Is There Anything Specific about Early School Leaving in Southeast Europe? A Review of Research and Policy

Studies on early school leaving (ESL) from countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia have been missing from the international early school leaving research map. As a contribution to remedying this, the article reviews research papers and strategic documents from these countries, guided by the general question whether there is anything specific about ESL in this region in comparison to the wider European research and policy context. The aspects of ESL examined include definitional similarities and differences, extent of ESL, dominant theoretical and methodological approaches, factors identified as impacting ESL as well as policy solutions. We find that Croatia and Slovenia are among the countries which have the lowest ESL rates in Europe. The findings of the reviewed research studies correspond to international research papers in terms of the following frequent risk factors for ESL: low economic and cultural family background, ethnic minority and migration status, type of school enrolled and motivation and academic achievement. There is a strong focus on Roma children early school leavers in all of the countries examined and Bosnia and Herzegovina stands out in the broader European context with the finding that girls from large, low socio-economic status families, who live more than three kilometres away from school, are at particular risk of ESL. In discussing ESL, the reviewed studies tend to emphasise individual and family characteristics rather than also broader social constraints as ESL determinants, a practice also reflected in policy documents which do not mention the role of broader social and economic conditions shaping early school leaving.     

Stichwort: Professionalisierung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The emergence of online teaching practices: a socio-material analysis

The aim of this article was to analyse relations between online teaching practices and their virtual material arrangements. Two higher education online settings were studied using an online ethnographic approach in which observation of the teaching process was of central importance. The first setting was a course in education carried out on itslearning^© (a learning management system) and the second setting was a language course in Second Life^® (a virtual world). A socio-material perspective based on practice theory was used in the analysis, and the focal point was the co-constitutive relation between teaching practices and material arrangements in online settings. A number of relations between practice and arrangement were identified and analysed in the results section. It is argued that the relation between online arrangements and practice is not fixed and determined beforehand, but emerges and alters as the teaching unfolds.     

Adult learners in the workplace: online learning and communities of practice

Seven in‐employment postgraduate Master's level students in an e‐learning unit participated in this research, designed to identify tensions between participation in a community of learning that was part of their studies, and participation in the communities of practice that they were engaged in at their workplaces. It was hypothesised that participation in both these forms of community in their different contexts may enhance each other, or could potentially have a disrupting effect on each. The research employed an interviewing technique. The students' perceptions of the impact of participation in the one form of community on their participation in the other was mixed, with some suggesting that it was enhancing, and others suggesting the contrary, or that there was no impact. The findings indicate that the enhancing effect of participation in communities of learning relevant to a learner's workplace community of practice occur when the learning tasks are designed to enable negotiation of tasks and collaboration with learners who have similar workplace issues.     

Somewhere in between Touch and Vision: In Search of a Meaningful Art Education for Blind Individuals

This article offers a theoretical framework of a meaningful art education for blind people. Existing literature focuses on the interaction between the artwork and the blind person. This text describes this aesthetic encounter which is complex due to tactile sensations, individual differences of the non‐sighted viewer and specific features of the art work. The article demonstrates further the importance of thorough reflection on these issues. The paradoxical character of blindness and visual art raises some difficult theoretical problems. Several authors plead for an art education for the blind that emphasises tactile experiences, instead of visual information. The article considers the consequences of such reasoning and stresses the importance of visual information in an art educational setting for blind people. Finally the article considers the roles of the art educator and the museum guide, as moderators in this dichotomy between the tactile elements of an artwork and its visual features.     

Being chimaera: a monstrous identity for SoTL academics

Lurking on the fringes of university culture are academic identities that do not fit into the usual disciplinary communities. Aiming to explore the experience of ‘being academic’ when not linked directly to a discipline, this paper examines the stories of a diverse group of SoTL scholars who work in a centralised multi-campus academic skills support centre in an Australian university. Framed as group auto-ethnography, the paper inquires into the everyday experience of these academics through narrative analysis of multiple first-person accounts and makes apparent the monstrousness of de-affiliated academic identities. Despite diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the author-participants found that they now shared a tripartite academic identity formed through the negotiation of three roles: the teacher, the disciplinarian, and the educational researcher. Using the chimaera, a mythical three-headed monster as an organising metaphor, this paper aims to provide agency and visibility for often under-represented and unacknowledged academic identities.     

Promoting VET teachers’ innovative behaviour: exploring the roles of task interdependence,learning goal orientation and occupational self-efficacy

Changing employer demands, new technological and pedagogical insights are examples of developments which urge Vocational Education and Training (VET) institutes to continually renew and innovate their educational programmes. This, in turn, requires teachers to show innovative behaviour. Our study focuses on the effects of task interdependence on VET teachers’ innovative behaviour. In addition, the mediating roles of learning goal orientation and occupational self-efficacy in this relationship are examined. A two-wave survey study among 342 teachers, from 54 teams of 6 Dutch VET institutes, showed that task interdependence enhanced teachers’ learning goal orientation, which enhanced their engagement in innovative behaviour over time. Task interdependence also increased teachers’ occupational self-efficacy, which in turn increased their engagement in innovative behaviour. This effect, however, appeared short lived. Apparently, once teachers exceed a certain level of occupational self-efficacy, other variables, like learning goal orientation, play a more important role in sustaining innovative behaviour.     

Communicating aims and learning goals in physical education: part of a subject for learning?

Based on a socio-cultural perspective on learning, the aim of this article is to examine how aims and learning goals are communicated in physical education (PE) practice. A special focus is on scrutinising how teaching practices are framed in terms of whether and how the aims and learning goals are made explicit or not to students. The aim is also to relate these kinds of communications to different movement cultures. The result shows that many of the students taking part in the study do not understand what they are supposed to learn in PE. However, if the goals are well articulated by teachers, the students are more likely to both understand and be aware of the learning outcomes and what to learn in PE. The opposite is also true. If the goals and objectives are not clarified, students find it difficult to state the learning objectives and know what they are supposed to learn.