Changing school loyalties and the middle class: A reflection on the developing fate of state comprehensive high schooling

Of all Australian secondary schools in the current period, the government comprehensive high school is in most difficulty. This article looks at the developing fate of this school in terms of middle class social practice in relation to changing schooling loyalties. The recent work of Michael Pusey, Stephen Ball, Janet McCalman, Richard Teese and Judith Brett on the middle class is reviewed to give the discussion an historical and contemporary sociological context. The main idea addressed is that the middle class is being ‘forced’ to leave public schools. Government policy on state aid since the (1960s is interpreted as encouraging the departure of the middle class from public schooling, though not evenly in all regions or different kinds of government school. The article analyses census data for New South Wales from (1976 to 2001, using the categories of family income, fathers’ occupation and labour force status as quantifiable indicators of changing school loyalties in the middle class. The article concludes that state comprehensive high schools face a difficult future. Increasingly these schools are seen as schools of ‘last resort’, or schools to which students are sent where active choices are not possible, or are not made by apparently neglectful parents. This occurs in a period in which ‘good citizenship’ is defined less in terms of responsibility to the welfare of broad collectivities in society, but in the informed strategic pursuit of private interest.     

Action research: a methodology for transformative learning for a professor and his students in an engineering classroom

ABSTRACT

An engineering professor of a first-year thermodynamics course and a PhD student with a focus in engineering education in a large research university in Canada participated in an ethnographic action research study with the intention of increasing active learning in the classroom to enhance student engagement and learning. Unexpected findings included transformative changes to the professor’s epistemology of teaching and learning. Through the action research cycle of planning, implementing, observing, and critically reflecting, modifications were made to the instructional strategies and the learning environment that created a micro engineering community of practice where both students and teaching assistants engaged in deep learning and legitimate peripheral participation on the trajectory to ‘becoming engineers’. Qualitative interview data from the professor, three students, and three teaching assistants are analysed through approaches to learning research and situated learning theory. Engaging in action research had profound repercussions in this case. The authors make the argument for action research as a catalyst for transformative learning required for teachers to engage students in the twenty-first century classroom.     

Conditioned flavor preferences as a function of deprivation level: Preferences or aversions?

Rats tend to prefer flavors previously consumed under low deprivation to flavors previously consumed under high deprivation (Capaldi & Myers, 1982). We attempted to distinguish among possible associative explanations by determining whether this conditioning phenomenon was based upon conditioned preferences, conditioned aversions, or both. We compared preference for flavors presented exclusively under either high or low deprivation with preference for a neutral flavor. In Experiments 1A and 1B the neutral flavor was one that had been randomly paired with both high and low deprivation, whereas in Experiments 2 and 3 the neutral flavors had not been associated with either high or low deprivation. Our results strongly suggest that this conditioning phenomenon is based upon an actual increase in preference for the flavor consumed under low deprivation rather than on any form of aversion conditioning.     

Teacher perceptions and attitudes that foster or maintain sex role differences

In an attempt to determine the nature of sex role differences as perceived by teachers, a survey of 60 secondary school teachers was conducted. The results revealed teacher perceptions of traditional male-female student behavior in the classroom, teacher preference for male teachers and male students, and the reluctance of most teachers to facilitate sex role behavior changes. Other evidence cited supports the claim of proponents that males and females are socialized differently-toward the maintenance of traditional sex role behavior. How the education system can aim for a new role balance allowing greater independence, integrity, and freedom from misconceptions about the other sex is discussed.

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Résumé Dans le but de déterminer la nature des différences de rôle attribuables au sexe comme les professeurs le voient, une étude a été entreprise auprès de 60 professeurs d'école secondaire. Les résultats ont révélé les perceptions par les professeurs de conduite traditionnelle masculine et féminine en classe, la préférence de la part des professeurs pour étudiants mâles et enseignants mâles, et la répugnance de la majorité des professeurs de faciliter des changements dans la conduite attribuable au sexe. D'autres témoignages cités supportent l'affirmation des partisans de la différence sociale entre hommes et femmes-vers le maintien de la conduite traditionnelle relative aux sexes. La présente étude discute de quelle manière le système éducationnel peut être orienté vers un nouvel équilibre des rôles permettant plus d'indépendance et d'intégrité et moins de conceptions erronées à propos du sexe opposé.

     

From conception to performance: How undergraduate students conceptualise and construct essays

Interviews with forty six undergraduate students enrolled in either first or third year of a Bachelor of Education explored how they conceptualised and undertook an essay writing task. The conceptual structure of their essays was analysed using the SOLO Taxonomy. Comparisons between students who wrote essays of differing levels of complexity revealed that there were major differences between students at every stage of the essay writing process. Compared to students writing essays with simple conceptual structures, students writing more complex essays engaged in processes of reconstruction rather than knowledge telling, put more effort into finding references, used organisational systems for integrating their notes according to topics or themes, built arguments rather than presented information when structuring and drafting their essays, were concerned with improving ideas and arguments as well as mechanics when revising their essays, had a more sophisticated understanding of the concepts underlying the assessment criteria, and expected and received higher grades. The results suggest a developmental process in underlying conceptualisations of both the body of knowledge forming the content of the essay, and the essay writing processes themselves. As such, attempts to improve students' essay writing skills need to shift from a focus on discrete skills to an emphasis on the relationship between students' understanding of the content and their ability to write about it. As part of the writing process, students need help building understandings representing the body of knowledge they are writing about, and this help needs to be geared to their current level of operation.     

Can Summer Vacation Be Detrimental To Learning? An Empirical Look

This study examined the performance of four autistic boys each trained to a criterion of 80 percent correct on two sets of noun labels. After training, one set of labels was reviewed twice a week for nine weeks (summer vacation); the other set received no additional training. Performance on both sets was then retested. Each boy showed greater retention of the rehearsed compared with the unrehearsed material; one, placed on a VR3 schedule of reinforcement during the final stages of training, showed slightly better retention of the unrehearsed material than two trained exclusively with a CRF schedule. The authors argue that these data provide beginning support for the contention that seriously developmentally disabled children need to be in a program which offers year‐round schooling rather than an 180‐day school year.     

The Effect of Private School Vouchers on Political Participation: Experimental Evidence From New York City

In 1997, the New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program (SCSF) randomly offered three-year scholarships to attend private schools to approximately 1,000 low-income families in New York City. In this paper we leverage exogenous variation generated by the SCSF to estimate the causal effect of the private school voucher offer—and the private school attendance it induced—on later-life voter registration and turnout outcomes. Our results demonstrate that the voucher intervention had no effect on registering to vote or voting in any of several elections for either the full sample or any of several demographic subgroups. Although unique aspects of the SCSF context impose limits on the scope of our results, they have clear implications for assessing the relative effectiveness of public and private schools in preparing democratic citizens. We close the paper by discussing the implications of the results for research and policy.     

(Re)braiding to tell: using trenzas as a metaphorical–analytical tool in qualitative research

Metaphors can be used in qualitative research to illuminate the meanings of participant experiences and examine phenomena from insightful and creative perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how I utilized trenzas (braids) as a metaphorical and analytical tool for understanding the experiences and perspectives of Latina teachers around being a well-educated person. Accordingly, this paper is organized into three strands. First, I discuss trenzas as a metaphorical concept in raced–gendered epistemology, highlighting the work of Chicana/Latina feminist scholars in law and education. Second, I describe how metaphorical thinking informed the methodological design. Third, I explain how I used trenzas to make sense of data and build theory. The discussion weaves the three strands together to emphasize the functional and generative nature of trenzas as a metaphorical–analytical tool for gaining critical and nuanced understandings of how personal, professional, and community identities shape participant’ experiences and perspectives.     

Literacy education and diversity: Toward equity in the teaching of reading and writing

The school-age population in North America is characterized by increasing linguistic, cultural, and ethnic diversity. The authors argue that non-mainstream students do not perform as well in schools as mainstream students (predominantly whilte, middle-class English speakers) because they are not equitably served by the educational system. They explore some of the complexities of educational equity and consider equity issues in the literacy education of language minority students from four different perspectives: individual student characteristics, sociocultural factors, language issues, and instructional issues. In support of their position, they examine each of these areas in turn, providing illustrations and analysis. They conclude with several principles upon which to build practices to make literacy education more equitable for all students.