Leadership identity in a small island developing state: the Jamaican context

While the role of leadership in improving schools is attracting more worldwide attention, there is a need for more research investigating leaders’ experiences in different national contexts. Using focus-group and semi-structured interview data, this paper explores the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican school leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, the paper examines how the participants’ journeys of becoming and being school leaders are influenced by national-level societal and cultural issues, experienced at a local level. The findings suggest that in becoming school leaders, the participants perceived that they had a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities, which in turn, they hope, will have a lasting effect on the nation as a whole.     

Gendered educational leadership: beneath the monoglossic façade

Recent gender retheorisation has drawn on Mikhail Bakhtin's literary and linguistic theories of monoglossia and heteroglossia to reconcile seemingly contradictory gender discourses. Thus, girls/women and boys/men as they are biologically sexed might be discussed within a poststructural gender theory discourse that disconnects gender from the body. The concepts of gender monoglossia, gender heteroglossia and polyglossia have been applied here to empirical research into the construction of gendered leadership as it was seen to be done by one woman head teacher. The accounts of members of staff expose heteroglossia in the articulation of their understandings of gendered leadership beneath the construction of a monoglossic façade. They also reveal an understanding of polyglossic simultaneity as the head teacher is observed to ‘switch’ seamlessly between modes of doing gendered leadership depending on context and circumstances. There is also evidence of polyglossic simultaneity in the reports that might lead to the rejection and/or redefinition of gender theory discourses.     

Does maternal employment influence poor children’s social development?

Various initiatives over the past 40 years have aimed to strengthen children’s early learning and social development. One policy theory—manifest in recent welfare reforms—postulates that requiring single mothers to work more outside the home will advance children’s well-being. We first examine whether young children’s social development is related to maternal employment among 405 women who entered welfare-to-work programs in 1998. For girls, age 24–42 months, we found that their mother’s recent employment duration was significantly associated with a lower incidence of aggressive behavior and inattentiveness, measured by two scales from the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL 2/3). Yet these relationships with employment were weaker than more robust associations observed for proximal child-rearing practices, including the frequency of reading with the child, enforcing a regular bedtime, the propensity to spank the child, as well as levels of maternal depression. We then assess whether broader measures of the mother’s economic security help to predict these proximal determinants of development. We observed that food security and indicators of job quality consistently predicted the proximal factors. Structural equation models (SEM) provided additional evidence that these broader indicators of economic security, but not recent employment per se, operated through parenting practices and maternal depression to influence girls’ and boys’ social development. These results are consistent with recent findings from random-assignment experiments, showing that employment gains rarely affect child outcomes unless mothers’ income and broader economic security also improve.     

社会认识论:知识政策的理论与实践(下)

本文的后半部分展现社会认识论的实践层面.在这里笔者认为,有组织的探究,即维基词典中广义的"科学",仅仅在一种宏观经济学的框架内才能被证明是一种富有献身精神的追求.这个论点紧跟着这样的需要,即需要福利国家或市场社会主义来确保公共产品的稳定产生.即使我们假定(这个假定是有争议的)个体非常了解自身的利益所在,也不能由此断定他们足够充分地了解他人的利益,以至于确信他们将会协力生产出合适的知识,使得他们所有人都能够达到其目的.     

Credentialism,adults and part-time higher education in the United Kingdom: an account of rising take up and some implications for policy

This paper focuses on, and helps to explain, the growing importance of higher level qualifications for adults in the UK. It highlights statistical trends in their take up of qualifications, particularly, as the result of taking part-time courses in higher education. Recent figures indicate that most part-time students at undergraduate level fund their own tuition fees: I interpret this finding as an indicator of individual demand. The article goes on to draw on a qualitative study of mature students to identify some of the issues which lie behind the statistics. I suggest that insights into the rising take up of HE can be gained from considering the backgrounds and perspectives of mature students themselves, their changing relationship to qualifying and how their return-to-study decisions relate to the contemporary socio-economic context. The paper concludes by reminding policy makers of the challenge of widening access to HE for disadvantaged groups and briefly focuses on the potential of the new foundation degree to address this issue.     

Freshman perceptions of instructor fairness and expertise: A problem in course evaluation

This paper reports a study based on Bruner, Shapiro and Tagiuri's conception of lay personality theory. The trait implication questionnaire adapted from Bruner et. al. was used to investigate the way in which freshmen students make inferences about instructor fairness and expertise. Results are discussed in light of their implications for the use of student course evaluations.     

The accuracy of students’ predictions of their GCSE grades

The paper reports a study that investigated the relationship between students’ self-predicted and actual General Certificate of Secondary Education results in order to establish the extent of over- and under-prediction and whether this varies by subject and across genders and socio-economic groupings. It also considered the relationship between actual and predicted attainment and attitudes towards going to university. The sample consisted of 109 young people in two schools being followed up from an earlier study. Just over 50% of predictions were accurate and students were much more likely to over-predict than to under-predict. Most errors of prediction were only one grade out and may reflect examination unreliability as well as student misperceptions. Girls were slightly less likely than boys to over-predict but there were no differences associated with social background. Higher levels of attainment, both actual and predicted, were strongly associated with positive attitudes to university. Differences between predictions and results are likely to reflect examination errors as well as pupil errors. There is no evidence that students from more advantaged social backgrounds over-estimate themselves compared with other students, although boys over-estimate themselves compared with girls.