The myth of The Phoenix: progressive education,migration and the shaping of the welfare state, 1985–2015

Abstract

Since the 1970s, many western welfare states have been subject both to increased migration and to a renewed interest in progressive education. The present article addresses the question of whether these two phenomena are related and how changing notions of the welfare state shape and are shaped by this relationship. To answer the question, we concentrate our attention on the case study of Ghent (Belgium), which from the 1970s onwards has been characterised not only by a growing ethnic diversity but also by a renewed interest in progressive educational initiatives. Drawing on oral history with key figures in the local educational field and research in school archives, this article indicates that progressive initiatives in the last few decades have indeed emerged as an answer to migration patterns. But whereas initial initiatives in the 1980s arose from an endeavour to cater for the migrant child, some recent initiatives arose from an attempt to exclude the same child.     

An exploratory study into the complexity of relations between physics lecturers’ crafting of practice and students’ expectations of quality teaching

This study contributes to research that characterises the affective learning that is evoked and taken on by students in response to their perceptions of their contextual learning environments. Interview-discussions were held with lecturers of both introductory and higher-level physics courses (n = 3) concerning how they formulated their patterns of teaching in terms of a particular conceptual framing that they considered to best optimize making learning possible. Subsequently their students (n = 212) were asked with written questions, and some select follow-up interview-discussions, to describe what they expected from ‘a good physics lecturer’. The relationships between these two things—the lecturer’s crafting of practice and the students’ expectations of quality teaching—were investigated. Results show that students’ expectations tend to match their lecturers’ practice, indicating that students are strongly influenced by a contextually based appreciation of ‘good’ teaching.     

A disciplinary discourse perspective on university science learning: Achieving fluency in a critical constellation of modes

In this theoretical article we use an interpretative study with physics undergraduates to exemplify a proposed characterization of student learning in university science in terms of fluency in disciplinary discourse. Drawing on ideas from a number of different sources in the literature, we characterize what we call “disciplinary discourse” as the complex of representations, tools and activities of a discipline, describing how it can be seen as being made up of various “modes”. For university science, examples of these modes are: spoken and written language, mathematics, gesture, images (including pictures, graphs and diagrams), tools (such as experimental apparatus and measurement equipment), and activities (such as ways of working—both practice and praxis, analytical routines, actions, etc.). Using physics as an illustrative example, we discuss the relationship between the ways of knowing that constitute a discipline and the modes of disciplinary discourse used to represent this knowing. The data comes from stimulated recall interviews where physics undergraduates discuss their learning experiences during lectures. These interviews are used to anecdotally illustrate our proposed characterization of learning and its associated theoretical constructs. Students describe a repetitive practice aspect to their learning, which we suggest is necessary for achieving fluency in the various modes of disciplinary discourse. Here we found instances of discourse imitation, where students are seemingly fluent in one or more modes of disciplinary discourse without having related this to a teacher‐intended disciplinary way of knowing. The examples lead to the suggestion that fluency in a critical constellation of modes of disciplinary discourse may be a necessary (though not always sufficient) condition for gaining meaningful holistic access to disciplinary ways of knowing. One implication is that in order to be effective, science teachers need to know which modes are critical for an understanding of the material they wish to teach. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 27–49, 2009     

Professional development design: Embedding educational reform in New Zealand

Teacher professional development variously supports ongoing skill development, new knowledge, and systems change. In New Zealand, the implementation of major assessment reforms in senior secondary schools provided opportunity to investigate teacher professional development as a function of the particular stage of an educational reform. Multi-method data sources including teacher surveys and school case studies were employed to evaluate professional development during the embedding stage of a standards-based assessment system, revealing a positive relationship between professional satisfaction and teacher involvement in setting priorities for the professional development. Other positive features were networking, personalized learning, and facilitator expertise. This research illustrates the importance of tailoring professional learning to implementation phase of an organizational change.     

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.     

Children's own vision of schooling

Recent research on cognition demonstrates how significant it is to listen to and hear what children say about their experience. When we understand what they analyse about the daily events of school, we get a very different picture of what they go through than the official policies would suggest. Children have clear insights into the formal and informal aspects of school. This article summarises some of their thoughts about the curriculum, about how they are taught and what they learn about themselves and society through their experience.     

The learners’ experience of variation: following students’ threads of learning physics in computer simulation sessions

This article attempts to describe students’ process of learning physics using the notion of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on analytic tools from the phenomenographic research tradition, and the recent group of studies colloquially known as the variation theory of learning, having the notion of experiencing variation as a key for learning at its core. Empirically, the study relies on video and audio recordings of seven pairs of students interacting in a computer-simulation learning environment featuring Bohr’s model of the atom. The data was analysed on a micro-level for the emergence of student-recognised variation, depicted in terms of ‘threads of learning’. This was done by linking variation around aspects of the object of learning present in the situation, and attended to by the students, to new ways of seeing—characterised as an expanding anatomy of awareness, and hence as learning. The students’ threads of learning are characterised in terms of two stages of learning progress: (1) discerning variation, and (2) constituting meaning from this experience of variation (experienced as holistically relevant in the students’ conceptual domain of physics and the Bohr model). Two groups of threads of learning were identified: one where the variation experienced by students was within an aspect of the object of learning, and one where variation was across several aspects.     

The Media and Information: children's responses to the Gulf War

This paper analyses research that took place in a European country not involved with the Gulf War to explore the reactions of school children to the news dealing with that particular event. It sought to ascertain the kind of knowledge accumulated about a media event, what impact it has on the school curriculum and the relationship of such news events to levels of anxiety and areas of interest. The results showed the separation between children's knowledge of the news and the curriculum at school, the different styles of gathering information and the lack of detailed discussion about such events.