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.     

为肯尼亚青年谋求STEM教育的平等机会

肯尼亚人口中18岁以下的青少年占50％,他们是肯尼亚社会中一股重要而活跃的力量,大力发展青少年教育是促进发展的有效方式。肯尼亚科学中心是一所筹建中的STEM教育机构,旨在为所有青少年提供平等的教育机会,并接受STEM教育方面的启迪。本文介绍了建设和发展肯尼亚科学中心的各种工作方式,期望能够借鉴国际上其他科学中心的经验,以达成独具特色的发展目标。     

Unconscious and unnoticed professional practice within an outstanding school for children and young people with complex learning difficulties and disabilities

This article describes a three‐year project undertaken at Pear Tree School for children and young people with severe and multiple and profound learning difficulties. Lesley Sullivan, the school's head teacher, believed that much of the value within the work of this outstanding school went unidentified by existing approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluation. Richard Crombie, educational psychologist, was engaged to work on the project. Also involved were Kate Walker and Rebecca Warnock, deputy head teachers, as well as the whole staff, children and some parents. The project takes as its starting point that essential, but very often unnoticed and unconscious, professional practice is rooted in implicit processes learnt experientially. We set ourselves the task of finding meaningful frameworks for identifying and developing that practice. This meant close observation within and outside school coupled with feeding back to staff, and their subsequent engagement with and use of explanatory frameworks.     

Societal Culture and School Leadership Charting the Way Ahead

This paper discusses four issues emerging from the papers that make up the special edition. These are considered key issues as researchers further investigate the influence of societal culture on educational administration and leadership. The four selected issues target the definition of societal culture; possible relationships between organizational culture, personality and societal culture; the interface between school leadership, educational policy and societal culture; and some of the limitations of Hofstede's framework for guiding the study of cultural influence in educational administration. Each of the issues revolves around the concept of societal culture and its application as an explanatory and analytic device in the field of educational administration and leadership.     

A study of the difficulties of care and support in new university teachers’ work

This paper discusses some findings from a small‐scale qualitative study involving ‘new’ teachers in a medium sized, regional English university. Using Grounded Theory methods to inform and guide the research, the study explores participants’ views on working as both teachers and researchers whilst also managing considerable amounts of ‘caring work’ with a diverse body of students who often need academic and pastoral support in excess of that assumed within the university academic timetables or support networks. The voices of these teachers suggest that care is an overlooked aspect of university teachers’ work, yet it plays an important part in maintaining their and their students’ sense of scholarly endeavour. Further, our findings suggest that within the university at large there is a ‘discourse of difference’ in the way that many academics conceptualize and represent the student body and students’ needs to be supported. This discourse impacts on the development of new teachers’ identities and aspirations. Some implications of these findings for implementing strategies for supporting teachers to develop both academic and pastoral roles within universities are discussed.     

Positing Organizational Effectiveness as a Second-Order Construct in Hong Kong Higher Education Institutions

The study examines the relative importance of the various organizational effectiveness dimensions in higher education institutions by positing organizational effectiveness as a second-order construct. Based on the findings of a survey administered to university academics in Hong Kong universities, the second-order structure of organizational effectiveness was supported. The findings reflected that the student-related dimensions were not considered as important as the dimensions related to faculty employment and satisfaction and suggested the disproportionate influence of the governing body on universities in Hong Kong.     

Access to higher education in South Africa: expanding capabilities in and through an undergraduate photovoice project

ABSTRACT

There is a gap in research on access to universities in South Africa. The research that exists focuses on quantitative methodologies, although some qualitative studies are now emerging. These research methodologies, although necessary and substantial for the development of equity measures and policies, might be less successful in their impact on the local context, on research participants and in expanding what counts as knowledge in the university. In this paper, participatory research, which has not been used to research access, is explored. The paper seeks to go beyond the instrumentalization of research participants – especially those from low-income households – highlighting the potential of using multi-strategy research, in which participatory elements are included as a way to foster both participants’ human development and local impact. Drawing on a research project on access to higher education in South Africa, the paper demonstrates that by including participatory elements (in this case photovoice) has the potential to operationalize Appadurai’s notion of the ‘right to research’ among undergraduates. Using data, including processes, observations, workshops, interviews, and visual narratives from a participatory photovoice project, the findings highlight how methodological plurality creates space for locally and relevant knowledge production, challenging epistemic barriers and fostering human development among the research participants.     

Sustainable assessment for lifelong learning

This paper explores the alignment of assessment practices in universities and lifelong learning as a key process and outcome for expansive student development. It outlines Boud’s approach to assessment, operationalises this to analyse practices in two contrasting national contexts: the sociology departments of the Midlands University in the UK and Nam Du University in Vietnam, and reframes this framework as a guide to improving practices and better-supporting lifelong learning. The paper thus contributes to recent debates about sustainable assessment and how to change assessment to better support students for lifelong learning in different countries. The findings suggest that although more elements were found at Midlands University than Nam Du University, assessment in both cases was an imperfect realisation of this framework. Nonetheless, the paper argues that the framework can offer guidance for changes to align assessment practices with lifelong learning, but to do this it should be adapted to the education context and also expanded to include explicit social commitments to others for expansive lifelong learning.