Licensed Partnership: State,Region and Institution in the Regulation of Access Education in England 1987–1992

The paper discusses the evolution and impact of a policy initiative intended to recognise and regulate a new entry route into British higher education: namely, that associated with access courses aimed primarily at adults and provided mainly by colleges of further education. The framework of quality assurance created to achieve this goal is examined from two vantage points. The first comes from within the central body established by the national government to develop and implement the scheme across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The second is that of one of the agencies in England licensed to recognise access courses at a regional and local level. As an early expression of a shift in government policy in the direction of a mass system of higher education, the framework represented on the one hand an exercise in legitimation and, on the other, an element in a larger process of change in post-secondary education. However, the ability of the initiative to shape priorities on the ground, or to embrace other transformations in and around access education, was always limited.     

Rule learning and complexity in simulated reading

Three approaches (Rule, Higher-order Unit, Whole Word) to decoding in a simulated reading task were studied. Rule complexity was varied in three experiments employing symbols ($, @, etc.) as stimuli and numbers as responses. CAI was the experimental vehicle. The 110 fifth and sixth grade boys and girls from an inner-city school were randomly assigned to one of the 11 groups in the three experiments. When the rule was simple (one-to-one correspondence) the rule approach was superior, but when the rule was complex (simulation of the final e rule in reading) the higher-order unit approach was superior. Higher-order unit subjects studied examples composed of the fewest stimuli possible to illustrate the rule.     

Demand intensity, market parameters and policy responses towards demand and supply of private supplementary tutoring in China

Based on some longitudinal studies of private tutoring in twelve cities, towns, municipalities and provinces of China, the paper endeavours to depict demand intensity, articulate market parameters and reflect on policy responses towards the demand-supply mechanism of the vast shadowy educational phenomena at primary and secondary levels. Such educational phenomena are so hidden that there is a complete lack of official statistical figures in measuring the full scale of tutoring and identifying tutors in some cases. In Hong Kong and Macao, parents and their schooling children take up responsibilities to consume various types of tutoring without state intervention into quality assurance. In Mainland China, local ministries of education prohibit home tutoring delivered by daytime teachers to their daytime students whilst take a laissez-faire approach towards mass tutorials that run in private business sphere. Lastly, a multi-level societal movement framework is recommended with strategic action plans in school practitioners’ and policy-makers’ perspectives for effectively monitoring or hampering the growth of such shadowy educational phenomena in China.     

A critical turn in higher education research: turning the critical lens on the Academic Language and Learning educator

This paper suggests that historical ontology, as one form of reflexive critique, is an instructive research design for making sense of the political and historical constitution of the Academic Language and Learning (ALL) educator in Australian higher education. The ALL educator in this paper refers to those practitioners in the field of ALL, whose ethical agency has largely been taken for granted since their slow and uneven emergence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Using the lens of governmentality, genealogical design and archaeological method, the historical ontology proposed in this paper demonstrates how the ethical remit of the ALL educator to ‘make a difference’ to student learning is not necessarily a unifying construct providing a foundational moral basis for the work, but a contingent historical and political effect of the government of conduct in liberal society. The findings of this approach are not intended to undermine the agency of the ALL educator, but to assist in making sense of the historical conditions that frame and complicate their institutional intelligibility as ethical agents in the academy.