the whole school staff. The paper describes why there is possibly some antipathy to this topic for in‐service education and training (INSET). The approach chosen was to use teachers’ current managerial tasks as the focus for the development so that in conjunction with extant self‐study materials, teachers could design their own INSET appropriate to their current perceived needs.     

Complex Inequalities of Educational Opportunities. A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on the Relation Between Gender,Social Class,Ethnicity and School Success

It is well documented that stratification in education precedes social stratification. Many authors hypothesise that the stratification patterns in education may be related to background characteristics of students in a more complex way than researched so far in this field. Therefore, in this article the interactive effects of social class, ethnicity and gender on various indicators for school success are analysed and discussed. A large-scale longitudinal database offered the possibility to establish the complex relations between the three student background variables and school careers, measured by educational attainment 6 years after entering secondary education and by technical or science related choices. Results show that school success is not always predicted by expected additive or multiplicative effects of the different background variables. For example the situation of girls from ethnic minorities is better than expected, while that of indigenous boys from low socio-economic backgrounds is worse when compared to similar boys from ethnic minorities. Inequalities arising from different choice patterns regarding technical and science subjects can only partly be deduced from differences present at the age of 12, whereas in terms of general educational attainment secondary schools even reduce arrears of ethnic minority female students as these can be observed at the age of 12.     

Event-Konzepte

In view of processes of individualization and pluralization, the requirements for living in modern societies result in significantly increased complexity of social constructions of reality. Especially for individualized juvenile people new forms of communities are a constitutive feature of social lifestyle progression and rearrangement. Within events a specific type of these juvenile communalities emerges. Based on two different cases, a music festival and an improvisational theater performance, this paper emphasizes a crucial similarity of events: the use of (physical) staging as a social mechanism for integration and distinction. The process of ‘eventization’ (i.e., spectacularization) provides a framework for action, in which emotional as well as mental affiliations constitute.     

Editorial: Kompetenzmodelle zur Erfassung individueller Lernergebnisse und zur Bilanzierung von Bildungsprozessen

This special issue comprises eleven articles from the DFG priority program “Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes”. The special issue aims at showing the priority program’s present state of discussion concerning essential concepts and questions related to the modeling of competencies. The first article describes the structure and research areas of the program and gives an overview on the current state of research. The short articles two to eleven discuss questions and problems which proved to be of particular importance during the work of the priority program in the last years. These articles constitute the result of a workshop of the participating scientists of the priority program in terms of position papers.     

Transferwirkungen künstlerischer Tätigkeiten. Ihre kritische Kommentierung durch eine umfassende Theorie ästhetischer Bildung

Transfer research examines how artistic activities can have an impact outside of the realm of art itself. The article concludes that this research can be carried out in a meaningful way, only within the framework of a comprehensive theory of aesthetic education. This theory would encompass the structural analysis of artistic activity, as well as biographical reports about artistic experiences. The elucidation of the concepts or themes relevant to the theory would include the notion of aesthetic experience, the understanding of immediate, aesthetic experiences, the analysis of artistic processes, and the outcomes of scientifically evaluated applications of aesthetic education.     

Wann kann Kompetenzdiagnostik negative Auswirkungen haben?

This paper addresses potential negative effects of systematic external competence assessment on different levels of the education system. We discuss possible sources of misinterpretations of competence assessment feedback, potential consequences of feedback and assessment for different education stakeholders (teachers, students, and educational administration) as well as negative effects of systematic competence assessment on the culture of teaching and learning. The paper concludes with some reflections on possibilities to prevent or reduce the discussed negative effects.     

Wie können Ergebnisse der Kompetenzdiagnostik in Forschungsprojekten sinnvoll zurückgemeldet werden?

Reporting on research results to students, teachers and institutions is a big challenge within competence assessment research: students individually have to be given feedback about how they performed, teachers have to be provided with information about their classes, education authorities are interested in actual research results. For feedback being helpful for students, teachers and institutions, the following questions have to be thought of: (1) Who is the feedback given to? What is the aim of the feedback? (2) Which results shall be reported? (3) How should feedback theoretically look like? And (4) how does feedback depend on the given general framework? The given article discusses these questions and offers a “checklist” to research projects with a focus on competence assessment.