Meritocracy,deficit thinking and the invisibility of the system: Discourses on educational success and failure

Socio‐ethnic stratification and segregation processes present in Flemish society are reflected in the everyday school environment. Pupils with a different socio‐ethnic background than the dominant majority and middle class seem to be confronted with a lot of difficulties in this school system. The dominant meritocratic discourse frequently applies a deficit thinking perspective to frame educational success and failure, focusing on deficiencies originating outside of the school. In this paper we analyse newly collected survey data (N = 11,015 pupils) and a large amount of qualitative data (from pupils, parents, teachers, principals) to answer our two main research questions: (i) how is educational success/failure defined, and (ii) how is educational success/failure explained? The factor analyses as well as the qualitative analyses illustrate how the idea of meritocracy relates to individualistic features such as effort, merit and competence. However, the findings also reveal that this individualistic approach goes hand‐in‐hand with a focus on the family environment and ‘culture’ which seems to limit individual agency to a large extent. In these discourses, pupils, parents and even teachers are presented as being largely determined by their direct social environment with almost no regard for social inequalities within the educational system. The paper ends with a discussion on how processes of victimization and the denial of systemic bias, influence educational trajectories and proposes a different approach to multiculturalism and the appreciation of cultural background and specific family resources as positive elements in these trajectories.     

Improving higher education practice through student evaluation systems: is the student voice being heard?

Many higher education institutions use student evaluation systems as a way of highlighting course and lecturer strengths and areas for improvement. Globally, the student voice has been increasing in volume, and capitalising on student feedback has been proposed as a means to benefit teacher professional development. This paper examines the student evaluations at a university in Trinidad and Tobago in an effort to determine whether the student voice is being heard. The research focused on students’ responses to the question, ‘How do you think this course could be improved?’ Student evaluations were gathered from five purposefully selected courses taught at the university during 2011–2012 and then again one year later, in 2012–2013. This allowed for an analysis of the selected courses. Whilst the literature suggested that student evaluation systems are a valuable aid to lecturer improvement, this research found little evidence that these evaluations actually led to any real significant changes in lecturers’ practice.     

Problem Solving in the Professions

The authors express the view that algorithms and heuristics may be used to help improve professional problem solving abilities provided that they are appropriately contextualised within the relevant discipline.

The first part of this paper presents a basic algorithm applied to the engineering discipline. A similar algorithm applicable in the solving of legal problems is presented later in the paper. Problem complexity and related variables are discussed as are ways of teaching problem solving and integrating problem solving into the curriculum. Typical problem solving exercises are described.     

Specifying a curriculum for biopolitical critical literacy in science teacher education: exploring roles for science fiction

In this essay I suggest some ways in which science teacher educators in Western neoliberal economies might facilitate learners’ development of a critical literacy concerning the social and cultural changes signified by the concept of biopolitics. I consider how such a biopolitically inflected critical literacy might find expression in a science teacher education curriculum and suggest a number of ways of materializing such a curriculum in specific literatures, media, procedures, and assessment tasks, with particular reference to the contributions of science fiction in popular media.     

A hypertext open learning system for writers

In this article I describe three key design issues which underlie a CIRG project building an open learning hypertext package for teaching writing skills. These are issues in:

? combining flexible materials with fixed structures;

? giving students real flexibility in learning;

? the nature of interaction in hypertext writing teaching.

I outline a design strategy to meet problems in all these areas.     

Radio-Television Books

Harry Sova's American Radio: 1927 (available from the author c/o Department of Radio and Television, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, 4)1.00).

Robert Lewis Shayon's Open to Criticism (Beacon Press, $9.95)

LeRoy E. Kennel's Ecology of the Airwaves (Focal Pamphlet No. 21, Herald Press, Scottsdale, Arizona 15683, $1.50 paper).

Noel B. Gerson's Talk Show (William morrow, $6.95) which deals with a Carson or Cavett-like personality and you guessed it–his sex hang-ups which lead to his TV Downfall. The second is Allan Prior's The Contract (Simon and Schuster, $7.95)

John M. Stormes and James P. Crumpler's Television Communications Systems for Business and Industry (Wiley/Interscience, 4)11.95).     

The thrust of the mob and the media

Children from ages 4 to 9 watched segments from Sesame Street and answered questions about television reality. Factor analysis produced three reality dimensions: (a) Sesame Street really exists, (b) television characters can see and hear us, and (c) what you see is inside the television set. For preschoolers, age was the most important variable in regard to television reality. There were other background variables for older children: Children from working‐class backgrounds were more apt to believe that television characters can see and hear us and that they reside inside the television set than their middle‐ and upper‐class age peers.     

The Kalamazoo School Decision

On October 4, 1973, U.S. District Court Judge Noel P. Fox ruled in the Oliver case against the Kalamazoo school board and the Michigan state department of education, among others. On May 7, 1971, the city school board had adopted a desegregation plan. After an election, a new school board voted on July 6, 1971, to reinstate the attendance boundaries in force before May 7th. The complete opinion occupies 127 typed pages, in addition to five appendices. Following are major portions of the ruling.