Autobiographical Research and the Emergence of the Fictive Voice

Autobiographical research is promoted as a means by which educational practitioners can critically analyse their professional lives. This goes beyond the valuable work already done on teachers’ lives by embracing personal critique. However, much of recent psychological research into autobiographical memory, particularly in terms of its veridicality or truth content, has not been widely disseminated within the world of education. This article discusses such research and its application to professional autobiography. It also offers a means forward for further study, emanating from the author's own autobiographical analysis. This is termed the fictive voice. By this is meant memories which, recreated from the perspective of hindsight and one's own self‐schema, are believed incorrectly to be true, but which may, when critiqued, offer the means by which one can arrive at an accurate recreation of one's professional past     

Attitudes towards faith-based schooling amongst Roman Catholics in Britain

Separate Catholic schooling in Britain has historically been a key mechanism for the religious socialisation of children within the denomination and for the transmission of communal identity and heritage. Catholic schools currently comprise around a tenth of all state schools in England and nearly all ‘denominational’ schools in Scotland. This study analyses Catholics’ attitudes towards publicly funded faith schools for different religious groups using a nationally representative survey of adult Catholics in Britain. It assesses the impact of social characteristics, religious behaving and believing, and moral attitudes. Catholics’ religious orthodoxy is consistently related to support for state-funding of faith schools, irrespective of the religious group in question, providing some support for the ‘solidarity of the religious’ perspective. The effects for moral attitudes are less consistent, with socially conservative views associated with support for faith schools for Catholics and Anglicans, but associated with opposition to faith schools in general and for non-Christian religions.     

The Recuperation of Participatory Arts Practices

Creative participation in the arts is a complex and abstract concept that bridges the gap between cultural production and its consumption. It is highly contextual and defined through a range of discourses besides aesthetics that concern access and inclusion, cultural identity, socio‐political rights, collective working, transformation and emancipation as advocated by community arts philosophy and praxis. These ideas are theoretically explored and critically evaluated in practice through three popular visual arts events in which the general public engaged and performed, demonstrating varying degrees of active involvement and dialogue. They also highlight the recuperation of radical cultural activism and communality where participation has become associated with spectacle and the co‐option of self‐determined thinking and resistance. Such cases are of obvious interest to community arts educators, particularly their value, the terms of participatory engagement and the extent to which radical non‐authoritarian and collective practices have been appropriated by cults of individuality and celebrity.     

Scale dimensionality and population heterogeneity: Potential problems in the interpretation of attitude data

This paper examines problems in the interpretation of attitude data which may arise when the dimensionality of the instrument and sources of heterogeneity in the population are ignored. As a specific example, the paper describes the development and analysis of an instrument designed to measure primary school children's liking of science-related activities. Careful analysis of the patterns of response to the questionnaire created some disquiet about the conventional methods used to collapse data from attitude scales. The results demonstrate that conclusions drawn from attitude measurement can be misleading when proper attention is not given to the structure of the instrument nor to the structure of the population from which the measurements are made.