Preparing teachers to teach pupils with special educational needs in more inclusive schools: evaluating a PGCE development

As we move towards a more inclusive education system in the UK, there is a real need to equip teachers to work in more diverse classrooms from the start of their teaching careers. In this article, Gill Golder, teaching and research fellow (physical education), Brahm Norwich, Professor of Educational Psychology and Special Educational Needs, and Phil Bayliss, senior lecturer in special educational needs and education studies, all based in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Exeter, describe developments in Exeter's secondary phase Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme. The authors set their account in the context of policy requirements in England and international trends towards more inclusive teacher education. They report on an initiative designed to enhance the knowledge, skills and attitudes of trainee teachers and to equip them to differentiate their teaching to meet the individual needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs. This initiative involved all trainees working intensively with one pupil, supported by the SENCo in their teaching practice school. Building towards a form of dispersed teacher preparation that may have applications in other contexts, the programme offered student teachers a systematic strategy for individualised teaching and the support of web-based resources. Gill Golder, Brahm Norwich and Phil Bayliss include evaluations from student teachers, SENCos and principal subject tutors in their report. They conclude that this is a promising way of working, which highlights the national and international need to develop practical ways of enhancing initial teacher education in relation to special educational needs and inclusion.     

Building trust and shared knowledge in communities of e-learning practice: collaborative leadership in the JISC eLISA and CAMEL lifelong learning projects

Trust and collective learning are useful features that are enabled by effective collaborative leadership of e‐learning projects across higher and further education (HE/FE) institutions promoting lifelong learning. These features contribute effectively to the development of design for learning in communities of e‐learning practice. For this, reflexivity, good leadership and the capacity to engage in innovation is crucial to team performance. This paper outlines a serendipitously useful combination of innovative models of collaboration emerging from two 2005–06 UK e‐learning pilots: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) e‐Learning Independent Study Award (eLISA) and JISC infoNet Collaborative Approaches to the Management of e‐Learning (CAMEL) projects. The JISC‐funded eLISA Distributed e‐Learning (DeL) project set up a collaborative partnership among teachers to try out LAMS and Moodle using study skills in e‐learning. Simultaneously, the JISC infoNet CAMEL project developed a model of collaborative approaches to e‐learning leadership and management across four UK HE/FE institutions. This paper proposes two new theoretical collaborative team leadership and operational models for e‐learning projects, including indices of trust, reflexivity and shared procedural knowledge, recommending that these models are further developed in future communities of e‐learning practice in institutions promoting lifelong learning.     

'It's Like We're a Normal Way and Everyone Else is Different': Australian children's constructions of citizenship and national identity

The more people are urged to 'think globally' and to see themselves as 'citizens of the world', the more taken-for granted notions of national belonging (national identity) are called into question. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Australia where, in recent times, a number of events have caused Australians to think most carefully about what it means to be Australian. While there have been plenty of opportunities for adults to debate these issues, little attention has been paid to the way children are now conceptualising their senses of 'belonging'. Do children see themselves as global citizens, an identity they are increasingly encouraged to embrace through mass media, mass communications and the Internet, or do they see themselves as belonging to an entity called 'Australia', or are they juggling with both identities? This study examines how 28 young Australian children are thinking about what it means to be 'Australian' and 'a citizen' in global times.     

Unfinished business: re-positioning gender on the education equity agenda

The long-standing relationship between social disadvantage and poor educational outcomes continues to preoccupy educational policy-makers, with teachers at the front line of the ongoing struggle. Across the range of equity concerns, gender may be noted as either qualifying disadvantage or compounding it, but the meaning of gender as a simple binary category is rarely challenged. Using data drawn from a study in three disadvantaged urban fringe Australian high schools we argue that the policy-driven gender-as-difference approach can serve to mask educational inequality rather than to challenge it. By demonstrating the ways in which the girls and their teachers respond to, interpret and understand their schooling experience, we suggest the enriched capacity of a relational theory of gender that, while inclusive of earlier theoretical moments and cognisant of progress made, does offer a more coherent and potentially redemptive basis for educational intervention     

Notes and News

For reasons of expediency, Colleges of Education (engaged in initial teacher education outside the university sector) introduced a category of Assistant Lecturer in the 1960s. These posts were created to strengthen the subject studies base within the colleges. They attracted a somewhat modest salary, and young, recent graduates tended to be appointed to them. In this paper, the authors consider the extent to which these posts were a form of preparation for teaching, with some features in common with current ‘workplace’ routes to Qualified Teacher Status in England. The approach is autobiographical, recording and reflecting on the authors’ own experience as Assistant Lecturers in Mathematics in two Colleges of Education in the 1960s and early 1970s.     

Authoritative schools: A test of a model to resolve the school effectiveness debate

School effectiveness research has fueled debate on the importance of a press for academic excellence versus communal values. Research on parenting styles offers a theoretical framework that may resolve the debate. We hypothesized that dimensions of parenting styles—demandingness (academic press) and responsiveness (communal values)—predict students’ mathematics achievement, engagement, and locus of control. HLM analyses of NELS: 88 data on 19,435 eighth-graders partially supported the hypothesis: Students’ perceptions of school responsiveness predicted their engagement and internal control. In addition, students in responsive schools had smaller differences in mathematics achievement and internal control attributable to SES, suggesting that responsive schools may increase equity. We offer suggestions for further investigation of the model in hope of resolving the debate.