Hesitantly into the arena: An account of trainee teachers' and sixth form students' preliminary attempts to enter into dialogue through email

Teacher training is increasingly accountable to central government. Trainees – the word itself is significant – are expected to demonstrate competence in a wide range of professional standards if they are to achieve qualified teacher status. Training partnership schools, understandably, impose their own conditions for entry into their 'communities of practice'. In these circumstances, trainees – and their trainers – have increasingly fewer opportunities for risk taking or for exploring new configurations of the teacher pupil relationship.
This paper describes an attempt to exploit the potential of email as a means of granting access to a 'pedagogical arena' in which trainees and students might attempt to negotiate their own ways of working together. It concludes by suggesting that both groups found this a challenging task and by noting that the trainers involved decided that, if the project were to run again, a certain amount of autonomy would need to be sacrificed to direction.     

The Educational Forces Inventory

The Educational Forces Inventory (EFI) is a technique for assessing the constellation of forces in the teacher’s social-psychological field. Thereby, important stress points for teachers are identified and their work in the classroom is facilitated. The EFI charts the relative influence of each of 13 forces that are important factors in the educational settting. Teachers are asked to characterize each force along two dimensions: the amount of influence it exerts upon the classroom process, and the degree to which this influence is positive or negative. Several hundred teachers and teaching assistants in Follow Through classrooms throughout the country participated in a field test of the instrument, with concurrent administration of the Purdue Teacher Opinionaire (PTO), an established measure of teacher morale. The high rate of return and correct completion on the EFI indicated that it is a practical technique. In addition, the data indicated validity for the instrument in three important respects: (1) the pattern-of-importance ratings correspond to independently assessed patterns of physical and social distance; (2) the positive/negative ratings for particular forces correlated substantially with corresponding subscores of the PTO; and (3) the pattern of responses reflected aspects of internal consistency. Some ways of utilizing EFI data are discussed: how to plot and interpret two-dimensional force fields, and how to use them in program implementation, especially to facilitate the work of the teacher in the classroom.     

Community Colleges and Labor Market Conditions: How Does Enrollment Demand Change Relative to Local Unemployment Rates?

This study uses fixed-effects panel data techniques to estimate the elasticity of community college enrollment demand relative to local unemployment rates. The findings suggest that community college enrollment demand is counter-cyclical to changes in the labor market, as enrollments rise during periods of weak economic conditions. Using national data for the years 1990 through 2009, we find that a one percentage-point change in unemployment is associated with 1.1–3.3 % increases in enrollment demand. We disaggregate the analysis by total full-time and part-time enrollment, concluding that high levels of unemployment are also associated with greater demand for full-time attendance. Additionally, enrollments are slightly more responsive to unemployment in metropolitan (rather than micropolitan) areas. Informed by enrollment demand theory, our analysis provides an update to the “unemployment elasticity” literature and could aid in current enrollment planning, economic development, and public policy efforts to educate students on the margin between college and work.