Half Full, Not Half Empty: A Positive Look at Part-time Higher Education

This article explores the largely negative view of part-time higher education in contemporary policy discourse and the academic community. It presents the available data and re-interprets it in a positive way demonstrating that part-time students are not only in the (silent) majority but represent a model of lifelong learning, generate significant income for the universities and represent a resource of great potential for higher education. However, it concludes that there remains an outstanding research agenda and policy debate before its full potential can be realised.     

Conceptions of ‘research’ and their gendered impact on research activity: a UK case study

ABSTRACT

The last twenty years have seen an increased emphasis around the world on the quality and quantity of research in response to national research assessments, international league tables, and changes in government funding. The prevailing attitude in higher education embeds research as the ‘gold standard’ in the context of academic activity. However, a key feature of this trend is significant gender differences in research activity. We argue that research productivity is related to identification as a researcher, and that identifying as ‘research-active’ or not would appear to depend upon how an individual academic subjectively defines ‘research’. This article brings together two hitherto separate bodies of work (1) the impact of gender on academic research careers, and (2) academic conceptions of research. Through a combination of interviews, focus groups and questionnaires, we investigate the extent to which interpretations of ‘research’ and ‘research activity’ differ by gender within an institution in the UK and the potential impact of these interpretations. Although the research found that there are many similarities in the interpretations of ‘research activity’ between genders, we found one important difference between male and female participants’ conceptions of research and its relationship to teaching. Significantly, our findings suggest that there is a need to expand our existing conceptualisations of ‘research’ to include ‘research as scholarship’ in order to address the obstacles that current understandings of ‘research’ have placed on some academics. Self-definition as a researcher underlies research activity. A narrow conception of ‘research’ may prevent individuals from identifying as ‘research-active’ and therefore engaging with research.     

Self‐esteem and National Tests in Years 2 and 6: a 4‐year longitudinal study

ABSTRACT This 4‐year longitudinal study measured the self‐esteem, reading and mathematical attainments of four cohorts of children on two occasions‐‐in Year 2 and again in Year 6. All Year 2 children(N = 842) in five randomly selected primary schools within one Local Education Authority (LEA) comprised the sample, of which 588 were present in Year 6. The Lawseq questionnaire (Lawrence, 1982), Mathematics 7 and 11 (NFER, 1987a, b) and the Primary Reading Test Levels 1 and 2 (France, 1981) were administered to this sample. Results showed that Cohorts 3 and 4 had the lowest self‐esteem scores in Year 2 and the highest in Year 6 (significant at the 0.1% level). Attainments in mathematics were stable over the 4 years, but reading comprehension means were significantly higher in Year 6 than Year 2 (at the 0.1% level). Discussion centres on the age effects of self‐esteem responses as well as the effects of context and domain specific factors on self‐esteem.     

After Higgins and Dunne: Imagining School Teaching as a Multi‐Practice Activity

There remains a concern in philosophy of education circles to assert that teaching is a social practice. Its initiation occurs in a conversation between Alasdair MacIntyre and Joe Dunne which inspired a Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. This has been recently utilised in a further Special Issue by Chris Higgins. In this article I consider two points of conflict between MacIntyre and Dunne and seek to resolve both with a more nuanced understanding of the implications of applying the concept ‘social practice’ to teaching. I critique both Dunne's and Higgins' focus on schools and school teaching. It is their focus on school teaching, rather than a broader account of teaching, that leads them astray. The result is that Dunne and Higgins have not shown that teaching is a social practice. School teaching is not a complex activity, but a complex set of different activities co‐located in one place and engaged in by the same agents. In a final section I offer an account of ‘school teaching’ as a multi‐practice activity which is consistent with MacIntyre's approach, and argue that schoolteachers have both an institutional and an educative role.     

The Interplay Among Children's Negative Family Representations,Visual Processing of Negative Emotions,and Externalizing Symptoms

This study examined the transactional interplay among children's negative family representations, visual processing of negative emotions, and externalizing symptoms in a sample of 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years). Children participated in three annual measurement occasions. Cross‐lagged autoregressive models were conducted with multimethod, multi‐informant data to identify mediational pathways. Consistent with schema‐based top‐down models, negative family representations were associated with attention to negative faces in an eye‐tracking task and their externalizing symptoms. Children's negative representations of family relationships specifically predicted decreases in their attention to negative emotions, which, in turn, was associated with subsequent increases in their externalizing symptoms. Follow‐up analyses indicated that the mediational role of diminished attention to negative emotions was particularly pronounced for angry faces.     

Inclusion and mastery: variations on the theme of subjection

This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘mastery’ using memory stories generated in a collective biography workshop. The five authors analysed their memories from childhood and adolescence on two separate and competing concepts that currently inform educational practice: inclusion and mastery. These stories of mastery/non‐mastery and inclusion/exclusion often exceeded or transgressed dominant normative discourses concerning the competent performance of autonomous selves. Drawing on the work of several theorists, they authors explored these transgressions. In so doing, their analysis extends Butler’s theorising of the human subject as constituted through processes of exclusion and differentiation.     

The Diversity and Dynamics of Competition: Evidence from two local schooling markets

The policy of encouraging schools to compete has been justified on the basis of raising measured levels of attainment and widening choice. In this paper we review the basis for this policy, utilising the economic analysis of markets with a small number of providers. We note that in such markets, typical of local schooling markets, increased competition may generate diverse market behaviour and identify factors likely to produce rivalry and co-operation. We then present evidence of two apparently similar local schooling markets that exhibit very different levels and types of competition. We show how an assessment of the intensity of competition in a local schooling market depends on the particular indicators chosen. We review alternative interpretations for these differences in the nature of competition and relate to recent policy initiatives.     

Critical thinking and the disciplines reconsidered

This paper argues that Moore's specifist defence of critical thinking as ‘diverse modes of thought in the disciplines’, which appeared in Higher Education Research & Development, 30(3), 2011, is flawed as it entrenches relativist attitudes toward the important skill of critical thinking. The paper outlines the critical thinking debate, distinguishes between ‘top-down’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘relativist’ approaches and locates Moore's account therein. It uses examples from one discipline-specific area, namely, the discipline of Literature, to show that the generalist approach to critical thinking does not ‘leave something out’ and outlines why teaching ‘generic’ critical thinking skills is central to tertiary education, teaching and learning, and employment opportunities for students. The paper also defends the assessment of critical thinking skills.     

Education for citizenship: the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the educational settlement movement

David Reeder was one of the most important conservers of the traditions of urban history scholarship established during the 1960s at the University of Leicester under the leadership of Professor H. J. Dyos. Among Reeder’s major achievements were the application of the skills and objectives of such scholarship to the history of education, and in turn his reminding of urban historians of the importance of the educational dimension within their studies. Reeder was also a key figure in the international diffusion of teaching and research in urban educational history, and in promoting an interdisciplinary perspective that drew together past and present studies of urban educational policy and related social issues. This tribute article places his work in the context of changing attitudes to the history of urban education from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, and focuses by way of illustration on collaborative work between its writer [BM] and David Reeder in national conferences and in contributions to publications on the subject.