Consensus or dissensus? Stakeholders’ views on the role of play in learning

Across cultures and eras, children have engaged in play as part of the process of growing and maturing into adulthood. Play has been recognized as an effective form of pedagogy to promote learning in the early years. However, beliefs about what play is and how it should be practiced vary across Hong Kong and in other countries. Because Chinese culture places a heavy emphasis on academic achievement, a play-based curriculum has not been widely implemented in the region. Through classroom observations and interviews with key stakeholders in early childhood education, namely parents, teachers, and principals, this study reveals the complexity of views on this matter and uncovers the root cause of the difficulties in supporting play in the Hong Kong kindergartens. These findings may help promote the play-based curriculum in Hong Kong and other countries where play is in crisis.     

论教师的课程创生

“教师的课程创生”意在回答教师与课程的内在关系,它源于但又超越“课程实施的创生”,主张教师在整个课程运作过程中都应充分发挥主体性和创造性。“教师的课程创生”这一命题的确立,对于变革课程观念、转换教师课程角色及课程运作价值取向的转型具有十分重要的意义。     

Teachers as agents of change in curricular reform: the position of dance revisited

This paper reports findings from a recent large-scale survey of Physical Education (PE) teachers’ perceptions of teaching dance and compares them to results of a study completed 10 years previously [MacLean, J. (2007). A longitudinal study to ascertain the factors that impact on the confidence of undergraduate physical education student teachers to teach dance in Scottish schools. European Physical Education Review, 13(1), 99–116]. The current position of dance is examined in light of the introduction of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) in 2010, a national initiative in Scottish schools that provides a unified flexible curricular framework for children aged 3–18. Dance remains part of the PE curriculum but also for the first time in Scotland occupies an additional position within the Expressive Arts (EA). Teachers are positioned as agents of change tasked with greater autonomy, flexibility and responsibility in curriculum design. The inclusion of dance in both PE and EA provides potential for teachers to design curricula that excludes dance from the PE curriculum or alternatively use the opportunity to increase dance provision. Currently, little is known about the impact CfE has on the provision and position of dance or the factors that impinge on teachers’ decisions regarding the inclusion of dance in the curriculum. To further such understanding, 85 secondary school PE teachers responded to a questionnaire concerning dance opportunities within the current school context. In addition, the original participants from MacLean (2007) research were re-interviewed to identify and explore the factors that enable teachers to achieve agency when teaching dance. The results indicated that collaborative planning, united goals and collective action had enabled teachers to significantly increase dance provision in schools. Teacher attention had shifted from concerns about individual capacity to a focus on the level of social, cultural and material support in providing valuable educational experiences in dance for all pupils.     

Physical education teachers’ perceptions of factors that inhibit and facilitate the enactment of curriculum change in a high-stakes exam climate

Policy enactment is a dynamic process, which invites agents to uniquely create and recreate policy as an ongoing process. Few policies arrive in school fully formed and the process of policy enactment involves teachers navigating policy frameworks in a way that provides success for each individual pupil. This research examines the complexities involved in teacher enactment of new policy in schools with the added caveat of investigating the impact that high-stakes exams place on teachers to act as agents of change. The primary objective was to ascertain whether inhibitors and facilitators identified in literature were recurring during the period of change in physical education (PE). The secondary objective was to investigate how PE teachers enact curriculum change utilising a flexible curriculum framework to achieve success at examination level. The research reflects a journey from the broad realms of curriculum studies towards a more in-depth analysis of the realist theory of analytical dualism. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with five full time PE teachers working within one secondary school in Scotland. The results indicated that revolutionary change was somewhat stagnated by potent inhibitors such as a lack of collaboration with policy-makers and vague course documentation. These were compounded by an inherent desire for pupils to succeed that induced feelings of wariness and indecision amongst teachers. The flexible curriculum and guidance offered by policy-makers was insufficient for teachers to confidently pose as curriculum decision-makers, resulting in a call for a more explicitly structured course. It became clear that teachers acting as agents of change who help devise and develop policy require support, collaboration and direction to empower and buttress their decision-making, particularly when faced with the high-stakes nature of the examination climate.     

‘You can’t show impact with a new pair of shoes’: negotiating disadvantage through Pupil Premium

The Pupil Premium policy was introduced in 2010 by the UK coalition government to tackle the attainment gap disproportionately affecting children from low-income families. Semi-structured interviews and policy documents are examined for the way the policy has been enacted in a single comprehensive secondary school in England. In 2014, this school had a lower population of Pupil Premium pupils (18%) compared to (29%) nationally and (25%) countywide. Despite this, the study provides evidence that the Pupil Premium has become invested within and gives rise to, a number of neoliberal techniques, technologies and practices. The study bridges insights from Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ and Ball et al.’s work on policy enactment to provide an in-depth, grounded analysis of the way the policy plays out within this school’s context. It argues that the combination of national accountability measures used to show impact for Pupil Premium, and the school’s ongoing struggle to raise overall attainment, leads school leaders and staff members to rethink the concept of disadvantage for their school population. This results in disadvantage being reconceptualised to fit a matrix of moral/pastoral obligations and efficiency/economic competitiveness, in which the tensions between these two orientations are uncomfortable and unresolved.     

The ontological politics of evidence and policy enablement

Ontological politics has received increasing attention within education policy studies, particularly as a support for the notion of policy enactment. While policy enactment offers serious challenges to traditional approaches toward policy implementation, this paper takes up ontological politics as a concept that extends beyond implementation and holds consequences for policy formation as well. Analysing the different uses of evidence in recent policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper argues that an ontological politics of evidence grounds policies in ways that define what can and cannot be enacted, what this paper terms policy enablement. The analyses illustrate an ontological politics of evidence that excludes non-experts in the first instance, and that sanitises the critical elements of enactment in the second. Both analyses highlight the ways policy enablement emerges from ontological politics and offers a supplement to policy enactment. Following these analyses, the paper offers some provisional thoughts on the relationship between enablement and enactment as an approach that attends to context as a constitutive element of policy-making.     

Systematic quality development work in a Swedish leisure-time centre

There is increasing activity in the area of quality issues in education in Europe. Diverse discourses of policy for quality are encountered in daily practice. This article explores systematic quality development work in a Swedish educational setting: the leisure-time centre. By following 2 teachers’ enactments of policy in planning, organising, documenting, and evaluating the quality of a leisure-time centre and children's achievement of objectives, different logics were found. Tensions in practice that visualise pluralistic intentions in policy and educational approaches were also revealed. Planning and organising as parts of systematic quality development work reveal an emerging individualistic perspective. However, when teachers carry out documentation and evaluation, they reconstruct a social pedagogical approach grounded in the tradition of the leisure-time centre with a group-oriented focus.     

Learning to Coach in Practice-Based Teacher Education: A Self-Study

In some forms of practice-based teacher education, one important task for the teacher educator is to undertake in-the-moment coaching during rehearsals of practice. However, being such a coach is a new role for many teacher educators and requires a different skill set to other forms of teacher educator practice. In addition, there is little literature to which teacher educators can turn when seeking to address the problem of enactment in this context. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature. It reports a self-study undertaken by one mathematics teacher educator as he learned to coach pre-service teachers on the fly, while in turn they learned to orchestrate whole-class mathematical discussions. It seeks to illustrate how the process of journaling can support the journey of discovery that is the development of new practice. Through consulting the literature and story-telling, a picture is painted of how the educator addressed early concerns such as “what is a coach supposed to do?” and “what should a coach pause a rehearsal to talk about?” and began to master coaching – work that was never routine, but rather situated, adaptive, and responsive. The stories draw from a personal journal of field notes and reflections from such events as student rehearsals, lesson conferences, team meetings, reading student work, and professional reading. Journal entries from 12 rehearsal cycles over four years were consulted.     

‘Widening Access’ to higher education: the reproduction of university hierarchies through policy enactment

Patterns of participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, as elsewhere, have been marked by social inequalities for decades. UK Governments have responded with a plethora of policies and agendas aimed at addressing this broad social issue. However, little is known about how higher education institutions (HEIs) interpret and ‘enact’ these policies in relation to institution-specific contexts. Drawing on concepts from policy sociology this paper examines how HEIs in one nation state, Wales, enact its Government’s policy on ‘widening access’ to higher education. Interviews with a range of ‘policy actors’ along with analyses of institutional ‘widening access’ policy documents, reveal divergences between HEIs in how this policy agenda is interpreted and delivered. These differences reflect institution-specific contexts – not least their internal politics and assumptions about the type of students they admit, but also their interests and priorities in relation to their positions within a global, marketised, HE system. The implications of this for the reproduction of university hierarchies in the UK, as well as social inequalities more generally are brought to the fore.