Teachers,Arts Practice and Pedagogy

What are possible overlaps between arts practice and school pedagogy? How is teacher subjectivity and pedagogy affected when teachers engage with arts practice, in particular, theatre practices? We draw on research conducted into the Learning Performance Network (LPN), a project that involved school teachers working with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Warwick. The aim of the commissioned research was to look at the effects on teacher development, focusing on the active rehearsal room pedagogic techniques and ensemble methods of exploring Shakespearean text and performance. The practices of working as an ensemble through rehearsal room pedagogy were central to the LPN. Our interest is in looking for possible shifts in teachers’ subjectivity, their self-perception. What affordances, limitations, accommodations and tensions are experienced by the teachers in transposing work from the rehearsal room to the classroom? We draw on a range of cultural theories that provide complementary perspectives on aspects of subjectivity; these include Vygotskian approaches to the psychology of art and acting. Raymond Williams’s work on the ‘dramatized society’ and Jacques Rancière’s work on spectatorship and pedagogy. Data in the form of excerpts from field notes, taken in an introductory workshop where teachers worked with theatre practitioners, and from transcribed interviews with participants in the project are used to provide evidence of shifts in perspective, self-perception and pedagogic practice.     

Rhythm production at school entry as a predictor of poor reading and spelling at the end of first grade

Rhythm plays an organisational role in the prosody and phonology of language, and children with literacy difficulties have been found to demonstrate poor rhythmic perception. This study explored whether students’ performance on a simple rhythm task at school entry could serve as a predictor of whether they would face difficulties in word reading and spelling at the end of grade 1. The participants were 479 Norwegian 6-year-old first graders randomized as controls in the longitudinal RCT on track (n = 1171). Rhythmic timing and pre-reading skills were tested individually at school entry on a digital tablet. On the rhythm task, the students were told to tap a drum appearing on the screen to two different rhythms (2 Hz paced and 1.5 Hz paced). Children’s responses were recorded as they tapped on the screen with their index finger. Significant group differences were found in rhythm tapping ability measured at school entry, when groups were defined upon whether children went on to score above or below the 20th percentile reading and spelling thresholds in national assessment tests at the end of grade one. Inclusion of the school-entry rhythmic tapping measure into a model of classification accuracy for above or below threshold reading and spelling improved accuracy of classification by 6.2 and 9.2% respectively.     

Headteacher critique and resistance: a challenge for policy,and for leadership/management scholars

Educational leadership/management scholars have undertaken work which documents the difficulties particular headteachers face when implementing policy. Some have suggested that headteachers mediate policy, ensuring the best possible outcomes for their schools, but there is also critique of this argument and a counter‐suggestion that heads ought to resist the imposts of conservative, marketised policies which produce and reproduce educational inequities. In this article I consider this position, and argue that if the field is to take up the question of resistance then it will need to extend its theoretical resources, interrogate and test out the limits of the proposition through empirical example, consider instances where resistance appears to occur, and move beyond a focus on individual headteachers to take seriously their collective professional organisations. In making this argument, I generate some suggestions for future research.     

Research Subjects,Participants or Co-researchers? Extending the Involvement of Students in Art and Design Research

Art education has a range of purposes. Art is said to support students to explore, interpret, ask critical questions, communicate and realise ideas, experiment, take risks, collaborate, tell stories and/or engage in social and political actions. In this paper, we consider whether educational researchers have the same capacious view of students’ potential and capacities for involvement. We bring the results of a Rapid Evidence Review (RER) of the benefits of arts education into conversation with the literatures on student voice and participation. We outline the ways in which student voice and participation are discussed, then move to the results of the RER. We conclude with a discussion of the opportunities for art education researchers to develop research practices that are inclusive of students.