Transition planning and the needs of young people and their carers: the alumni project

Melanie Smart is a research associate at Sunfield School, Worcestershire, and a trainee clinical psychologist. In this article, she reports the results of a small-scale survey which looked at the views of 17 parents whose children with severe and/or complex learning difficulties had made the transition from a residential special school to an adult placement. Pa rents were asked their retrospective views on the transition planning process; their own involvement; and how the adult placement met the needs of their children.
Melanie Smart's findings indicate that the majority of parents were very much involved in the planning process, although they reported struggling to get consistency of approach and basic information. The young people themselves were found to be marginalised in the planning process, with very few being involved in any decision making. Most parents were happy with the eventual placement, but those who had concerns were still pushing for basic services and care. Of those who had suffered placement breakdowns, the major factor was lack of consistency of approach and failure to use prior information about the child.
This survey shows that parents and their learning disabled children experience difficulties in the transition process. There seems to be a distinct lack of person-centred planning, particularly with this user group, by both child and adult services. Parents are vital to this type of planning approach, particularly when the young people themselves cannot voice their needs or advocate their own rights to quality service provision. Melanie Smart argues that parents need access to better quality information and reassurance that their children will receive the services they deserve as young adults. The various agencies, she asserts, need to work together to ensure that the transition process is effective.     

Changing perceptions about feminists and (still not) claiming a feminist identity

We examine student perceptions about feminists and feminism, and the willingness to claim a feminist identity and engage in collective activism, as stated at the beginning and end of a Women’s Studies course. Course participation simultaneously fostered more positive views towards feminists and feminism and entrenched the unwillingness to claim a feminist identity and engage in activism. These contradictory outcomes stemmed from the critical capacity to recognise that structural inequality is reproduced through disciplinary relationships. Thus, unwillingness was entangled with feelings of fear and vulnerability in relation to the national context whereby neoliberalism guides the governance of the self, and where gender equality has presumed to be achieved. The article highlights that developing the willingness to identify and act is intimately shaped and constrained by the socio-political context and personal relationships. We consider the implications of this insight in relation to pedagogical assumptions about developing feminist knowledge in the classroom.     

Spaces of Mediation: Excavating Art's Boundaries

Ideas of social responsibility and exploring art's place in society are widespread and prevalent. Access, community, participation, empowerment are words that appear with increasing frequency within disparate discourses. From Glasgow's successful bid to be UK City of Architecture and Design 1999, [1] to lottery guidelines [2] and policy research [3], there appears to be a preoccupation with such terminology. However, does this demonstrate a true desire to find a point of mediation between discourses, between one place or one group and another? Do projects establish sustainability in the relationships that are built up between apparently disparate elements or are these terms linked mainly to high profile events that intervene, then move on, leaving people with little more than a memory of the encounter? This paper proposes that in order to shift the topography of art practice – the where, how and on whose terms it occurs – spaces and forms of mediation have to reconstruct the very sub structure on which they are founded.     

‘I just treat them all the same,really’: teachers,whiteness and (anti) racism in physical education

This paper explores physical educators’ perspectives on race and racism as a first step towards disrupting whiteness and supporting the development of antiracist practice. With close links to sport, a practice centrally implicated in the creation and maintenance of racialised bodies and hierarchies, Physical Education (PE) offers an important context for a study of whiteness and racism in education. Using collective biography we examine physical educators’ narrative stories for what they reveal about the operation of whiteness and racism in PE. Teachers draw on narratives from curricula texts which uphold and reinforce notions of the racialised other, thereby reasserting normative, universal white knowledge. Their pedagogy is underpinned by a colour blind approach where race is ‘not seen’, yet essentialist and cultural discourses of race are nevertheless deployed to position particular racialised and gendered bodies as ‘problems’ in PE. Engagement with antiracism is limited to professional rhetoric within pedagogical practice.     

Being critical: an account of an early career academic working within and against neoliberalism

In 2014 I attended a symposium concerning Early Career Academics (ECAs) in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy. I was struck by the dominance of a particular theme at that symposium—that is, how to obtain a position and survive in academia. The aim of this paper is to use an inciting moment that occurred at this symposium as a means to confront some of the broader issues that I thought were at stake. Specifically I seek to interrogate the possible consequences of thinking about ECAs and academia in neoliberal terms, for the future of the field—a field that has a strong critical tradition. To this end I utilise autoethnographic techniques to connect the personal to the cultural and attempt to describe and analyse my story of becoming and being a critical scholar of sport, in a neoliberal context.     

Improving marking reliability of scientific writing with the Developing Understanding of Assessment for Learning programme

The Developing Understanding of Assessment for Learning (DUAL) programme was developed with the dual aims of improving both the quality and consistency of feedback students receive and the students’ ability to use that feedback to improve. DUAL comprises a range of processes (including marking rubrics, sample reports, moderation discussions and peer-review activities) which support explicit knowledge exchange between staff, and between staff and students and the development of tacit knowledge of standards in all participants. This paper describes the study which quantified the extent to which the DUAL programme improved reliability and efficiency of marking of first year biology reports by a large team of laboratory demonstrators. Marker reliability increased after participation in DUAL, with demonstrators marking laboratory reports significantly closer to the marks awarded by an expert marker of the discipline. Efficiency was also improved since time taken to mark the reports did not increase significantly, despite the fact that demonstrators were adapting to a new system of marking. Demonstrators valued the programme and nominated the marking rubric, feedback code and moderation discussion as the most useful elements. The community of practice built through joint participation in the DUAL programme created a supportive working environment for demonstrators and strengthened the collaboration between the discipline and academic language and learning lecturers.     

Mapping a complex system: what influences teacher learning during initial teacher education?

Despite a growing body of knowledge about what content, processes and arrangements for learning may result in more effective initial teacher education, there remains a problem with the variability of outcomes from teacher education programmes. This paper reports on a multi-perspective exploration of what influences learning to teach in valued ways during initial teacher education. Framed by complexity theory, which emphasises the non-linear nature of social phenomena, the paper presents an analysis of 76 maps of influences on learning to teach (made by teacher candidates, teacher educators, mentor teachers and policy makers), looking for differences and patterns that might point the way to explanations about teacher candidates’ varying ability to enact practice that improves outcomes for all learners.