The Status of Civic Education: A Preservice Program Response

Civic education is an issue of growing and serious concern. There is diminished time for civics, fewer course offerings, and gaps in students’ civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The role of teacher education in addressing this problem is one area deserving additional focus. This article describes the project begun by the secondary education faculty at one university to provide teacher education candidates in all content areas with the ability to address civics in meaningful ways.     

Elements of Elaboration in Working Class Writing

In an attempt to define the concepts ‘elaborate’ and ‘restricted code’ by which the language of middle‐class and working‐class people has been said to be distinguishable, the authors conducted an experiment in which a small group of public school sixth‐formers and a small group of young car‐workers of similar age and poor educational record wrote essays on a variety of themes. These were closely analyzed for characteristics of verbal usage. It was found that when essays on technical topics were considered alone, the general linguistic disadvantage of the working‐class groups was wiped out. This suggests that areas of working‐class language may, after all, be ‘elaborate’ and complex rather than ‘restricted’.     

Departmental characteristics and the experience of secondary science teaching

This paper reports findings about the impact of departmental characteristics on secondary science teachers' work. It is drawn from a larger study, which also looked at ideological and material influences on practice. It focuses particularly on those aspects of the departmental environment which teachers themselves referred to frequently when discussing their work. These were: the managerial style of the department; the use made of schemes of work; the emphasis on the science disciplines as compared with 'science'; and the characteristics of pupils. It argues that such departmental characteristics are sometimes symbiotic, and that they are most subtly characterized in mainstream comprehensive schools. It also suggests that, while these influences do not necessarily lead to variation in the broad forms of pedagogy employed, they are perceived by teachers as significantly influencing their professional working environment, and the experience of teaching science.     

Transtheoretical-based bullying prevention effectiveness trials in middle schools and high schools

Background Bullying threatens the physical and mental well-being of students across a broad range of schools. Tailored interventions based on the Transtheoretical model and delivered over the Internet were designed to reduce participation in each of three roles related to bullying (bully, victim and passive bystander).

Methods Effectiveness trials were completed in 12 middle schools and 13 high schools in the USA. A diverse sample of 1237 middle (6th–8th grade, with 45.1% in the 7th grade; ages 11–14) and 1215 high school (9th–11th grade, with 41.6% in the 9th grade; ages 14–17) students were available for analyses.

Results Analyses showed significant treatment effects for both intervention groups when compared to control for both the middle and high school programs.

Conclusions Given the relative ease of dissemination, these programs could be applied as stand-alone practices or as part of more intensive interventions.     

BILINGUALISM IN WALES: AN ASPECT OF SEMANTIC ORGANISATION

The influence of teachers upon pupil performance has been acknowledged in other studies as setting in motion a ‘self‐fulfilling prophecy’. But this informal segregation of children into good and bad academic prospects is in part determined by the headteacher's beliefs about the pupils’ potential achievement during and after their school lives. By setting different levels of expectation throughout the school the headteacher may impose upon certain sets of children a diminished self‐concept. To a significant extent, therefore, the headteacher predetermines the child's developing image of himself not only as a pupil but as a person.     

Safety in numbers? Middle-class parents and social mix in London primary schools

Research into parents’ secondary-school choices suggests that many middle-class parents are keen to secure a middle-class peer group for their children. This article reports the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study into whether a similar phenomenon exists at primary-school level and, if so, why. In-depth interviews were conducted with 56 middle-class parents of pre-school children in inner London. Respondents often had contradictory impulses. Nearly all liked the idea of a socially mixed school but many associated the ‘wrong’ mix with various risks. Some of these perceived risks are familiar from previous studies. Others are less familiar, such as the fear among respondents that they themselves might not ‘fit in’ at their children’s school. The types of intake which respondents preferred fell into three overlapping categories: children from ‘pro-school’ families, children at a similar level of achievement to respondents’ own children and ‘people like us’. Respondents’ judgements about whether children and families fell into these categories were based in part on ideas about class, ethnicity and language. Respondents gravitated toward schools where most children were perceived to come from middle-class, white, English-speaking backgrounds. The article argues that attitudes towards children learning English as an additional language need to receive greater attention in future research.     

Personality,moral purpose,and the leadership of an education for sustainable development

This paper describes how two primary head teachers, nationally recognised as role models for the development of an education for sustainable development (ESD) in their schools, manage the implementation of this area. In doing so, it shows how they adopt two very different approaches to ESD and to their job generally, and suggests that whilst there are some commonalities between them, educational leadership needs to be seen as driven by a moral purpose, engaging and re-engaging with each situation, entering into a dialectic with others’ visions, leading to the re-conceptualisation of problems in different ways. This not only suggests a continued tension between such uniqueness and standardised approaches to headship, but raises questions about current policy imperatives for developing models of sustainable leadership.     

Challenging educational injustice: ‘Grassroots’ privatisation in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa

The phenomenon of low-cost private schools ‘mushrooming’ in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and elsewhere, is now well-documented. Findings from research by the author’s teams and others show that these schools are serving a majority (urban and peri-urban) or significant minority (rural) of the poor, including significant proportions of the poorest of the poor. Concerns are raised in the literature about their implications for social justice. In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen asks us to rethink ideas about justice; instead of the quest for a Rawlsian ‘transcendental institutionalism’, he argues for a comparative approach, grounded in the practicalities of human behaviour. Linking Sen’s ideas on justice with the grassroots privatisation leads to the tentative conclusion that those concerned with promoting social justice could agree to help improve access to, and quality in, the low-cost private school sector, rather than focus on the public education sector. Paradoxically, this could be true even for those whose ideal is an egalitarian public education system.