Reception of Arthur Sutherland Neill＇s pedagogical concept and his Summerhill School in Hungarian and German pedagogical literature and press

Arthur Sutherland Neill is one of the most debated personalities among the representatives of the classic reform pedagogy, due to his pedagogical concept and its practical realization, and his Summerhill School, equally. He is often mentioned during public debates, where mostly the ＂three S＂--＂sex, swearing and smoking＂, are existing as subject of the debates. While analyzing publications about Summerhill School appearing in Hungarian and German pedagogical special literature and press, a kind of polarized attitude has been realized towards the conceptions and school： Some talk about him admiringly; others criticize him while emphasizing the concept＇s drawbacks and unique features.     

An Australian Proposal for Doing Critical Literacy Assessment: The Case of Writing

In this article we present current thinking and practices in Queens land, Australia, about how to do critical literacy assessment in the English classroom. In taking this focus, we propose and discuss a framework that brings together interest in text analysis and social practices. Then, we apply the framework showing how it can be used to generate writing tasks and assessment criteria that are consistent with critical pedagogy. Finally, the challenges of moving to a socially critical, discourse‐oriented approach to assessment are considered.     

The significance of materiality in shaping institutional habitus: exploring dynamics preceding school effects

This article examines the objective possibilities of Swedish schools to offer an equal and functional pedagogical practice for students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills. The data consist of policy documents, observations, and interviews with students, teachers, and head teachers in three educational settings distinguished by different social demographics. The focus allows for a comparative understanding of how tangible objects generate formations of schools as a relational phenomenon depending on geographic location and social background of students. The article indicates that the impact of materiality lies in its preceding power. It shapes the condition of institutions visualised in architecture, buildings, and the quality of and design of facilities and artefacts. From this material root emanates schools’ values, appeal, social status, and pedagogical organisations – school effects – that empower or weaken the school’s attraction and self-confidence. Different materialities influence each school’s institutional habitus, producing school effects with unequal educational outcomes.     

Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening

Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill‐equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy for this purpose. Using interview data in which early years practitioners reflect on a listening walk, we show how the method can: (i) produce heightened multisensory experiences of spaces; (ii) generate forms of difficulty and discomfort that produce new learning; and (iii) influence practice, particularly practitioners’ ability to empathise with young children. Listening walks function by disrupting everyday sensory habits, provoking listeners to listen anew to their own listening, in an open‐ended way that is not tied to predetermined learning outcomes. The method therefore has wider pedagogic potential for rethinking education and childhood beyond rationality, representation and meaning.     

Bernstein in the urban classroom: a case study

Despite a long-standing concern within the sociology of education for ameliorating educational inequality, the challenge of improving educational opportunities for disadvantaged students remains deeply entrenched. While ‘macro’ issues such as segregation and systemic inequalities in school funding and access to qualified teachers must be addressed as matters of social and educational justice, Basil Bernstein's novel focus on ‘relations within’ education as the site of pedagogic discourse offers teachers and those working inside school systems a particularly powerful vision for promoting more equitable outcomes for students. This paper examines this assertion through a case study of the ‘mixed’ pedagogical practice of a successful teacher in a fifth-grade urban classroom in the United States.     

Turning in or tuning out? Listening to silences in education for critical political consciousness

What happens when a team of university education researchers initiates a social justice learning project in a local high school, and – despite the overall project’s considerable successes in cultivating students’ critical political ‘voice’ – is confounded by the periodic, apparent ‘silences’ of some of its young female students? Drawing on eight years of fieldwork in a groundbreaking high school social justice education classroom, this article examines the presumptions inherent in certain forms of social justice pedagogy, and the ways in which ensuing classroom disjunctures may, in fact, lead to deeper insights about education for youth critical social consciousness. The article focuses on two, interrelated issues: the unsettling and sometimes confounding ‘silences’ of female students and the correlation between such silences and social justice educators’ attenuated ability to recognize and support the myriad ways in which minority female students may encounter, negotiate, and articulate their own particular forms of Freirian conscientización.     

Review of The Atlas of Erotic Anatomy and Arousal

The Atlas of Erotic Anatomy and Arousal is online video education that explores sexual pleasure and sexual anatomy from a sex positive perspective. Written and presented by a sex educator and therapist, Cyndi Darnell, this video is an excellent resource for adult individuals interested in learning about their bodies and having fulfilling sexual experiences with their partners. The video series provides scientifically accurate and pleasure-based information about the anatomy of the vulva, the penis, and the anus, and the physiology of orgasm and ejaculation, in an entertaining manner.     

Effects of coaching on teacher use of sociocultural instructional practices

This study evaluates a performance-based instructional coaching model intended to improve teacher pedagogy and classroom organization for educating diverse student populations. Elementary teachers (N = 21) participated in a 30-h workshop and seven individual coaching sessions across an academic year. The coaching model promoted use of the Standards for Effective Pedagogy, five research-based practices known to increase student achievement. Findings demonstrate performance-based instructional coaching led to statistically significant (a) improvements in teacher pedagogy, (b) patterns of teacher growth, and (c) changes in classroom organization. Implications for improving teachers’ ultimate achievement, the coaching protocol, and research are addressed.     

高师院校公共教育学课程文献综述

文章主要以CNKI、维普中文期刊数据库为检索源,对近十年国内关于公共教育学课程方面的研究进行归纳和分析,从公共教育学的价值及意义、效果及影响因素、存在的问题及对策建议等方面进行综述。结果发现,以往的研究大都从教师、教材等角度去研究,而从学生角度去思考的研究还比较缺乏,有待加强。     

Reclaiming nostalgia in educational politics and practice: counter-memory,aporetic mourning,and critical pedagogy

In this essay, the author attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in productive ways. Despite some literature addressing the consequences of nostalgia in the context of teaching, little has been done towards the direction of critically examining nostalgia in relation to the controversial issues of national memory and historical trauma and how those influence educational politics and practice. Central to the author's argument is that nostalgia has multiple meanings, some of which promote nationalist agendas while others offer opportunities for transformation. One way to begin the process of reclaiming nostalgia in education is to shift the discourse from restorative nostalgia to reflective nostalgia. The constructs of counter-memory and aporetic mourning provide useful theoretical lenses through which reflective nostalgia can promote productive ways of addressing national memory and historical trauma.