Increasing Secondary Teachers’ Capacity to Integrate the Arts

Abstract

Examples from a team of collaborating secondary teachers—one visual arts teacher and one science teacher—highlight key aspects of this professional development project in arts integration. The article traces a regional network designed to build teacher capacity with implications for the design, effectiveness, and sustainability of professional development for secondary teachers. It describes the framework for professional development through the first two years of the project. In year one, teachers increased their understanding of arts integration; collegial collaboration; the design and use of assessments that align with standards, benchmarks, and learning goals; and how to reflect on student work. In year two, professional development activity focused on co-teaching and helping teachers to increase the rigor of student learning goals as a way to improve student learning in arts and non-arts content areas. Project outcomes and challenges to sustaining such job-embedded and networked professional learning opportunities are discussed and directions for further research are offered.     

Of Slumdogs and Schoolmasters: Jacotot,Rancière and Mitra on self-organized learning

Abstract

This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often conflated: knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education.     

Critique and Politics: A sociomaterialist intervention

Sociomaterial theories, including actor–network theory (ANT), materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to counter such a view. Drawing specifically on the work of Latour on the nature of critique and on examples of political analysis from writers such as Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Marres and Whatmore, we suggest that sociomaterialist approaches to the more-than-human open up extended understandings and productive alternative practices of politics. While recognising that this is a work in progress and not without difficulties and challenges, we argue that there is much to be gained for educational researchers from engaging with such approaches.     

Adult recognition of school bullying situations

Bullying and harassment by school peers has received increasing attention as their relation to personal problems and more extreme forms of violence has become better recognized. Emphases of empirical studies have focused on characteristics and behaviours of both school bullies and their victims. There is a need to place these traits and actions into the context of the situation in which they occur, in order to expand the research and allow for the development of more sophisticated and comprehensive educational, prevention and intervention programmes. A total 251 professionals (teachers and counsellors) participated in this empirical study on the ability of professionals to differentiate between bullying and other forms of conflict. Participants were asked to judge the severity of 21 scenarios depicting different combinations of situational characteristics and also whether they constituted bullying situations or not. Results indicated that physical threat or abuse was seen as more severe than verbal or social/emotional abuse, and professionals more often rated physical conflicts as bullying even when they did not fit the definition. The repeated nature of an abusive relationship and an unfair match between participants were bullying situation characteristics found to be related to the responses of more and less effective situation evaluators. Implications for pre- and in-service training of educators were considered based on study results and previous research.