Developing a Common Model? Comparing Effective School Improvement Across European Countries

Applicability of research models across contexts is often viewed as desirable. This article discusses 6 issues faced by members of the Effective School Improvement (ESI) project research teams as they explored themes emerging in case studies carried out in 8 different countries, as part of a process of trying to generate a model that would be valid and applicable across contexts. After posing questions that need further resolution, the conclusion at this particular stage of the research was that caution was advisable before transferring the findings from one context to another.     

Defining the political ontology of the classroom: toward a multitudinous education

This paper is driven by a simple question: what type of collective space is a classroom and how can it be imagined differently? Drawing on the social topography provided by Hardt and Negri, I suggest that schools have traditionally worked to produce either (a) a people; (b) a crowd; or (c) the masses. The problem with these forms of social collectivity is that they each tend to limit radical movements for democracy. Opposed to a people, a crowd, or the masses, I suggest that classroom collectivity be reconceptualized in terms of the multitude. It is by configuring the dynamic space of the classroom in relation to a theory of the multitude that educational democracy can be achieved.     

Swarm Intelligence: Rethinking the Multitude from within the Transversal Commons

Abstract

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that contemporary political and economic struggle entails reappropriating the monster as a potent image of multitudinous insurgency against Empire. This essay critically appraises the status of the monstrous in Hardt and Negri's work by bringing the field of critical animal studies into dialogue with Hardt and Negri in order to demonstrate how their conceptualisation of the monstrous nature of the multitude is not monstrous enough. While gesturing toward a posthumanist understanding of the multitude as a monstrous and unformed flesh of resistance and transformation, Hardt and Negri provide no clear discussion of the role of nonhuman animals within the multitude. Instead, nonhuman animals are reduced to mere allegories for the swarm intelligence of a decisively human multitude. The monstrous nature of the multitude remains mired within an anthropocentric speciesism that does not recognise the linguistic, cognitive and material resources that nonhuman animals may bring to the development of a swarm intelligence capable of overcoming the domination of nature inherent in Empire.     

A biographical narrative inquiry into teachers’ knowledge: an intergenerational approach

This study is an investigation into Chinese EFL teachers’ knowledge and understanding of teaching English as a foreign language within the context of a time of tremendous social change in China. In a medium-sized city, biographical narrative interviews and observation were used to three Chinese secondary EFL teachers, of three successive generations. An in-depth narrative analysis interpreting their metaphors, and constructing their life stories is employed to understand the biographical narrative data. It indicates how individual teacher’s knowledge is both constrained and enabled by themselves and by the wider society they live in, and how change and continuity are intertwined in the teaching and learning practices of the three generations. This paper also addresses certain key issues in biographical narrative studies, namely subjectivity, representation, and cultural bearings, and teachers’ knowledge, all of which constitute a form of pedagogy in educational research.