Education and poverty in affluent countries

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding ‘the public’ from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education.     

Exploring the Actual and Potential Rhetoric-reality Gaps in Environmental Education and their Implications for Pre-service Teacher Training

The mismatch between the advocated views of theorists and the teaching realities in school environmental education is widely recognised. There is relatively little research examining the advocated practices of teachers themselves, other than already environmentally active teachers, to indicate the nature of the 'potential' rhetoric-reality gap that might exist if all constraints were removed, and teachers had a completely free choice in designing their own environmental education programmes. This article identifies such gaps by exploring current practices and teachers' views on selected components of environmental education, across a complete teacher training partnership. This information has been used to help prioritise the content and approaches used by pre-service teachers when conducting school-based environmental activities. The investigation reveals that although most schools lack a written policy on environmental education, most have a positive attitude towards the large majority of selected components and these are usually addressed in school. Teachers are not generally compelled to deliver aspects of environmental education that they deem inappropriate. Of the 10 components not currently addressed by most of these schools, the findings suggest that five would be added if constraining factors were removed, but a further five would remain absent. The overall potential rhetoric-reality differences in this case study are thus smaller than the actual existing differences, but still fall short of some theorists' goals. Within the pre-service training programme, efforts have been concentrated on components that are: (i) currently practised in most schools; and (ii) receive a positive response from most teachers, and this has resulted in markedly improved feedback from schools and trainees alike.     

Session search modeling by partially observable Markov decision process

Session search, the task of document retrieval for a series of queries in a session, has been receiving increasing attention from the information retrieval research community. Session search exhibits the properties of rich user-system interactions and temporal dependency. These properties lead to our proposal of using partially observable Markov decision process to model session search. On the basis of a design choice schema for states, actions and rewards, we evaluate different combinations of these choices over the TREC 2012 and 2013 session track datasets. According to the experimental results, practical design recommendations for using PODMP in session search are discussed.     

Judging Teachers: the social and political contexts of teacher evaluation

This paper argues that the assessment and evaluation of teachers in slate provided schooling in Britain has never been simply a matter of technical competence. Judging teachers has always involved social, ideological and political considerations which have varied in different historical periods.

An analysis is made of attempts to apply principles and procedures of assessment especially to teachers in urban working class schools. It is shown that these attempts have historically moved from a ‘visible’ strategy of direct imposition and surveillance to an ‘invisible’ strategy through the ethic of legitimated professionalism. Current developments in British schooling suggest, however, a possible return to more direct and visible procedures as ‘teacher incompetence’ is placed at the centre of the education problem.     

Using the outdoor scavenger hunt to teach theories of organizational communication

Courses: Communication Theory, Organizational Communication, Strategic Communication.

Objectives: Students will identify and categorize organizational discourses on their campuses; students will become aware of the ethical considerations of communication; students will recognize the different perceptions of organizational culture on campus.     

Making Connections for Future Directions: Taking religion seriously in the sociology of education

This article argues that a problem for the contemporary sociology of education is that it has operated within a 'secularisation of consciousness paradigm'. This has limited both the depth and the scope of its intellectual enquiries. Sociological analysis which elides a religious dimension not only presents an over-simplified view of social relations in 'the Modern West', but it also fails to make an authentic engagement with many socio-cultural and educational situations internationally, where God is far from dead. The article suggests various ways forward for a reorientation of sociological writing and research.     

Science for All: Engaging Students with Special Needs in and About Science

The notion of “science for all” suggests that all students—irrespective of achievement and ability—should engage in opportunities to understand the practice and discourse of science. Improving scientific literacy is an intrinsic goal of science education, yet current instructional practices may not effectively support all students, in particular, students with special needs. Argument‐based inquiry approaches, such as the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH), require all students to construct their scientific understandings by engaging in investigations and negotiating their ideas in multiple contexts, such as discussions and writing. Various SWH studies demonstrated that students engaged in appropriating the language, culture, practice, and dispositions of science generally improved their critical thinking and standardized test scores. The implementation of such an approach has several implications for science and special education research and practice, including how learning environments should be established to encourage the inclusion of all students’ ideas, as well as how scaffolded supports can and should be used to support science learning.