The changing role of students’ unions within contemporary higher education

Despite profound changes to the higher education sector in the UK over recent years, which have tended to emphasise the role of prospective students as active choosers within a marketplace and encourage higher education institutions (HEIs) to place more emphasis on student engagement and representation as a means of improving the quality of the learning experience, the role of students’ unions has remained largely unexplored. To start to redress this gap, this paper draws on a UK-wide survey of students’ union officers and a series of focus groups with 86 students and higher education staff in 10 case study institutions. It outlines the ways in which students’ unions are believed, by those closely involved with them, to have changed over recent years, focusing on: the shift towards a much greater emphasis on representation in the role and function of the students’ union; the increasing importance of non-elected officers; and the emergence of more cooperative relationships between the students’ union and senior institutional management. The article then discusses the implications of these findings for both our understanding of the political engagement of students, and theorising student involvement in the governance of HEIs.     

The role of drawing in young children's journeys towards literacy

The focus of this article is the role of drawings in the journeys of young children towards literacy. The argument is that young children learn from home contexts a wide range of approaches towards literacy. At school their flexibility in using these approaches is reshaped into narrow versions of literacy based on learning to read, write and become numerate. Children continue to explore alternative modes of representation at home and amongst their peer group in informal learning contexts outside school. The argument is illustrated with examples from a project, which followed the changes in seven young children's drawing behaviours as they made the transition from home to school. It is suggested that we need a radical reappraisal of what it means to be a literate child in 2004; and that the literacy curriculum in early childhood settings needs to be reframed to reflect this reappraisal.     

“Don’t rock the boat”: conflicting mentor and pre-service teacher narratives of professional experience

This article examines conflicting mentor (school-based supervising teacher) and pre-service teacher narratives of professional experience in schools. It draws on a small narrative inquiry about the mentoring relationship in teacher education. Interview conversations were analysed using “writing as a method of inquiry”, allowing for a recursive understanding of the competing discourses that emerged, and highlighting the tensions in the mentoring relationship. While the pre-service teachers interviewed for this study expected professional experience to provide opportunities for innovation and collaboration, mentors tended to view the relationship as assimilation into the profession. Two points of challenge are identified where disruption to the tensions that arise from these competing narratives is needed if changes to educational equity are to occur.     

Construction and Validation of a Chinese Value of Learning Scale (CVLS)

The Chinese Value of Learning Scale (CVLS) is a 5-item instrument for assessing the value of learning in Chinese culture. The psychometric properties of CVLS were investigated in a convenient sample of 583 Chinese soon-to-be-aged adults in Hong Kong. CVLS possesses high internal consistency and exhibited satisfactory short-term test-retest reliability. CVLS also exhibited high face validity and mild convergent validity with other 48-item openness-to-experience scale (OTES) from Revised NEO Personality Inventory, and is significantly related to the past and actual learning experience. In view of its brevity and easy administration, CVLS offers a useful instrument to further investigate the value of learning in Chinese culture and its possible relationship with adults' learning behaviour.     

Chinese Retirees' Learning Interests: A Qualitative Analysis

This paper reports the results of two semistructured focus group interviews with 17 retirees that explore the issues these retirees perceived as central to their learning in later life (LLL). Focus is especially placed on the factors leading to their learning interests after retirement. A total of six themes (past experience in adulthood and voluntary work, perception of learning, social support, living alone, self-efficacy, and openness) were identified to be related to learning interest in later life. This study has implications for future research and service planning of LLL in the Chinese population.     

For the Love of the Game: A Philosophical Defense of Amateurism

Amateurism at the Olympic Games is now little more than a memory. While it is a good thing that the end of amateurism is also the end of the hypocrisy of millionaire amateurs and illicit payments, the rejoicing should not be absolute. This paper argues that the definition of amateur as one who is not paid, and the resulting war against payment of athletes masked a more interesting and more important notion of amateurism. Amateurism is presented as a form of motivation, the desire to perform or compete for the love of the game itself. The rewards for the amateur athlete comes from the internal goods of the game he or she plays. This account of the internal goods of a game can also be used to show why cheating is necessarily counterproductive and why payment may, but need not, be corrupting.     

Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death and Dying

This article explores children’s picturebooks about death and grieving by considering both psychological and literary aspects. Two questions frame this analysis: How can picturebooks, particularly written for young children, support children’s grief when someone dies? How do the illustrations and text of picture books express and convey the aesthetic and emotional experience of loss? Using both psychological research on children’s grief reactions and literary analysis of picturebooks, this paper reviews picturebooks that have been published on the topic of death from 2001 to 2011 and then closely analyzes three books that span a range of topics and approaches to death. Findings indicate that children’s picturebooks convey important psychological and cultural issues through text and illustrations. Furthermore, understanding some of the psychological and literary features of children’s picturebooks that address death and grieving can help educators to provide support and understanding for children when they experience loss.     

Just‐in‐time pedagogy: teachers' perspectives on the response to intervention framework

The purpose of this mixed methods research is to examine teachers' perspectives on the response to intervention (RTI) framework and its implementation in Michigan and Texas schools. Both states have been leaders in literacy, increasing preservice and in‐service teacher certification standards and developing similar batteries for assessing literacy skills. Using the International Reading Association's RTI principles, the following question directed this inquiry: what are the perspectives of teachers in various educational, geographic, economic and cultural settings of the RTI? The research was developed through questionnaires, focus groups and semi‐structured interviews. Findings revealed that teacher professional development, assessments and collaboration for instruction were highly integrated themes when developing RTI strategies as reforming practice and increasing student literacy. Michigan and Texas teachers were more confident and comfortable in measuring and identifying students with reading difficulties over their ability to prevent learning disabilities through their instruction.     

An Analytic Study of the Professional Development Research in Early Childhood Education

Research Findings: The goal of this study was to examine empirical research on the design, delivery, and measurement of the effects of professional development (PD) for early childhood educators in order to provide insight into what the field has accomplished as well as suggest directions for future PD programs and research. Through the use of rigorous inclusion criteria outlined by S. M. Wilson, R. E. Floden, and J. Ferrini-Mundy (2001 Vu, J., Jeon, H. J., &; Howes, C. (2008). Formal education, credential, or both: Early childhood program classroom practices. Early Education &; Development, 19, 479–504.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), 73 studies were included and analyzed. On average, 25% (M = 12.68, SD = 9.99) of references in each study were specifically about PD. The majority of studies (n = 39) targeted some form of language and literacy instruction, whereas only 5 studies targeted math and 1 study targeted science. A total of 35 different delivery mechanisms were used to provide PD, with 40 studies including some form of coaching and 45 including training workshops. The studies used a wide range of methods to measure PD-related outcomes: 51% (n = 37) of studies examined changes in teacher practice, 18% (n = 13) measured changes in teachers’ knowledge, 40% (n = 29) measured changes in children’s learning, and 11% (n = 8) measured changes in children’s behavior. Practice or Policy: Based on the results of this study, there are 4 major ways in which PD for early childhood educators can be developed. Researchers and providers of PD should (a) continue to draw from multiple resources to inform PD implementation designs, (b) include more diversity in the content of instruction targeted by PD, (c) experiment with innovative formats for delivering PD, and (d) create better means of evaluating PD.     

The Performance of Eyewitnesses with Intellectual Disabilities on Photographic Identification Line-ups

Despite the large number of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) and the fact they are more likely to be victims and witnesses of crime, only two published studies have investigated their performance on identification line-up parades. In the present study we examined the identification performance of adults with and without ID on both a perpetrator-present and a perpetrator-absent photographic line-up. In addition, we investigated factors that could explain any potential difficulties with identification performance, such as face recognition performance (as measured by a standardised test), eyewitness confidence, understanding of the purpose of a line-up, and memory for non-biased line-up instructions. In comparison with typical adults, participants with ID demonstrated poorer performance across both perpetrator-present and perpetrator-absent photographic line-ups, yet were more confident in the accuracy of their responses. In addition they had poorer face recognition performance, were less likely to understand the purpose of the line-up, and were less likely to remember the non-biased line-up instructions. This pattern of difficulties is discussed in relation to the development of future research and interventions.