Between ‘Bastard’ and ‘Wicked’ leadership? School leadership and the emerging policies of the UK Coalition Government

Barker argues that in England under New Labour, school leaders and teachers have been ‘bastardised’ and suggests that the situation in 2010, with a general election afforded an opportunity in education policy for the ‘pendulum to swing’. In this article, the key points about ‘bastard Leadership’ are briefly summarised. The article then develops a view of schools as sites of complexity and ‘wickedity’ as an alternative to the linear reductionist approaches of managerialists. These two perspectives present the extremes of a spectrum against which the trajectory of school leadership can be viewed as it emerges from the New Labour years and is now being developed by the Coalition Government. Evidence from ministerial speeches and the Coalition Government's flagship White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, are used to examine key issues of freedom and trust, reducing bureaucracy and increasing autonomy for schools as ways of exploring the extent to which the new government's policies on school leadership are, or are not, moving away from those of their New Labour predecessors.     

Choosing whether to resist or reinforce the new managerialism: the impact of performance‐based research funding on academic identity

This article uses four academics’ gendered and cultural responses to life in a university in Aotearoa New Zealand under the new managerialist regime. Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) requires academics to submit evidence‐based portfolios every six years to categorise and rank them, with government funding assigned accordingly. When the authors met as members of a writing group, the talk often turned to negative aspects of PBRF. Using co‐operative enquiry, the four co‐researchers began writing observations of their individual experiences, differences and identities to help them reflect and understand the impact of the changed environment. The four phases of writing as enquiry were: deciding on a focus, writing observations, engaging with the written accounts and interpreting the outcome through metaphor. The article process facilitated a positive outcome by helping the authors regain a sense of collegiality and mutual support, along with a sense of preserving their academic identity by writing and publishing as a group.     

The Role of Teaching Assistants in Student-Centered Learning: Benefits, Costs, and Negotiations

As more faculty members utilize student-centered methods, we should also expect to see an increase in graduate teaching assistants (TAs) who are asked to co-teach these classes. However, little is written about the challenges TAs face and the adjustments they make when teaching student-centered courses. This study examined a student-centered course taught by the hevruta method, a dyadic approach that emphasizes text-based student discussions. Although students reported significant learning gains, both they and TAs had to negotiate new instructional roles. Based on student and TA feedback, strategies are presented to facilitate effective student learning in a student-centered course co-taught by TAs.     

Testing the translational-symmetry hypothesis of abstract-concept learning in pigeons

The translational-symmetry hypothesis of abstract-concept learning was tested in a same/different (S/D) task with pairs of pictures. The translational-symmetry hypothesis proposes that subjects discriminate same trials by the simultaneous repetition of features in the two pictures (and different trials by the lack of feature repetition). Pigeons that had learned a simultaneous S/D task were tested with delays between the two pictures to remove emergent perceptual cues. In Experiment 1, we tested delays of 0 and 1 sec. The results did not show the accuracy decrease expected according to the translational-symmetry hypothesis. In Experiment 2, we expanded the delays to 2 and 6 sec. Even at the longest delay, there was no evidence of the precipitous performance decline or default strategy that would be predicted by translational symmetry. The results provide evidence against translational symmetry (or other perceptually emergent features) that might control these pigeons’ performance in our two-item S/D task.