Unlocking education through relationship building: Identity and agency in English educational institutions during Covid-19

This paper reports on a longitudinal study in the North of England with 13 educators in schools, colleges and universities during two lockdowns. The project was designed to ‘unlock’ education by providing spaces to co-create new ways of thinking about education in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Focus groups were conducted with school and college teachers as well as university staff at the end of the first and second English lockdowns, in summer 2020 and spring 2021. An initial analysis identified issues with expectations and communication between educators and executive management as well as a lack of agency of educators, and how participants framed them as impacting on their identity as educators. Therefore, the framework of tactics of intersubjectivity was adopted to explore how educators discursively positioned themselves and others through constructions of similarity and difference, realness and power, and how their professional identities were affected by the experience of working through the pandemic and by those around them. Whilst educators took opportunities to authenticate their identity and reimagine education, their agency was undermined by top-down governing involving little successful communication, leading to denaturalising and illegitimising experiences for educators. Executive management were perceived as lacking engagement with staff and understanding of the implications of their decisions on them. The findings call for relationship building and recognition of educators' voice.     

The Literacy Skills of English Language Learners in Canada

The purpose of this article is to review published studies of the English literacy of children in Canada who are English language learners (ELLs) with the goal of understanding the reading development of ELLs and characteristics of reading disabilities (RD) in this population. Phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and working memory of ELLs with and without RD were compared to that of native English‐speaking (L1) students with and without RD. Our review found that ELLs with RD experienced reading difficulties similar to those of L1 students with RD. On the basis of the evidence, ELLs are not at greater risk for RD than their native English‐speaking peers. We propose that the diagnosis of a reading disability can be made in a similar manner in both ELL and L1 students.     

Gender and Leadership in South African Educational Administration

Between 1994 and 1999, new discourses of social justice and gender equity enabled the entry of significant numbers of women into the previously all-male domains of the educational bureaucracy. At the same time, women in one bureaucracy were leaving as fast as they were entering. This article probes this phenomenon of the simultaneous transformation of the educational administration and the apparent consolidation of earlier patriarchal forms of control, albeit on a non-racial basis. On the basis of 16 in-depth interviews conducted in the Gauteng Department of Education with key decision-makers, the article argues that these developments can be explained by the particular constructs and practices of leadership in educational administration that associate leadership and competence with masculinity, rationality and whiteness. This is evident in how interviewees framed their experience of authority and leadership, visibility and recognition and balance between public and private life. The experience overall was such as to lever women out of their positions. All interviewees drew on a range of personal and social resources to deal with the stresses and strains of working in educational administration. Black women drew strength from a belief in the collective strength and capability of women rooted in maternal feminism.