Youth Education Attainment and Participation in Europe: the role of contextual factors and the scope of education policy

This article examines how certain contextual factors explain levels of education attainment and participation amongst youths in 30 European countries, whilst also exploring the scope for action of education policy when dealing with these issues. Through simple OLS regressions, we first evaluate the impact of a group of contextual indicators on the percentage of the population aged 20 to 24 having completed at least upper secondary education (education attainment) and the number of students aged 18 as a percentage of the corresponding age population (education participation). Secondly, through multivariate OLS analysis, we identify the net impact of some of these factors on the levels of education participation of 18-year-olds. The results show the significance of three factors: low-skilled occupation, the structure of public spending on education, and the importance of vocational education programmes in secondary education.     

Le Catalan en Catalogne Espagnole

Spanish Catalonia knew a period of political and literary grandeur before being relegated to the role of a Spanish province and deprived of its linguistic identity.

Currently, in the post‐Franco period, the linguistic autonomy of the province is being restored. The Catalan language, which takes its place alongside Spanish in teacher training and at primary level, has a capacity to facilitate international communication.     

I Like Cities; Do You Like Letters? Introducing Urban Typography in Art Education

This article proposes a study of the letters and graphics found in the city, while at the same time opening up unusual spaces linked to the cultural arena and visual geographies for the creation of learning spaces in art education, introducing urban typography for training teachers. The letters in urban spaces can help us reinterpret the patrimonial fabric of cities. With the help of typography, visual arts educators have a powerful graphic resource with which to articulate the complex communicative network of streets. We suggest walking as an aesthetic practice; strolling around the city as a very cultural means to motivate our students. We have at our disposal in our cities a genuine museum woven together with the threads of the alphabet.     

Seeing Life in their Shoes: Fostering Empathy Toward Victims of Interpersonal Violence through Five Active Learning Activities

As educators of future law enforcement and social service personnel, one of the most important objectives of faculty members within the social sciences disciplines is to foster a sense of empathy toward victims of crime among their students. Empathy toward victims of crime, and domestic abuse in particular, is vastly important as evidence suggests that the reactions survivors encounter upon disclosure influences reporting behavior to law enforcement. Moreover, evidence indicates that by fostering empathy toward domestic abuse survivors among students, social science educators can reduce the endorsement of harmful victim-blaming attitudes that these individuals may otherwise carry with them into their public service. However, despite the importance concerning teaching empathy within the classroom, a dearth of information exists—particularly in the criminal justice pedagogical literature. To address this gap, the objective of this study was to assess several active learning activities designed specifically to foster victim empathy in students. To gather feedback about how these activities affected students, we utilized standard Likert scales as well as several free response questions.     

Embracing the Abject Other: The Carnival Imagery of Harry Potter

In Rabelais and His World Mikhail Bakhtin traces the history of laughter and the specific impact of Francois Rabelais upon that history, but more important it is the most definitive example of the carnivalesque available to Western scholars to date. By carnivalesque he refers to the traditional language and spectacle associated with folk culture within the carnival season, language and images that represent the universal truths of life, death, and renewal through the grotesque body. Bakhtin’s theories of the characteristics of unbridled freedom illustrate the universality and dissident effects of laughter. The revolutionary or subversive, carnival spirit displayed by the clash between official and unofficial culture bear particular significance upon the Harry Potter series. At the heart of carnival imagery is what Bakhtin defines as the three elements of laughter: “universalism, freedom, and… [their] relation to the people’s unofficial truth” (p. 90). These are the elements of laughter that most adequately characterize Harry Potter’s subjective view of what is good and right. He is at the most basic level an initiate of change who works within the realm of the carnivalesque to illustrate the subversive qualities of laughter in opposition to the official culture the muggle world represents with regards to race. The carnivalesque and grotesque in Harry Potter illustrates an appeal to social transformation through the power of laughter and the reversal of the dominant order of race and racial difference.     

School educational project as a criterion of school choice: discourses and practices in the city of Barcelona

In its advancement towards an education quasi-market, Catalonia has recently been driving the development of school educational projects in all schools (both public and private) as a tool to facilitate school autonomy and family choices. A school educational project is a formal document in which schools identify their pedagogical goals, missions and orientations, their academic resources and organisational structures. Through the analysis of 60 in-depth interviews with parents of children at the age of commencing universal pre-primary education (three years old) and data collected from surveys completed by a representative sample made up of 3245 families, this article explores the impact of this policy on discourses and practices of school choice amongst families in the city of Barcelona. On the one hand, we observe that interest in educational projects has penetrated the discourses of the most educated parents, even though, at the same time, we detect a generalised lack of knowledge of the content of such projects. On the other hand, we note that the social composition of schools is still a prominent factor in choice practices. Such findings question the ideal of the autonomous and rational citizen-consumer that underlies the policy of establishing educational projects.     

‘The best school for my child?’ Positions,dispositions and inequalities in school choice in the city of Barcelona

This article deals with the discourses and practices employed by families involved in school choice processes in the city of Barcelona (Spain). It draws upon a study conducted by the authors in 2008/09, and it is based on surveys completed by a representative sample made up of 3245 families, as well as 60 in-depth interviews with families with children at the age of commencing universal pre-primary education (three years old). Firstly, the article focuses on the types of concerns and pressures that families experience when choosing a school for their child. Secondly, we analyse the level and type of knowledge that parents have at their disposal about the field of school choice, as well as how they use and benefit from available information channels. Finally, we identify three unequal positions in which families find themselves when negotiating the field of school choice: ‘maximising’, ‘guaranteeing’ and ‘displaced’. These positions are, in turn, directly related to families’ locations in the social structure, which are also unequal.