Translating policy: governmentality and the reflective teacher

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power or government and how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform.     

Reading training by means of disappearing text: effects on reading performance and eye movements

The Reading Acceleration Program (RAP), which uses adaptively increasing text erasure rates to enforce reading rate improvements, has been positively evaluated in various languages, reader and age groups. The current study compared the established incremental increase of text erasure rate with a training using fixed erasure rates in two groups of young, non-impaired German adults. Eye-tracking measures prior and post training examined training-related changes of eye-movement patterns. Equal gains in reading performance in both training groups led to the conclusion that not the adaptive increase but already text erasure at fixed rates provides an economically efficient tool for the enhancement of reading rates. Furthermore, eye-tracking results suggest that text erasure training affects word processing not only at one specific level, but simultaneously at pre-lexical, lexical, and post-lexical stages. Although these outcomes are promising, further research is necessary to determine the optimal individual erasure rates that preserve good comprehension at varying levels of text difficulty and in different orthographies.     

Individuelle und kontextuelle Prädiktoren des Fachwissenserwerbs zum Internen Rechnungswesen im Hochschulstudium

In our study, we examine some theoretically relevant personal factors as predictors of students’ acquisition of knowledge of management accounting, a key area of business and economics studies in higher education. We modeled and assessed business and economics students’ knowledge of management accounting in Germany using an internationally proven accounting test that has been translated and adapted and comprehensively validated for higher education in Germany. A review of the international literature showed that potential predictors might include not only learning opportunities students have used during and prior to higher education, but also students’ socio-cultural background and gender. These factors were assessed in a survey of 1012 students studying at 23 institutions of higher education. Not surprisingly, a multilevel analysis confirmed that among the learning opportunities a course in management accounting has the greatest effect on students’ knowledge of management accounting. But when other potential predictors are controlled, completion of a commercial vocation training prior to university studies shows a positive effect, as well.     

Do fine motor skills contribute to early reading development?

Background

Little is known about how fine motor skills (FMS) relate to early literacy skills, especially over and above cognitive variables. Moreover, a lack of distinction between FMS, grapho‐motor and writing skills may have hampered previous work.

Method

In Germany, kindergartners (n = 144, aged 6;1) were recruited before beginning formal reading instruction and were administered a host of FMS, early reading skills and cognitive measures.

Results

Analyses indicate that FMS related less strongly than grapho‐motor skills to emergent literacy skills. Controlling for grapho‐motor and cognitive skills, FMS did not generally explain unique variance in emergent literacy skills.

Conclusions

The link between reading and motor skills is highly differential. Findings did not suggest that pure FMS played a significant role in early reading development, however, its close cousin grapho‐motor skills – even when devoid of the cognitive knowledge of letters – did.

Implications for practice

What is already known about this topic

• Fine motor skills (FMS) are considered an important school readiness indicator
• FMS play a role in cognition and language development
• Some research suggests that FMS might be important for reading

What this paper adds

• First study to look differentially at FMS and emergent literacy
• FMS was considered separately from grapho‐motor and handwriting skill
• Links between these motor skills and a broad range of emergent literacy and cognitive skills were investigated

Implications for practice and/or policy

• FMS may be important in the development of grapho‐motor skills
• Grapho‐motor skills appear, in turn, linked to reading
• Fostering children's grapho‐motor skills may be important in kindergarten

     

p2pDating: Real life inspired semantic overlay networks for Web search

We consider a network of autonomous peers forming a logically global but physically distributed search engine, where every peer has its own local collection generated by independently crawling the Web. A challenging task in such systems is to efficiently route user queries to peers that can deliver high quality results and be able to rank these returned results, thus satisfying the users’ information need. However, the problem inherent with this scenario is selecting a few promising peers out of an a priori unlimited number of peers. In recent research a rather strict notion of semantic overlay networks has been established. In most approaches, peers are connected to other peers based on a rigid semantic profile by clustering them based on their contents. In contrast, our strategy follows the spirit of peer autonomy and creates semantic overlay networks based on the notion of “peer-to-peer dating”. Peers are free to decide which connections they create and which they want to avoid based on various usefulness estimators. The proposed techniques can be easily integrated into existing systems as they require only small additional bandwidth consumption as most messages can be piggybacked onto established communication. We show how we can greatly benefit from these additional semantic relations during query routing in search engines, such as Minerva, and in the JXP algorithm, which computes the PageRank authority measure in a completely decentralized manner.     

Patients reporting ritual abuse in childhood: a clinical syndrome. Report of 37 cases

Thirty-seven adult dissociative disorder patients who reported ritual abuse in childhood by satanic cults are described. Patients came from a variety of separate clinical settings and geographical locations and reported a number of similar abuses. The most frequently reported types of ritual abuse are outlined, and a clinical syndrome is presented which includes dissociative states with satanic overtones, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor guilt, bizarre self abuse, unusual fears, sexualization of sadistic impulses, indoctrinated beliefs, and substance abuse. Questions relating to issues of reliability, credibility and verifiability are addressed in depth, and the findings and implications are discussed.     

Pedagogical content beliefs: global, content domain-related and situation-specific components

Although teachers’ professional knowledge and instructional beliefs are known to have a variety of subcomponents, research on the structure and interrelations of these subcomponents is relatively scarce. This article presents some findings of a preliminary, quantitative empirical study examining the relationships between mathematics teachers’ views concerning specific classroom situations, their content domain-specific pedagogical content beliefs and their more global instruction-related beliefs. The findings suggest that global beliefs—in terms of cognitive constructivist or direct transmission views of teaching and learning, on the one hand, and beliefs about the stability of individual mathematical abilities, on the other—can impact teachers’ content domain-specific beliefs and their views related to videotaped classroom situations from introductory lessons on geometrical proof.     

Policy enactments in the UK secondary school: examining policy,practice and school positioning

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where ‘enactment’ refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south‐east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school‐based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own ‘take’ on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities.     

The politics of teaching as an occupation in the professional borderlands: the interplay of gender,class and professional status in a biographical study of trainee teachers in England

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’. This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 London-based secondary teacher training students from various social class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper asks how the profession is perceived and what sort of choice it is for the trainees. It employs a Bourdieusian lens and concepts of social and cultural capital to examine the interplay of gendered, classed and ‘raced’ biographies in relation to individuals’ decisions to become teachers. Understanding the social world as ‘accumulated history’, as Bourdieu does, stresses that experiences and outcomes are rooted and collected in a series of historical structures and functionings. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of the profession is both a function and an effect of its conceptualisation as feminised. It also asks whether the weak professional standing of teaching has further destabilising consequences in the present political moment where a string of neoliberal and neoconservative policy reforms reshape the profession.