Emerging Principalship Collaborative Style: Towards Research in Mentoring

An earlier exploratory study (Chong, 1991) suggest that a collaborative style of principalship is expected to emerge from the mentoring process. This paper highlights aspects of the environment of school management in Singapore which are beginning to support this emerging style that future principals are learning to adopt. It also identifies some possible areas for further research. Implications for policy and management are discussed. Mentoring episodes in Singapore could provide a unique opportunity for research that explicate a theory of morphogenesis.     

Stitching Codeable Circuits: High School Students’ Learning About Circuitry and Coding with Electronic Textiles

Learning about circuitry by connecting a battery, light bulb, and wires is a common activity in many science classrooms. In this paper, we expand students’ learning about circuitry with electronic textiles, which use conductive thread instead of wires and sewable LEDs instead of lightbulbs, by integrating programming sensor inputs and light outputs and examining how the two domains interact. We implemented an electronic textiles unit with 23 high school students ages 16–17 years who learned how to craft and code circuits with the LilyPad Arduino, an electronic textile construction kit. Our analyses not only confirm significant increases in students’ understanding of functional circuits but also showcase students’ ability in designing and remixing program code for controlling circuits. In our discussion, we address opportunities and challenges of introducing codeable circuit design for integrating maker activities that include engineering and computing into classrooms.     

Radical Artists & Art Students versus Management & Bureaucracy during the 1970s

This paper is an account of the impact of Conceptual art and art theory upon art students, studio tutors and managers during the 1970s in certain British art schools. The impact on students resulted in a shift away from the making of physical artefacts to the production of writings and magazines. It also problematised ‘the visual’ and encouraged critiques of art and the art education system. Some tutors responsible for art theory courses were dismissed and some students became politicised and attacked those in charge of art schools and polytechnics. Managers disciplined the students and, in some instances, failed and expelled them. William Furlong and Bruce McLean were two London based artists who responded to the ever‐increasing bureaucracy of art colleges by mounting a parodic performance.     

Jurisprudential and Ethical Perspectives on "The Best Interests of Children"

Justifications of policies must be clearly warranted if educational leaders are to continue to maintain integrity and to sustain the trust of those served. Educators are called upon to mediate many private and public interests, including those pertaining to personal, organizational, professional, and societal values. This work of mediating conflicting values often relates to guarding and/or advocating the interests of children. Leaders must understand what they mean when evoking the potent phrase in the best interests of children. More importantly, they must avoid the temptations of sophistic misuses of the best interests of children notion. What is meant when we say we are deciding in the best interests of children? Each of the political, psychological, pedagogical, philosophical, jurisprudential, and ethical grounds undergirding the concept of the best interests of the child contributes content and meaning to the phrase. While each of these perspectives merits consideration, this article is delimited to an exploration of three interpretations from the field of jurisprudence and four interpretations from the field of ethics.     

Pathways to Parental Engagement: Contributions of Parents,Teachers, and Schools in Cultural Context

Research Findings: This study examined correlates of parents’ reported school engagement in an ethnically diverse, rural sample (N = 346) of parents and teachers in kindergarten through Grade 2. Of particular interest were role expectations and family–school relationships in American Indian families, who historically have been marginalized by schools. In terms of role expectations, parents and teachers agreed that they should support each other’s roles, parents should have more responsibility than schools for teaching social skills, and families and schools should have shared responsibility for children’s academic success. Teachers had higher expectations than parents for parent engagement, which in turn was greater when parent–teacher communication was more frequent and the school climate was more welcoming. American Indian parents more strongly endorsed a separation of family and school roles and felt less welcomed at school; ethnicity moderated correlates of reported parent engagement. Practice or Policy: These findings have practical promise given that parent–teacher communication, school climate, and role expectations are more easily altered than are structural barriers that also may hinder parents’ involvement in supporting their children’s early education.     

Educational policy for citizenship in the early years in Australia

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to ‘be a good citizen’. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.