Adult literacy practitioners and employability skills: resisting neo-liberalism?

We draw on theories of policy enactment to explore the ways in which the situated, material and external contexts and professional cultures in adult literacy in the UK have influenced practitioners. Our analysis of the transnational (OECD, EU) and UK external policy contexts found that skills-related education is prioritised, with a focus on economic growth through increased productivity and accountability. This can lead to a narrow conceptualisation of literacy as a set of information processing skills needed for employment that limits the curriculum so that the knowledge of the participants is ignored. However, our findings show that there is not a one-way flow from the transnational to the local. Instead, literacy practitioners translate and enact policy texts based on their situated contexts and professional cultures leading to approaches to teaching and learning that keep learners and their goals at the centre of the curriculum. We conclude that shared understandings of good practice and an underpinning value system, along with creative ways of delivering pre-set outcomes, allow practitioners to resist to some extent the neoliberal discourse whilst meeting the requirements of policy and funding. However, how feasible delivering this alternative curriculum is over the longer term remains to be seen.     

From social interaction to individual reasoning: an empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development

This study explores the theory that individual reasoning ability, as measured using standard reasoning tests, has part of its origin in dialogue with others. In the study, 64 eight- and nine-year-old children were taught the use of ‘exploratory talk’, a type of talk in which joint reasoning is made explicit. The relationship between the talk of the children and the solving of Raven's test problems was studied using discourse analysis of groups working together. The findings of the study support four claims: that use of exploratory talk can improve group reasoning, that exploratory talk can be taught, that the teaching of exploratory talk can successfully transfer between educational contexts and that individual results on a standard non-verbal reasoning test significantly improved as a result of the intervention teaching exploratory talk. Our results offer support for the hypothesis that experience of social reasoning can improve scores on measures of individual reasoning. The stronger hypothesis that general cognitive development is a product of induction into social reasoning remains in doubt.     

“I Could Not Believe That Would Happen”: Challenges and Opportunities in a Critical,Project-Based Clinical Experience

As part of a youth summer program—a partnership between a large Southeastern university and the local school district—middle-school-aged youth, preservice teachers, and doctoral candidates interested in arts-based literacy practices spent their mornings in June 2016 engaging in activities that both explored and expanded thinking around their communities, schools, and families. Whereas the youth were enrolled in a monthlong creative arts and tentative unschooling experiment that ran roughly the length of a typical school day, university faculty and graduate students were engaged in a course on the application of youth participatory action research (YPAR). This article is an examination of the experience of preservice teachers, through an analysis of their reflections on events within the course, to suggest ways forward through the promises and perils of project-based, clinical preservice teaching experiences. In our exploration of the experiences of focal preservice teachers when engaged with youth coresearchers in a monthlong YPAR project, we found the work to have been filled with contradictions, unexpected shifts, and moments of great understanding, community affiliation, and suffering.     

A case study of scientific reasoning

Concern is increasingly being expressed about the teaching of higher order thinking skills in schools and the levels of understanding of scientific concepts by students. Metaphors for the improvement of science education have included science as exploration and science as process skills for experimentation. As a result of a series of studies on how children relate evidence to their theories or beliefs, Kuhn (1993a) has suggested that changing the metaphor to science as argument may be a fruitful way to increase the development of higher order thinking skills and understanding in science instruction. This report is of a case study into the coordination of evidence and theories by a grade 7 primary school student. This student was not able to coordinate these elements in a way that would enable her to rationally consider evidence in relation to her theories. It appeared that the thinking skills associated with science as argument were similar for her in different domains of knowledge and context. Specializations: science learning, scientific reasoning, learning environments, science teacher education. Specializations: cognition, reasoning in science and mathermatics.     

Students’ Research-Informed Socio-scientific Activism: Re/Visions for a Sustainable Future

In many educational contexts throughout the world, increasing focus has been placed on socio-scientific issues; that is, disagreements about potential personal, social and/or environmental problems associated with fields of science and technology. Some suggest (as do we) that many of these potential problems, such as those associated with climate change, are so serious that education needs to be oriented towards encouraging and enabling students to become citizen activists, ready and willing to take personal and social actions to reduce risks associated with the issues. Towards this outcome, teachers we studied encouraged and enabled students to direct open-ended primary (e.g., correlational studies), as well as secondary (e.g., internet searches), research as sources of motivation and direction for their activist projects. In this paper, we concluded, based on constant comparative analyses of qualitative data, that school students’ tendencies towards socio-political activism appeared to depend on myriad, possibly interacting, factors. We focused, though, on curriculum policy statements, school culture, teacher characteristics and student-generated research findings. Our conclusions may be useful to those promoting education for sustainability, generally, and, more specifically, to those encouraging activism on such issues informed by student-led research.     

Engineering design processes in seventh-grade classrooms: bridging the engineering education gap

This paper reports on some findings from the first year of a three-year longitudinal study, in which seventh- to ninth-graders were introduced to engineering education. Specifically, the paper addresses students’ responses to an initial design activity involving bridge construction, which was implemented at the end of seventh grade. This paper also addresses how students created their bridge designs and applied these in their bridge constructions; their reflections on their designs; their reflections on why the bridge failed to support increased weights during the testing process; and their suggestions on ways in which they would improve their bridge designs. The present findings include identification of six, increasingly sophisticated levels of illustrated bridge designs, with designs improving between the classroom and homework activities of two focus groups of students. Students’ responses to the classroom activity revealed a number of iterative design processes, where the problem goals, including constraints, served as monitoring factors for students’ generation of ideas, design thinking and construction of an effective bridge.