Symbolic resources and marketing strategies in Ontario higher education: a comparative analysis

Existing research on marketing within PSE tends to focus on homogeneous groups of high-status organisations. This study ameliorates this gap in the literature, conducting a comparative analysis of promotional materials produced by public universities and community colleges in Ontario, Canada. We find that these two groups draw on unique strategies to communicate their quality to external constituents. Public universities emphasise faculty and institutional-level accomplishments, such as research grants and rankings. Meanwhile, community colleges, lacking access to these symbolic resources, employ corporate-like strategies, such as taglines and non-traditional logos.     

The preschool bathroom: making ‘problem bodies’ and the limit of the disciplinary regime over children

In this paper we study the effects of power in a bathroom, which is a rarely analysed space in preschools, using empirical examples from a semi-ethnographic study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. We demonstrate that educators’ understanding and practices mostly consider their own positioning in discourses and come short in accounting for children’s practices in and expressed views on the bathroom. Educators also remain distant from children’s bodily experiences. The interplay of the open architectural design of the bathroom space and dominant discourses operating in the preschool constitute some children as ‘problem bodies’ apparently requiring (and justifying) direct intervention. Following this reasoning we argue that the surveillance, regularisation and normalisation in the bathroom is far from total, which leads us to question the adequacy of understanding the bathroom as forming a part of a modern (disciplinary) institution.     

A sociocultural perspective as a curriculum change in health and physical education

As a lens through which to read and understand a subject area and its curriculum content and issues, a sociocultural perspective is a recent and arguably significant change for the Health and Physical Education (HPE) Key Learning Area (KLA) in Australia. Its significance lies, first, in the fact that it seems to represent a notable departure from the predominantly medico-scientific, bio-physical and even psychological foundations of the learning area as it stood throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and second, because its attention to social and cultural influences on health put it in direct opposition to notions which locate health almost solely in the individual and his or her decisions. Despite the potential ramifications of these shifts for practitioners, to date there has been little research that has examined this change within the context of the classroom. This paper reports on a research project conducted in two classrooms in the Australian state of New South Wales, which began with the question ‘what happens when you introduce a unit of work planned with the aim of developing a sociocultural perspective into the HPE classroom?’ I respond to this question by drawing on teacher and student interviews, planning sessions, and classroom observations and recordings to discuss the most prominent discursive tensions and organisational constraints that stand as impediments to a sociocultural perspective as a practiced curriculum change.     

Place‐related identity,texts, and transcultural meanings

The spatial turn has been marked by increasing interest in conceptions of space and place in diverse areas of research. However, the important links between place and identity have received less attention, particularly in educational research. This paper reports an 18‐month research project that aimed to develop a theory of place‐related identity through the textual transactions of reading and writing. The research was an in‐depth qualitative study in two phases: the first phase involved the development of an interdisciplinary theory of place‐related identity, which was ‘tested’ in a second empirical phase. Two contrasting primary school classes were the site for the research that included the development of a unit of work, inspired by the book My place, as a vehicle for exploring place‐related identity. The data were interviews, classroom observations and outcomes from pupils’ work. The construct of transcultural meanings, established from the analytic categories of localising identity, othering identity and identity as belonging, was identified as a defining phenomenon of place‐related identity. The conclusions offer reflections on the development of our initial theory as a result of the empirical work, and the implications for practice and future research.     

Creativity in education

Currently considerable interest is being shown in creativity by the government and bodies such as QCA and Ofsted. A ‘creativity agenda’ has emerged with important implications for teaching and learning in schools. Drawing on research literature, as well as work completed by Secondary PGCE English and Drama trainees, this paper aims to provoke discussion about how creativity in education is defined and the impact of more explicit understandings of creativity in classrooms.     

Crowdsourcing civility: A natural experiment examining the effects of distributed moderation in online forums

Participation in discussions about the public interest can be enhanced by technology, but can also create an environment in which participants are overwhelmed by the quantity, quality, and diversity of information and arguments. Political participation is at a greater disadvantage than non-political activities in that participants from different parties already start out with established differences, which requires them to reach some form of common ground before progress can be made. Those seeking authentic deliberation are discouraged to participate when confronted with uncivil and inflammatory rhetoric. These issues are often exacerbated in online discussions, where lack of identity cues and low barriers to entry can lead to heightened incivility between participants, often labeled as “flaming” and “trolling”. This paper explores the extent to which moderator systems, tools online discussion forums use to manage contributions, can reduce information overload and encourage civil conversations in virtual discussion spaces. Using the popular website Slashdot as an example of sound moderation in a public discourse setting, we found that users move toward consensus about which and how comments deserve to be moderated. Using these findings, we explore how transferable these systems are for participation in public matters specifically to the unique attributes of political discussion. Slashdot's political forum provides a comparison group that allowed us to find quantitative and qualitative differences in political posting, comments, and moderation. Our results show that large scale, civil participation is possible with a distributed moderation system that enables regularly lively debates to be conducted positively because the system provides tools for people to enforce norms of civility.