Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: examining policy,practice and school positioning

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where ‘enactment’ refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south‐east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school‐based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own ‘take’ on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities.     

Differences in Child Care Quality for Children With and Without Disabilities

Research Findings: Federal, state, and local agencies legislate and support inclusive settings for the education of young children with disabilities. Recommended practices outline critical elements for meeting the educational and developmental needs of children with and without disabilities in inclusive settings, and minimal and essential quality characteristics have been articulated. Research has suggested that inclusive and non-inclusive settings may offer different levels of care as measured against best practices and essential quality characteristics. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine program quality in inclusive and non-inclusive preschool classrooms using observational, interview, and survey data. Results showed that inclusive classrooms earned higher scores on an observational measure of global quality and higher scores on an observational measure of language and literacy. Results also suggested that teachers with higher levels of education tend to have classrooms of higher quality. Practice or Policy: Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Popular with whom? Usage demographics of popular science nonfiction at an academic library

Abstract

There is a large body of nonfiction written for a general audience which is infrequently promoted in popular reading collections at academic libraries. The aim of this research is to look at the usage of nonfiction science literature at a large university library in comparison to the science collection as a whole. This information can help librarians to not only determine how best to prioritize the collection of nonfiction science literature, but it can also be used to provide insight into how popular nonfiction science books can be most effectively promoted to library patrons.     

Choice and diversity in English initial teacher education (ITE): trainees’ perspectives

In England, there has been an expansion of different routes into teaching resulting in an increasingly complex and diverse pattern of training provision. This reconfiguration of becoming a teacher is driven by concerns to improve the quality of teachers who are better able to raise standards in schools as well as to ensure a regular supply of teachers for the nation’s children. In consequence, there has been a move towards more school-based and school-led programmes set in a market-driven approach to pre-service teacher preparation. A great deal of research has focused on the implications of these structural changes in English teacher education, while much less attention has been paid to the perceptions and experiences of those who enrol on these diverse teacher education programmes.

This paper draws on a series of in-depth interviews with twelve trainee teachers following some of the different pathways into teaching in secondary schools. It explores the trainees’ rationale for choosing their route and how they describe the advantages and disadvantages of their chosen pathways.     

Translating policy: governmentality and the reflective teacher

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power or government and how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform.