Reproduction and Contradictions in Schooling: the case of Commercial Studies

This paper attempts to explore processes involved in cultural and social reproduction with specific reference to commercial studies in a Queensland Secondary School. Reproduction theories are discussed and a framework for analysing school experience is developed. It is argued that this broad approach to the study of school experience encompasses the formal and informal, the overt and covert, and social relations as well as content aspects of the curriculum. Empirical data on the structuring of school experience in commercial studies are presented under the categories: organisation, content, methodology and general values.

The final section of the paper considers the relationship between school experience and the occupational structure with respect to commercial studies. These subjects can be seen to reproduce the patriarchal and hierarchical relationships of office work. However, a number of recent changes in the structure of the workforce and the nature of office work, have resulted in a number of ‘contradictions’ in the school/work relationship. The implications of the study in relation to educational and social change are discussed.     

Diagnosed intellectual and emotional impairment among parents who seriously mistreat their children: prevalence, type, and outcome in a court sample

A substantial body of research evidence over the past three decades has indicated that intellectual and emotional impairment among parents is a factor contributing to child abuse and neglect. This study examined the court records of 206 seriously abused or neglected children and their families in a large urban area and found that in over half the records a parent had been diagnosed as having an emotional disorder and/or low IQ, with a majority of these diagnoses indicating significant impairment. Although type of impairment (emotional, low IQ, and a subsample of substance abusers) did not predict type of mistreatment, higher predicted risk for continued mistreatment, or greater likelihood of permanent removal of the child by the court, low IQ parents revealed significantly less prior court involvement and greater acceptance of court-ordered services. Parents diagnosed with serious emotional disorders were significantly more likely than less disturbed parents to have their children permanently removed despite findings of no significant differences in risk or compliance factors.     

Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide

Educators are experiencing a knowledge crisis and, as a result, they are committing epistemological suicide. The crisis is born out of two different conceptions of teacher knowledge, each containing a limitation that generates fissures within the respective knowledge paradigm. Educators commit epistemic suicide when surveillance technologies, masked as performance-based accountability systems, demand evidence of their knowing. Unable to account for their knowledge, educators fabricate pedagogical and curricular apparitions to be seen as compliant. I discuss how pedagogical fabrications constitute a teacher's subjectivity through the processes of exterritorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing their knowledge. In the end, I argue that any conception of teacher knowledge ought to include overt conceptualizations of power within professionalization attempts. I sketch a politics of meaning as a way to reclaim teacher knowledge.     

Anticipating education: governing habits,memories and policy-futures

ABSTRACT

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies [Fenwick, T., E. Mangez, and J. Ozga. 2014. Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education. New York, NY: Routledge]. New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them.     

Self‐analysis of Teaching Style using Television

The quality of training for general practice is primarily dependent on the teaching skill of the trainer, but trainers are not necessarily selected for their natural teaching ability nor required to be formally trained themselves. The paper describes a videotape package designed to introduce teaching strategies to prospective trainers by presenting for self‐analysis two contrasting teaching styles.     

Executive function: association with multiple reading skills

Reading and Writing - Executive function (EF) is related to reading. However, there is a lack of clarity around (a) the relative contribution of different components of EF to different reading...     

Intrinsic motivation and school misbehavior: some intervention implications

The intrinsic motivational concepts of self-determination, competence, and relatedness to others are highlighted to underscore their value in identifying motivational underpinnings for deviant and devious behavior. These constructs are woven into a working schema to differentiate intentional misbehavior in terms of whether it is reactive or proactive. Finally, from the perspective of such motivational thinking, implications for formal intervention research and experimental practice are illustrated.     

The German appraisal discussion since 1990: an overview

The development of German archival appraisal theory since 1990 has been little discussed in the English-speaking world. This article provides an introductory overview of the Federführungsmodell developed by the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives), the horizontal and vertical appraisal approach of the Landesarchiv (State Archives) of Baden-Württemberg, and the documentation plans typical of municipal and university archives. It also examines the new focus on records management and calls for collaboration in appraisal between different archives, levels of government and heritage institutions.