Evaluating multimodal literacies in student blogs

This research presents ways in which high school students used the multimodal and interactive affordances of blogs to create, organize, communicate and participate on an educational blog. Their actions demonstrated how plural modes of literacy are infiltrating digital environments and reshaping literacy and learning. Multimodal blogging practices of participants broaden the discourse about educational blogs to include an understanding of blogs as media‐rich platforms in which learners operate with plural modes of literacy to construct meaning, communicate and participate.     

The Tensions of Urban School Renewal in an Era of Reform

The faculty and administration of a school of education in the mid-Atlantic region formally adopted a standards-based, conceptual framework that reflects the values articulated by the faculty and the outcomes for students as they prepare for and develop in their professions. Faculty and administrators agreed to use the framework as the basis for examining professional programs, academic courses, and professional experiences, as well as for governing interactions with one another as colleagues. This article describes the conceptual framework, its goals, research used to evaluate the framework, and the outcomes attained.     

Experimenting with global governance: understanding the potential for generational change

The appropriate role for the United Nations in international dispute resolution is a matter of high profile discussion and controversy. This paper begins with this ambivalence about the appropriate role for the United Nations in the world and examines several sets of issues that relate to the future of support for the UN within the US and the prospects for global governance more generally. First, we briefly review two thematic strands in previous and contemporary scholarship:(1) arguments for increased global governance in contemporary world affairs, driven by perceptions of the changing nature of the political, social, economic and military challenges in the contemporary world system. This debate is also put in the context of the relevance of public support for global governance institutions; and (2) why it is valuable to study how the current generation of adolescents perceive issues of global governance and the impact that their views may have on that nexus in the coming years. We then move to an analysis of data generated from an experimental study of American adolescents and their attitudes toward global governance.     

The Honour of the Science Teacher: Pupils, Knowledge, and Society

This address covers several aspects of a teacher's "sense of honour." There is the professional honour we accord ourselves as members of a group who have shared working values. This is shown to be seriously at risk in today's world of distrust in all experts. Research evidence helps to show how, through practice and reconstructed autobiography, teachers develop an important functional sense of personal identity. Pupils form a large part of the content of this practitioner honour, although the teachers' relationship with them is carefully distinguished from that between parent and child. It is further argued that the teachers' pedagogic knowledge of science is, and indeed should be, closer to post-modern epistemology than to the abstract logical approach taken during the Enlightenment. The final section looks at society's changing demands on education and how this affects teaching, teachers, and their sense of honour in the tasks they undertake.     

Measuring ‘progress’: performativity as both driver and constraint in school innovation

Abstract

In this paper, we describe one secondary school’s radical attempt to rethink the shape and purpose of education for its pupils, and its subsequent return to more traditional methods in the face of pressures of performativity and accountability. Framing our analysis within activity theory and its emphasis on contradiction as a driver for change, we describe the school’s move towards a thematic curriculum and ‘personalised learning’ as a process of productive tensions which enabled the development of new approaches to education. While these innovations were considered to be of major benefit to both teachers and pupils, a fundamental contradiction between the focus on individual development underpinning the new approach and the demands of accountability in a persistent culture of performativity proved to be insurmountable. We argue that this particular contradiction highlights the dominance of measurability in judgements of school success and individual progress, with consequences for the pupils’ longer term education futures.