Complexities and compromises: The new era at Parkview School

This paper deals with the managing of externally imposed curriculum change from the teacher's perspective in a UK state-maintained school. When I delivered this paper at the AERA conference in Boston in 1990, it appeared that the substance of the paper was recognized as being as relevant to American educators as to their British counterparts. British teachers are now being required to teach to national specifications. These were legislated in the Educational Reform Act of 1988, with national curriculum and national prescribed assessment tasks for pupils at the ages of seven, eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. At the age of sixteen, pupils take a national examination called the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). The GCSE was introduced in September 1986, and for the first time in the history of English examinations, teachers had to teach from syllabuses that adhered to nationally prescribed criteria in all the major subjects of the curriculum. They were also obliged to assess the subject in the way specified. With the passing of the Educational Reform Act of 1988, the GCSE became the nationally prescribed assessment for all sixteen-year-olds.The American educational context has, for a long time, had to deal with decisions being made about curriculum and assessment outside the school. Mary Futrell (1986) states: Between 1983 and 1985, state legislations enacted more than 700 statutes stipulating what should be taught, how it should be taught, and by whom it should be taught (p. 1). This is now the situation in Britain, and so it would appear that much can be gained from an exchange of ideas between the UK and the United States about the impact that externally imposed curriculum change has on the organizational structure of schooling. I could quite easily have begun my paper with a quote by Ernest Boyer (1985), President of the Carnegie Foundation. This quote could refer to British as well as American teachers: Teachers feel that they have more responsibilities and less authority, less recognition, less empowerment to do their work (p. 1).The Parkview School is situated in a town in the southwest of England that has a variety of manufacturing and service industries. The school copes with problems familiar to schools in larger urban conurbations. The town has a center that suffers from urban decay and that over recent years has been demolished and rebuilt. The pupil population is composed of the full range of academic ability, pupils' families being in the middle- to low-income bracket. There is evidence of poverty and deprivation among the pupil population, and the more wealthy members of the population send their children to private independent schools. As is true of the majority of state schools in Britain, the Parkview School is underresourced, and education takes place in old, poorly maintained buildings. All schools in Britain are funded in a similar way regardless of the geographic area in which they are located. The schools share common organizational structures, have teachers on a national pay scale, and suffer from poor administrative backup.The issues, concerns, stresses, and tensions described in this paper will, I am sure, be familiar to educators on both sides of the Atlantic.     

The positive purpose of remediation: Getting to the core of higher education

Mike Rose argues that remediation, despite its negative reputation, is both a historically appropriate function of higher education and intimately interconnected with its foundational concerns.     

Choosing Technologies for Education

The aim of this paper is to help towards the development of national policies for the use of communication technology in education. It suggests that policy should be shaped by answering five questions: what technology is convenient for the learner; what are the national constraints on technology choice; what makes curricular sense; what are the costs; what works for small states?.     

Re‐engineering the Horizontally Challenged Pastoral System

The writers, as Section Manager and head of an inner‐city school under Special Measures, describe the school's approach to the re‐engineering of its pastoral system from a horizontal, year‐based system, to a semi‐vertical 'family' system. The article explores the reasons for the change, the planning process and the outcomes and suggests ways of implementing successful change over a short time‐frame.     

Japan’s English-medium instruction initiatives and the globalization of higher education

This article analyzes a recent initiative of Japan’s Ministry of Education, which aims to internationalize higher education in Japan. The large-investment project “Top Global University Project” (TGUP) has emerged to create globally oriented universities, to increase the role of foreign languages in higher education, and to foster global human resources. The TGUP identifies 37 universities: 13 as “top global universities” intended to compete in the top 100 university world rankings and 24 “global traction universities” intended to lead the internationalization of higher education in Japan. Despite the substantial funding behind this initiative, little research has been conducted to evaluate the potential impact of this policy on language planning in higher education in Japan. This paper addresses this gap in its exploration of the TGUP, including key changes from previous internationalization policies. It then presents an analysis of publicly available documents regarding the policy, collected from all 37 of the participant universities. Findings indicate a positive departure from older policy trends and the emergence of flexible, unique forms of English language education in Japan’s universities.     

Resettled Refugee Youths’ Stories of Migration,Schooling, and Future: Challenging Dominant Narratives About Refugees

In the United States and around the world, refugees are frequently portrayed as helpless victims, burdens of the host society, and potential criminals. Similarly, in schools even well-intentioned educators focus on what they lack, rather than the various stories, experiences, and perspectives they have to offer. To provide another perspective, we aim to find ways to empower resettled refugee youth and draw implications for education of former refugees and other marginalized students. Through interviews, we sought to understand the stories of ten former Burmese refugee adolescents with respect to their backgrounds, migration, and school experiences. Our analysis shows that they recognized their marginalized positionings in the United States that are attributable to their limited English proficiency, ethnicity and race, and former refugee status. They, however, authored narratives of themselves that contest such marginalizing narratives by providing diverse stories of refugees different from dominant ones and positioning themselves as valuable members of local communities and change agents for a more equitable society. These findings call for pedagogical approaches in which schools and communities provide space for stories that former refugee youths bring, value stories authored by them, and draw on their perspectives on inequity and social transformation.     

The bond between intelligences: Cultural,emotional, and social

Increasing interest in multiple forms of nonacademic intelligences in addition to the well‐established intelligent quotient (IQ) to explain individual success has triggered a need for clear establishment of the theoretical and empirical connection among these constructs. As such, this article explores the interrelationship that exists among three forms of nonacademic intelligences: cultural, emotional, and social. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.