Exploring recent developments and debates in education management

This article explores some recent developments and debates concerning education management. It is based on a review of seven recently published books with relevance to developing understanding of education management. An overview of the key issues and central arguments of each book is provided. Debates which have emerged within and between the books are identified as themes for discussion. Themes explored relate to: the changing context of education management; the management of change; discourses in education management; developing education management; a shift from management to leadership; power and values in education management; and the linkage between education and management. The article concludes that education management should emphasize educational goals rather than managerial ends. It suggests the need to explore the inter-relationship between management theory, discourse, practice and development and the implications for learning and teaching. There is a continuing need for development and debate concerning education management.     

A Meta-Analysis of Advance Organizer Studies

Twenty-nine reports yielding 112 studies were analyzed with Glass’s meta-analysis technique, and results were compared with predictions from Ausubel’s model of assimilative learning. Overall, advance organizers were shown to be associated with increased learning and retention of the material to be learned. Levels of some variables in the high-effect-size studies were not as predicted by Ausubel’s model, however.     

Blogging as public pedagogy: creating alternative educational futures

In this study, I explore ‘blogging’, the use of a regularly updated website or web page, authored and curated by an individual or small group, written in a conversational style, as a form of public pedagogy. I analyse blogs as pre-figurative spaces where people go to learn with/in a public sphere, through collaboration with interested others. However, my intention is not to conceptualize blogging spaces as such, but rather—having framed them in a particular way—to explore the extent to which they globalise dissent. My argument is that the blogs I explore, understood as public pedagogic spaces, cultivate voices of educational dissent. Positioning itself within the global research imagination, the study draws extensively on data generated by two blogging communities with a combined international readership in excess of 40,000 people; one of the blogs is based in the UK, written by a group of adult educators. The other is based in Canada written by a group of adult literacy practitioners. Whilst both blogs are authored, curated and carried by a named individual, as public pedagogic spaces, they are implicated in the creation of a dialogic self: a self which is developed collaboratively with/in the interests of and through a public that coalesces around them. The pedagogies associated with these spaces are argued as explicit and intentioned. The public that coalesces around them learns how to survive a global neoliberal policy nexus that is unsympathetic towards the ideals they pre-figuratively embody. In so doing, they call into being the creation of alternative educational understandings of themselves and each other in relation to policy, pedagogy and the purposes of education.     

Local links,local knowledge: Choosing care settings and schools

This article draws on data from two recently completed Economic and Social Research Council funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities in choice of school and choice of childcare. The authors argue that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity. The processes by which working‐class parents in one study chose care settings and schools could be seen as less skilled, less informed, less careful than the decision making of many of the middle‐class respondents. However, this is not an argument that the authors advance, noting instead that the practices and meanings of choice are subject to significant social, cultural and economic variations in terms of who gets to choose, who gets their choices, and what, how and why people choose when they are able to. The authors argue that there are alternative sets of priorities in play for the working‐class respondents, involving attachments to the communal and the local.     

Legacy evaluation and London, 2012 and the Cultural Olympiad

The Summer Olympic Games were held in London from 27th July to 12th August 2012 with the Paralympic Games following two weeks later. In the immediate aftermath, the event was heralded as an outstanding success with praise for efficient organisation, welcoming volunteers and sporting prowess. But how do we evaluate the longer term legacy of an event like the Olympic Games? This article explores developments within the last decade to establish a paradigm for evaluating the legacy of the Olympic Games. The development of the International Olympic Committee's focus on “legacy” planning introduces this article and is followed by a brief synopsis of the contribution that the UK has made to legacy evaluation. The final section suggests that one of London 2012s major contributions to the Olympic movement as a whole may be what an interrogation of the issues surrounding legacy evaluation tell us about legacy as a whole.