Where are we now in the economics of education?

This essay offers a bird's eye view of new directions in the economics of education. An increasing awareness of the socialization function of education, of the screening hypothesis, of the ‘incomplete’ employment contract and of labour market segmentation is leading, it is argued, to a picture of the economic value of schooling which is simply miles removed from the old-fashioned belief that education enhances cognitive knowledge and that employers pay educated people more because they know more. The new way of looking at the economic value of schooling is illustrated by the example of youth training and work experience programmes.     

Vivarium

This contribution is an introduction to an online forum, Vivarium, at the new open¦ed web site. The site will be accessible to an audience of: educationalists, artists, producers, development agencies and funding bodies. The forum will discuss the artist as educator, the culture of art in education, and explicitly Live Art as tool for rendering social issues for exploration in the classrooms of the future. In an era of global ecologies of information, offering users data on everything from hydroponics to Derrida's text The Truth in Painting, fertile knowledge is increasingly accessed through non‐hierarchical networks. In such a terrain, a new post‐pedagogical approach to creativity appears essential if we hope to excite, channel and challenge young people. This paper charts a series of critical issues that readers are invited to develop and discuss online, but perhaps more importantly signifies potential topics that might return in a series of subsequent dialogues commissioned by the Arts Council England for Vivarium. The broader aim of Vivarium is to create a context to frame potential initiatives that might be delivered through Creative Partnerships, the unprecedented Arts Council England initiative, promoting cultural and creative activity for young people.     

A method for personalising the blade size for competitors in flatwater kayaking

The intent of this project was to explore the feasibility of personalising the paddle blade size for individual flatwater kayakers based on their power output profiles. Twelve elite male kayakers performed on a kayak ergometer at the same intensity and resistance that they would normally experience while paddling at race pace for 500 m on the water. The kayak ergometer was instrumented so that power profiles could be determined from the instantaneous force and velocity of the representative centre point of the paddle blade. From the power profile information, the researchers calculated a personalised blade size that was expected to improve performance for those kayakers differing more than 5% from the calculated ‘ideal’ size. For the elite kayakers studied, it was recommended that seven of the paddlers should increase their blade size by approximately 5–10%. For the remaining five paddlers, the results indicated that their current blade sizes were within the expected measurement error of their predicted ideal value and should be retained. It is anticipated that this research will provide the theoretical rationale for elite kayakers to see the need to personalise their blade size based on their own muscle power profiles.     

The perception,management and performance of risk amongst Forest School educators

This article investigates how risk perception amongst teachers within an outdoor educational initiative, Forest School, both shape and are shaped by their understandings of childhood, pedagogy and their own professional identity. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective in theorising risk and childhood, the article argues that contemporary, hyper-sensitised concerns regarding children’s vulnerability emanate from both fears of the modern world, and the proclivity towards over-protection which these fears precipitate. Rather than treating this hyper-sensitivity as irrational or paranoid, the paper draws on socio-cultural theories and qualitative methods to interrogate how risk is perceived, managed and performed by teachers within an initiative which aims to reintroduce risk into children’s lives. The research found that while these teachers’ motivations to participate in Forest School were derived from a desire to expose children to formative risk-taking in the outdoors, the hegemonic cultural and institutional risk aversion which they were attempting to counter, aligned with their contested occupational identity, created tensions in how they managed and performed risk which militated against the full realisation of a Forest School pedagogy.     

Allied healthcare undergraduate education: international students at the clinical interface

The global movement of students in higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has gained momentum in the last 30 years. Much research has been focused on the experiences of this population. Relatively little is known about international allied healthcare students who undertake clinical placements as part of their undergraduate course. This study explores students’ perceptions of their clinical experience. The chosen focus group method was prefaced by a pilot study; both were conducted within the allied healthcare school of a university in the UK. Four themes emerged from the study: communication, cultural differences, relationships with professionals and survival strategies. Communication referred to both the interaction with and between the students, their patients and fellow members of the multidisciplinary team. Cultural differences were expressed in the negotiation of differing cultures at the patient interface. A third theme was the students’ relationship with clinical professionals; within this, the relationship with the student’s clinical educator was paramount. Finally, survival strategies represented the advice students wished to impart to future international students to facilitate their clinical placement abroad.     

American colonial education policy and Filipino labour migration to the US (1900–1935)

Public mass schooling was the major instrument used by the Americans in the performance of their mission to “civilize” Filipinos. Free primary education was implemented right after the islands’ annexation in 1899 and was a critical component (alongside armed force) of the programme for their “pacification”. For the elite, education formed a route into collaborative involvement in the management of the colonial state. By the second decade of colonization, Filipinos were managing the civil service, participating in elected institutions and installed as mayors and governors. Like that of the Spanish, American colonial governance was profoundly reliant on the collaboration of members of the haciendero class, and thus implicated in the maintenance of long-established social and political hierarchies. But what did the maintenance of that status quo imply for ordinary Filipinos, now increasingly educated and literate in the language of the colonial power? Specifically, to what extent did this combination of socio-economic stasis and educational progress contribute to spurring early labour migration? This article investigates how far labour migration was seen to be, or functioned as, a mechanism for maintaining social and political stability in the American colonial period. It examines how this phenomenon was related to the free and English-based mass education programme undertaken out of an urge to fulfil what Kipling – writing of the American colonial enterprise – termed “the White Man’s Burden”.     

GiveMe Shelter: a people-centred design process for promoting independent inquiry-led learning in engineering

It has become increasingly common for tasks traditionally carried out by engineers to be undertaken by technicians and technologist with access to sophisticated computers and software that can often perform complex calculations that were previously the responsibility of engineers. Not surprisingly, this development raises serious questions about the future role of engineers and the education needed to address these changes in technology as well as emerging priorities from societal to environmental challenges. In response to these challenges, a new design module was created for undergraduate engineering students to design and build temporary shelters for a wide variety of end users from refugees, to the homeless and children. Even though the module provided guidance on principles of design thinking and methods for observing users needs through field studies, the students found it difficult to respond to needs of specific end users but instead focused more on purely technical issues.     

The changing status of higher education in the ‘moronic inferno’

Getting a good and relevant education is difficult enough to achieve within a context where social and economic needs are constantly unsettled by political policy. The public funding of the education sector has become a contested arena irrespective of a government’s ideology. Recent graduates from various disciplines from Town Planning to Philosophy report in university destination surveys that they have only found employment in areas unrelated to their academic training – for instance, in supermarkets, restaurants and other low-level service industries. How has it happened that the universalisation of mass higher education has contributed to a disconnect between the individual’s social aspirations and their economic status? What happened to the tacit promise that an extended period of intellectual development would prepare the individual for a life of valuable social contribution and financial security? Part of the answer lies in the success of higher education itself. Its popularity has changed its transformative capacity and allowed operational efficiencies to overrule academic quality. The university, ideally seen as a repository of intellectual intuition, has been remade into yet another modern corporation concerned with the bottom line and financial security. Why has it been necessary to remake the university in the image of the department store, supermarket or bank, and how has it been achieved without more critique?     

Mothers’ Implicit and Explicit Attitudes and Attributions in Relation to Self-Reported Parenting Behavior

Objective. Parenting behavior is presumed to be related to the thoughts about child behavior that parents report in a controlled and explicit manner and to more implicit parent cognitions that occur outside of conscious awareness and are less accessible to verbal report. Design. We examined mothers’ attitudes toward their children as correlates of self-reported parenting behavior. We used a combination of a self-report questionnaire and a reaction-time method (the Implicit Association Test) to assess explicit and implicit attitudes, respectively. We also assessed mothers’ implicit and explicit attributions for child misbehavior in relation to parenting, using a questionnaire measure of attributions completed under high-cognitive load (implicit attributions) or under low-cognitive load (explicit attributions). Mothers of 124, 6- to 10-year-olds (52% male) participated. Results. Attitudes assessed by self-report questionnaire and the Implicit Association Test were uniquely associated with negative parenting. The cognitive load manipulation moderated associations between attributions and parenting, such that child-blaming attributions were inversely associated with positive parenting only under conditions of high-cognitive load. Conclusions. Compared to traditional self-report questionnaires, methods such as the Implicit Association Test or cognitive load manipulations may more effectively assess implicit parent cognitions.     

The cognitive relevance of Indigenous and rural: Why is it critical to survival?

Using two case studies of children’s knowledge, this paper sheds light on the value, diversity, and necessity of Indigenous and place-based knowledge to science and engineering curricula in rural areas. Rural contexts are rich environments for cultivating contextual knowledge, hence framing a critical pedagogy of teaching and learning. Indigenous and rural place-based knowledge are nuanced and pragmatic in character, and offer solutions to both local and global challenges. Two case studies, drawn from the experience of Lakota and Dakota communities and rural New York State, demonstrate the need to conserve, transmit, and contribute to Indigenous and rural knowledge through experiential and place-based education that bridges the gap between children’s knowledge and global STEM. This knowledge is inherently diverse in its complexity and connectivity to habitat, and when viewed in this light, has the capacity to transform our perspectives on educational practices and policies as well as our overall outlook on conserving both ecological as well as cultural diversity worldwide. Because diversity and knowledge are necessary for the survival of life on this planet, an enriched concept of pedagogical pluralism, in terms of multiple ways of knowing, is a necessity.