What Youth Care About: Exploring Topic Identification for Youth-Led Research in School

The Urban Review - Youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) has been documented to increase youth’s social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes, foster critical thinking and...     

Cooperation and instruction in practical problem solving. Differences in interaction styles of mother-child dyads as related to socio-economic background and cognitive development

This article addresses the role of parents and children in the social construction of children's cognitive competence. A discussion of four approaches (i.e. Sigel, Wertsch, Wood, Diaz et al.) leads to the hypothesis that both the level of instruction content and the degree of cooperation in joint problem solving interactions with adults are related to children's cognitive development. This was tested in a study of 40 mothers and three-year-old children solving a practical problem. Coding videotaped interactions on a content and cooperation dimension yielded moderate to strong correlations with family's socio-economic status and children's cognitive level.     

On ‘Politics,Markets, and American Schools‘

This paper traces the trajectory of New Labour education policy since the formation of the first New Labour government in 1997. During that time the policy discourse has moved from a position of individualized school improvement through competition, to one where there is an emphasis on ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ as key mechanisms for improvement. We note, however, that ‘specialism’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are still key components of policy and that ‘partnership’ often denotes a deficit model, with more successful schools supporting (or in some cases taking over) less successful ones. Although there are the beginnings of a recognition that social class and social deprivation are factors which make achievement at school more problematic, generally New Labour policy has not attempted to alleviate the tendency to social polarization which has emerged as a result of school choice policies.     

Testing,French Style

Teachers are novices at any stage of their careers when they are faced with incidents that disrupt their expected patterns of teaching and learning. A first-day-of-school incident experienced by the author illustrates the evolution of a teacher's personal pedagogical theory construction, which is ultimately illuminated through the lens of Nel Noddings's ethic of care.