Class acts? Working class student officers in students’ unions

Abstract

This article explores the recent emergence of ‘working-class student officer’ roles in students’ unions associated with elite UK universities. These student representative roles are designed to represent the interests of working-class students within their universities and sit alongside student representatives for liberation groups and/or student communities. Based on interviews with postholders and using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and Reay’s applications of a ‘reflexive habitus’, I explore how these students have come to assert a public and political ‘working-class student’ identity within their universities. Their commentaries reveal the ‘makings of class’ in a context where students are very aware of claims for recognition and the ‘hidden injuries of class’ and offer an insight into how working-class students are finding new ways to navigate their classed identities in HE.     

China's intellectuals in the world community

The increasing flow of Chinese graduate students to the West for advanced study is examined in the context of earlier attempts to modernize China by introducing ideas and technologies from abroad. The author suggests that the theory of communicative action associated with Habermas may provide a framework for examining the quality and nature of the intellectual interaction now taking place between Chinese scholars and their counterparts in the universities of the capitalist world. This discussion uses three episodes as points of focus; firstly the discussion over intellectual freedom on the 30th anniversary of the Hundred Flowers movement, secondly the debate over political structure reform and finally the student movement of December 1986. The author argues that these occurrences are linked to a fundamental change in the knowledge orientation of Chinese universities.     

BEING A LEARNER: A VIRTUE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

ABSTRACT:  Lifelong learning is something which one does for oneself that no one else can do for one: it is a public and personal human activity, rather than private or individualistic. One of the features of the education system is the paucity of a language for learning as process and participative experience. Personalised learning requires a sense of the worthwhileness of 'being a learner'– a virtue in the 21st century. A sense of one's own worth as a person is essential to understanding one's identity as a learner. Research suggests the human capacity to learn can be understood as a form of consciousness which is characterised by particular values, attitudes and dispositions, with a lateral and a temporal connectivity. This 'consciousness' has several dimensions which are all related to becoming a person, with a learning identity. They also enable the learner to become aware of and appropriate what is of worth and map onto the sorts of core values that learning communities espouse. Awareness of self and of one's own worth as a person is a necessary condition for 'becoming a learner' and for identifying and engaging with 'what is of worth'. Furthermore, a sense of self as a learner is formed in relationship, and understood as one learns to tell one's own story, as a participant in the conversation of the learning community. Character is the way in which we refer to that quality of personhood in which there is rooted the capacity to change and learn over time.     

Academic work: Perceptions of senior academic administrators

This article reports on selected findings of the first stage of a qualitative study of academic work in Australian universities. This stage examined the perceptions senior academic administrators from the humanities, sciences, social sciences and professional areas hold of the work roles of academics. The article presents their perceptions of ‘research’ and ‘scholarship’ and the link between the two, as well as the interrelationships between research, scholarship and teaching. The findings show a high level of consensus and coherence in the views presented. The article examines possible reasons for such a unanimity of perception and raises further questions for investigation.     

The use of the interactive whiteboard for creative teaching and learning in literacy and mathematics: a case study

This paper considers the ways in which the interactive whiteboard may support and enhance pedagogic practice through whole‐class teaching within literacy and numeracy. Data collected from observations of whole‐class lessons, alongside individual interviews and focus group discussions with class teachers and Initial Teacher Education students, has provided opportunities to consider the potential of such technology to facilitate a more creative approach to whole‐class teaching. The data suggests that, in the first instance, the special features of information and communications technology such as interactivity, ‘provisionality,’ speed, capacity and range enhance the delivery and pace of the session. This research seems to indicate that it is the skill and the professional knowledge of the teacher who mediates the interaction, and facilitates the development of pupils' creative responses at the interface of technology, which is critical to the enhancement of the whole‐class teaching and learning processes.     

Primary teachers’ understanding of the interactive whiteboard as a tool for children’s collaborative learning and knowledge‐building

This paper reports on the second phase of a joint teacher/researcher project that explored teachers’ understandings of the potential of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) as a tool for primary school children’s collaborative group work. By examining teachers’ written analyses and discussions of work carried out in their own classrooms, the paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the ways in which the use of IWBs can contribute to changes in pedagogy. It highlights the interrelationships between collaborative learning and factors identified as important in the research carried out by teachers, amongst them the children’s technical skills and confidence, the mediating role of the teacher, the IWB affordances for knowledge‐building and the teachers’ own knowledge, attitudes and professional development. The paper also provides an account of how participation by the teachers in a course with Faculty staff, focused on the collaborative co‐construction of knowledge related to learning and to classroom research grounded in the values and principles of socio‐cultural theory, supported changes in pedagogic practice.     

Co-teaching as a context for teachers' professional learning and joint knowledge construction

The study examined two primary teachers' professional learning and joint knowledge construction in the context of co-teaching. The teachers narrated their learning as a collaborative process with serendipitous origins. Shared knowledge construction was crucial in the learning process, as was implementing the resulting new ideas in practice. It is concluded that experiences of co-teaching may support teachers in meeting their professional responsibilities effectively. Professional development programmes need to be sensitive to teachers' individual and collaborative learning experiences to be able better to support them in the natural context of those experiences in particular local and national contexts.