Making judgments as the basis for workplace learning: towards an epistemology of practice

Workplace learning has emerged as a significant site of adults' informal experiential learning, with implications for the provision and shape of formal education. There are, however, a prohibitive number of variables encumbering research into such learning. We can bypass the variables by focusing on phenomenal accounts of how professionals (in this instance) make judgements at work, underpinned by an organic logic derivable from Dewey. This article shows how to characterize a new epistemology of practice through both empirical and conceptual innovation, and thus advances the detail of this new informal workplace learning. This epistemology deals in five characteristics central to lifelong learning anyway, namely: the contingent (rather than exclusively formal, sustained, and systematic studies); the practical (rather than exclusively the theoretical); the process (rather than exclusively the assimilation of content); the particular (rather than the exclusively universal and a priori as the ‘context’); and the affective and the social domains (rather than exclusively the cognitive domain). Our fieldwork so far shows, through interview findings, how these are prominent in professional workplace judgments, and what prospects there are for further research on judgment as a site of ‘organic’ learning for adults.     

R.S. PETERS AND THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

In this essay Kelvin Beckett argues that Richard Peters's major work on education, Ethics and Education, belongs on a short list of important texts we can all share. He argues this not because of the place it has in the history of philosophy of education, as important as that is, but because of the contribution it can still make to the future of the discipline. The limitations of Peters's analysis of the concept of education in his chapter on “Criteria of Education” are well known. In the chapter on “Education as Initiation,” however, Peters offered a synthetic sketch of education that, Beckett argues, points us toward a more comprehensive definition of education, one which, he maintains, can be accepted by all philosophers, regardless of the tradition they work in.     

Urban High School Student Engagement Through CincySTEM iTEST Projects

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This paper focuses on the notable heightening of underrepresented students’ engagement in STEM education through project-based learning CincySTEM...     

Sacrificial girls: a case study of the impact of streaming and setting on gender reform

This article reports on research funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate school responses to gender equity. It addresses the efforts of a disadvantaged school to tackle what they perceived to be gender inequalities, but in the process of constructing a top‐set and bottom‐set/stream class they are developing new forms of old inequalities and new forms of inequalities. This research indicates that despite popular assertions that girls' education has become the priority of schools and education systems, girls are being further disadvantaged through attempts to implement market strategies coupled with gender reform agendas grounded in liberal notions of equity and relying on unsophisticated notions of affirmative action. In addition, this study highlights the extent to which a media‐driven debate about boys' education has influenced the constitution of boys as the ‘new disadvantaged’ with the capacity to determine the nature of gender reform agendas and programmes in schools.     

A ‘usable past’ of teacher education in England: history in JET’s anniversary issue

The recent JET Anniversary Virtual Special Issue, abbreviated here to JET@40, reproduced its very first editorial with selected articles from Britain and abroad published in subsequent decades. The journal first came into being as a response to damning criticism of the profession via government-sponsored reports and reviews but also to encourage informed debate with particular focus on notions of ‘good teaching’ and the ‘good teacher’. In this paper, we engage with selected contributions in JET@40 to tease out an historical map for teacher education. The task is to glean a sense of the past which resonates with our co-developed, research-informed teacher education programme, and gives insight to a lack of institutional and political support to encourage teacher research activity that interrogates the effects of poverty and cumulative multiple deprivation on disadvantaged students’ lives, learning and urban schooling experiences. Our argument is that JET@40 not only provides us with an indication of the best of what is known and practised but also a ‘usable past’ or history of specific professional insights to inform debate about possibilities and predicaments in our own teacher education programme.