Science discovery: Inside story

Human Anatomy in preschool? The answer is a resounding, “Yes!” The decision to study the “inside parts” of our bodies was based on solid ground. Young children ask questions about their bodies and we looked for activities which could help answer some of those questions.     

Supporting pupils in school with social,emotional and mental health needs: a scoping review of the literature

This article reports on a scoping review of the academic and related literature published between 2000 and 2015 that addressed the education provision for secondary aged pupils with social, emotional and/or mental health difficulties (SEMH) conducted over a six week period in 2015. A total of 168 documents met the inclusion criteria for the review, including 110 peer reviewed journal articles. The authors found an emerging evidence base to support more effective provision for pupils with SEMH, but there remains, particularly at the group and individual level a dearth of literature. Underpinning all the successful programmes in this review was a positive approach adopted by teachers and school leaders to pupils with SEMH. There was an overlap in practice between approaches used at universal, group and individual level but the majority of effective approaches were common to mainstream and specialist settings.     

LISP (Energy) — Some preliminary findings

Conclusion In concluding this tentative account of our research we can note that the research questions about teachers' alternative frameworks and their interaction with the curriculum and with classroom learning by students appear to be extremely important questions for researchers in the area of energy teaching and learning and presumably in wider contexts. There are also implications for science teacher education, both preservice and inservice. It is clearly necessary to address the confusion in both teachers' and students' understandings of energy. We would like to thank Mary and Jack, their Principals, and classes for allowing us to observe their teaching and learning, SERU colleagues for their sustained support and in particular Mark Cosgrove for his editing of this paper's drafts.     

The illusory dichotomy of plagiarism

Plagiarism has been characterised as a ‘major problem’ for universities. While tensions between students and universities are inevitable, the problem with the existing system of plagiarism management and prevention is that it operates to problematise the relationship between the university and the student, rather than address the core academic issues. As a result, a dichotomy is created where the student interest is constructed as adverse to that of the institution. This article argues that de-dichotomisation of the current polarity of plagiarism will open space for alternative thoughtful considerations in dealing with plagiarism positively in an institutional context.     

Educator Talk in Long Day Care Nurseries: How Context Shapes Meaning

Little is known about the quality and characteristics of the language used by childcare staff when interacting with infants in non-parental group care settings. This qualitative study analysed the manner in which staff used language when interacting with ten children aged between 9 and 20 months in four different long day care centres in Sydney, Australia. Each infant was audiorecorded for one whole day using a small recording device attached to her/his clothing, which captured all the language spoken directly to, or in their presence of, the infant. The infants and staff were simultaneously videorecorded as they went about their everyday activities, to provide additional contextual information. Using systemic functional linguistics as the theoretical underpinning, the study found that staff members tended to talk to more than one child at a time, limiting their potential to engage in the types of sustained conversations with individual children that have been shown to promote language development. Staff also tended to use language primarily to manage children’s behaviour and provide physical care, rather than using language to encourage children to use their own developing language to represent their experiences in a variety of contexts. The findings have implications for group size, early childhood teacher education and inservice professional development.     

‘In transition’: choice and the children of New Zealand’s economic reforms

New Zealand’s rapid emergence as a late‐modern, neo‐liberal society following 1984 led to a transformation in the institutional infrastructure for youth transitions from school to post‐school worlds. Our research focuses on the ways that young people born after 1984 craft identities in transition. We investigate their perspectives on transition in their last year of school, and the processes by which they make choices about post‐school destinations. In particular, we examine the extent to which the transitions they negotiate are shaped by the institutional infrastructure for transition established by policy. Expecting some degree of mismatch between the complexities of participants’ lives and the linear transition process implicit in policy, we found instead a combination of traditional assumptions (that transition would be a straightforward, linear process) and late‐modern assumptions (about the construction of elective biographies through active choice). These combined to produce a particular perception of risk among participants.     

Towards a collaborative methodology: An ethnography of widening educational participation

This paper examines my attempts to develop a collaborative methodology, and critically considers the limitations and possibilities of this approach. It draws on a small-scale ethnography of widening educational participation undertaken for my doctoral degree. I worked with a group of access students in a UK further education college to develop the methods and methodology, to identify research questions and key areas of focus and, to a lesser extent, to analyse the data. Post/structural analytical tools enabled co-participants to deconstruct hegemonic neo-liberal discourses of widening participation. Feminist theory enabled the refashioning of radical discourses that are concerned with destabilising unequal relations of power in research and in education. In the paper I consider issues of power, research relationships, author-ity, reflexivity and ethics in collaborative methodology.