Political pornification gone global: Teresa Rodríguez as fungible object in the 2015 Spanish regional elections

In this article, the authors examine the political pornification of Spanish politician Teresa Rodríguez and assess the rhetorical strategies she and her supporters used to respond to the controversy. The authors theorize a “fungibility frame” within which women candidates and citizens are treated as interchangeable, violable, and devalued. Rodríguez and her supporters resisted this frame, asserting women's individuality, agency, and inherent value. This case underscores the ways in which political pornification impacts not just candidates and public figures, but also private citizens. When pornified, women are presented not as individuals with political agency but as objects which may be manipulated for political and commercial gain. Additionally, this analysis reveals the ways in which the conditions that produce political pornification may be endemic to democratic culture.     

The Training of School Support Agents: A Case Study from Spain

This article deals with issues involved in the training of school support agents for school improvement tasks and purposes. We describe and analyze a specific training programme that was carried out in Madrid, Spain, from 1990 till 1992. Apart from dealing with its initial objectives and assumptions, the article explores the institutional, cultural and personal factors that played a major role throughout the implementation of the programme; finally, it attempts to give an account of the problems involved in the reconstruction of the theory and practice of external support through the in‐service training of school support agents.     

SOMETHING UP THE SLEEVE: FRAUD IN EDUCATION,OR THE LEARNING OF CORRUPTION

This article deals with the low profile issue of educational fraud. The author defines educational fraud in terms of a range of illegitimate practices in which students engage in order to inflate their recorded levels of academic performance. Four subtypes of fraud are identified. The cultural and social correlates of fraud are then considered. This discussion leads to suggestion that fraud may in certain circumstances be fostered by the hidden curriculum. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of educational fraud and an exploration of some possible means by which it could be combatted. Central issues here are (1) the links between fraud and dominant forms of educational evaluation which stress outcomes over process, and (2) the relevance of fraud to notions of citizenship and citizenship education.     

The return of the prodigal son: the experience of support agents on their return from Teachers’ Centers to school

This paper presents the results of a two‐year qualitative inquiry, carried out in Spain, on a rather neglected side of external support to schools: the personal and professional experience of external support agents when they go back to teaching. These ex‐advisers are career teachers who return ‘home’ to school after having left it to serve for some years in Teachers’ Centers, which in Spain are the institutions in charge of school support and in‐service teacher training. During their stay there, the ex‐advisers have developed a new discourse on teaching, on school organization and on teacher training that, on their return, they have to contrast with their everyday life in schools. To explore this process, the conceptions, perceptions and visions of these professionals, has a high potential to throw some light on school support, in‐service teacher training and the construction and reconstruction of different professional identities within our educational systems.     

How Do Children Acquire Early Grammar and Build Multiword Utterances? A Corpus Study of French Children Aged 2 to 4

In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples from high‐low socioeconomic status (SES) French‐speaking children aged 2–4 years were annotated with a part‐of‐speech‐tagger. Multiple regression analyses show that grammatical categories, particularly the most frequent subcategories, were the best predictors of MLU both across age and SES groups. These findings support the view that early language learning is guided by grammatical rather than by lexical words. This corpus research design can be used for future cross‐linguistic and cross‐pathology studies.