QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: ISSUES AND CONCERNS

Although quality in higher education is hard to define and to identify, there is growing concern about it at national and international levels. The work of CEPES, particularly its proposal to create a European Group on Academic Assessment (EGAA), and the work of OECD, particularly its Institutional Management in Higher Education Programme (IMHE), respond to this concern. Approaches to quality assessment in the United States, Japan, and Sweden are evoked.     

A SAFE WAY TO FIRST SOLO: A FLIGHT TRAINING CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTIONAL INNOVATION

A structured flight training syllabus to first solo, with accompanying student notes and instructional records was trialled in one aero club. Student progress was contrasted with flight training in two other clubs. Both quantitative and qualitative monitoring data were collected. This paper outlines the project, reports the data and general outcomes, and notes the difficulties encountered in implementing and monitoring this innovation in a loosely organised and changing context.     

Kierkegaard as an Educational Thinker: Communication Through and Across Ways of Being

Attempts to build bridges between Kierkegaard and current educational debates or dilemmas are in danger of appearing facile to friends of Kierkegaard, and opportunistic or irrelevant to each opposing side in educational controversies. In hope of reducing such extravagant risks, this essay explores some aspects of Kierkegaard on communication and on ways of being, i.e. his spheres or stages of existence. Communication through ways of being seems relatively straightforward. Communication across ways of being can seem either absurdly complicated or (if aiming at unravelling such complications) wonderfully illuminating. This Kierkegaard could become a creatively awkward, Socratic partner in educational attempts to critique and deepen current accounts of language and communication, narrative and accountability, reason and justification, personal and social development, emotional intelligence and (of course) moral and religious education (with or without 'spiritual' development) as well as political or citizenship education. Wittgenstein found in Kierkegaard one lifelong Socratic conversation partner. If other educators can do this in their own ways, Kierkegaard can still breathe more lively passion into the cold embers of educational discourses.     

Using order to reason about negative numbers: the case of Violet

This case study illustrates how a 2nd-grade child, Violet, used an ordinal view of number to reason about positive and negative integers and arithmetic involving integers. Violet’s ordinal view of number facilitated her ability to reason about and correctly solve some integer-related problems and constrained her solutions to others. We demonstrate how Violet’s thinking evolved over time while she extended the properties of whole numbers and addition and subtraction to the integers. Using this case study as a basis, we propose a series of developmental milestones that build toward one’s understanding of integers and integer arithmetic in an order-based way. We believe that understanding Violet’s order-based reasoning can help us listen to other children.     

Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite and the spaces of revolt

In this article we will contribute to the contemporary theoretical debate about film by considering, from a history-of-education perspective, the film Zéro de conduite by Jean Vigo (1905–1934). This film is classified under the umbrella of “poetic realism”: a product of cinéma de gauche and an avant-gardist, surrealist and anarchist-catalogued film by a film-maker described by many as very talented and creative. The paper is divided into five parts. In the first part we sketch Vigo’s own biography and the social biography of the film. The second section documents the response to the film both at the time of its release and subsequently. In the third section we explore anarchist ideas about education both in theory and practice. In the fourth section we use this understanding to analyse the film. The final section returns to the question of film as an underused resource and the possibilities of bringing new elements into historical practice.     

Manipulating the data: teaching and NAPLAN in the control society

High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the ‘good teacher’. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This article argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.     

The power of one? Conditions which challenge managerial professional development practices

This paper draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field to better understand and appreciate the conditions which encouraged the productive professional development (PD) practices of one very capable teacher working in a secondary school in the British Midlands. Rather than celebrating this teacher's practices and perspective as evidence of the capacity of the heroic individual to overcome sometimes adverse circumstances, this paper reveals how the experiences of this teacher can be understood as an instance of the socially situated self, engaged by and engaging in an alternative politics to that associated with more managerial conceptions of teacher learning. This research calls for a cautious approach to those renderings of educational practice which construe the creative potential of the habitus, without sufficient regard for the actual conditions which contribute towards this creativity. In this way, this paper is presented not as an example of how one teacher overcame significant barriers to substantive learning practices – as a morality tale for other, individual educators to emulate – but as a provocation to suggest how some teachers' access to professional/community resources helps them sustain a clear focus on substantive learning.     

Broadcasting in General

Erik Barnouw's The Image Empires A History of Broadcasting in the United States From 1953 (Oxford University Press, $9.75)

Howard Koch's The Panic Broadcast (Little, Brown & Co., $4.95)

Howard W. Coleman's Caso Studios in Broadcast Management (Hastings House, $4.95)

Joe McGinniss' The Soiling of the President 1963 (Pocket Books, $1.25)

Alexander Kendrick's Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow (Avon, $1.65)

Nicholas Johnson's How To Talk Back to Your Television Set (Bantam, $1.25)

Herbert C. Kelman and Raphael S. Ezekiel's Cross-National Encounters (Jossoy-Bass (San Fransisco), $10.50)

Victor Gold's The Enemies He Has Made (Arlington House)

Bon Bagdikian's The Information Machine (Harper & Row)

Chester, Garrison, and Willis' Television and Radio (Appleton-Century-Crofts)