Student-centred and teacher-centred learning environments: what students think

This contribution explores the relationship between teacher-centred and student-centred learning environments from a student's perspective. Three different views with respect to this relationship can be retrieved. The balance view suggests that the more teacher-centred a learning environment is, the less student-centred it is and vice versa. The transactional view stresses the continuous renegotiation of teacher- and student-roles. The independent view argues that teacher- and student-centredness are independent features of learning environments. Results from three survey studies of higher education students’ conceptions of quality education are discussed. While the practice-oriented literature regularly seems to adopt a balance view, factor analyses did not reveal evidence for the balance view in any of these studies. In students’ minds student-centredness and teacher-centredness seem to be mutually reinforcing features of high quality education. From a curricular point of view, and especially with regard to teacher training, the results warrant to argue for the development of so-called powerful learning environments rather than for the transition from teacher-centred towards student-centred learning environments.     

Reclaiming professionalism for geography education: Defending our own territory

In a world where governments increasingly attempt to impose regulation on all professional activities, this paper advocates that professional standards for teachers be developed ‘by the profession for the profession’. Foucauldian archaeology is applied to two teacher standards documents recently published in Australia, one developed at national governmental level and the other by geography teachers through their professional associations. The excavation reveals that both students and geography teachers themselves are better served when teachers assert their own definition of professionalism and thus reclaim their professional territory, rather than being compliant with generic governmental agendas. Whilst we use Australia as an illustrative example, our findings are applicable to all other countries where governments attempt to impose external professional standards on the teaching profession.     

What is Plan B? Using Foucault's archaeology to enhance policy analysis

Many governments in Western democracies conduct the work of leading their societies forward through policy generation and implementation. Despite government attempts at extensive negotiation, collaboration and debate, the general populace in these same countries frequently express feelings of disempowerment and undue pressure to be compliant, often leading to disengagement. Here we outline Plan B: a process for examining how policies that emerge from good intentions are frequently interpreted as burdensome or irrelevant by those on whom they have an impact. Using a case study of professional standards for teachers in Australia, we describe how we distilled Foucault's notions of archaeology into a research approach centring on the creation of ‘polyhedrons of intelligibility’ as an alternative approach by which both policy-makers and those affected by their policies may understand how their respective causes are supported and adversely affected.     

Reconceptualising the co-evolution of firms-in-industries and their environments: Developing an inter-disciplinary Triple Embeddedness Framework

This inter-disciplinary theory-building paper is motivated by the debate on grand societal challenges and by calls in the innovation studies literature for frameworks that offer a better understanding of the co-evolution of industries and their economic, political, cultural, and social environments. In response to these debates, the paper develops a new triple embeddedness framework (TEF), which conceptualizes firms-in-industries as embedded in two external (economic and socio-political) environments and in an industry regime which mediates strategic actions towards the external environments. The TEF's theoretical logic draws on the adaptation-selection debate, which suggests that the co-evolution phenomenon can be approached from two angles. With regard to (population-level) selection theories, which highlight pressures on industries from external environments, the TEF accommodates insights from evolutionary economics, neo-institutional theory, and economic sociology. With regard to (firm-level) adaptation theories, the TEF accommodates insights from externally-oriented strategy schools (economic positioning strategy, innovation strategy, corporate political strategy, discursive strategy, issue management) and internally-oriented strategy approaches (linked to knowledge/capabilities and cognition/sensemaking). The combination of insights produces a multi-dimensional framework with bi-directional interactions between firms-in-industries and their environments. Implications for the grand challenge agenda are discussed in a separate section and illustrated with examples.     

Theorising policy and practice in refugee education: Conceptualising ‘safety’, ‘belonging’, ‘success’ and ‘participatory parity’ in England and Sweden

Across the world, children are forced to leave their homes for far-flung destinations. This global phenomenon has particular impact in Europe, where there are now more child refugees than since World War II. Education plays an important role for children with extraordinary experiences seeking to build meaningful lives in their new context. This article offers a new theoretical approach to underpin reforms to educational policy and practice for refugees in schools in resettlement contexts in Europe. The new conceptual framing is grounded in empirical work in England and Sweden, and brings two theories together: ‘participatory parity’ (Fraser) and ‘resumption of an ordinary life’ (Kohli). Kohli’s concepts of ‘safety’, ‘belonging’ and ‘success’ have resonance with practitioners from Sweden and England as they work to meet the needs of their new arrivals. Fraser’s conceptual lenses of redistribution, recognition and representation highlight the barriers to achieving the right to inclusive education for refugee children in each context. The interdependence of both theories shapes a new framework. The theoretical understandings offered in this article have been developed with practitioners and add to the field by offering a robust moral and operational approach to shaping pedagogical principles for policymakers and educators working in resettlement communities.     

Re-invigorating the being of language in educational studies: unpacking Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ in Yijing as an exemplar

ABSTRACT

In international educational studies, cultural context matters and demands increased attention by educational researchers worldwide. Along with a globalized discourse, how to map historical–cultural understandings of teaching and learning without getting bogged down in modern Westernized epistemology has become a paradigmatic dilemma. This paper argues a Heideggerian–Foucauldian language perspective can provide a way to address this dilemma. As an example, the paper demonstrates how their language perspective has enabled the author to encounter a ‘wind-education’ discourse in China’s current schooling, and to explore, as the originary (re)source of the whole Confucian educational culture, Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ as expressed in Yijing. This unique historical–cultural ‘wind-education’ discourse is salient, yet goes unnoticed, in China’s current schooling largely due to a planetary signifier-signified style of reasoning. This paper sheds new light on educational literature on Confucian educational thinking and provides an alternative paradigm to the (cross-)cultural studies of education in China and beyond.     

The destabilisation of existing regimes: Confronting a multi-dimensional framework with a case study of the British coal industry (1913–1967)

Because innovation studies are oriented towards novelty, scholars in this field have paid less attention to the destabilisation of existing regimes. This paper discusses four views on industry destabilisation and presents an encompassing conceptual framework, which addresses interactions between the build-up of external pressures, industry response strategies, and the gradual weakening of commitment to existing regime elements. We confront the framework with an in-depth longitudinal case study of the British coal industry (1913–1967). Specific conclusions are developed about different degrees of regime inertia, the ebb and flow of external pressures, the relative importance of economic and socio-political pressures, and interactions between them.     

Enlivening the senses: engaging sight and sound to (re)consider the hidden narratives of academics in the histories of university education

Abstract

This article interrogates the construction of a visual and sound installation that juxtaposes contemporary material with historical artefacts regarding academic work to offer an aesthetic mode of interruption in explorations of academic voice in university histories and in the contemporary university. Drawing upon Foucauldian histories of the present (particularly genealogy), this installation combines text, images and sound to take audiences on an emotive journey of the university. As historical research increasingly takes on an aesthetic and sensual turn, moving beyond content and context to consider other forms of representation, the article draws on theories concerning the functions of art and the semiotics involved when we engage with art to explore the emotional dimensions of academic work. Art in story and story in art methodologies are used to situate attempts at engaging in aural and visual ways of knowing time and place to (re)consider academics’ silenced historical and contemporary narratives.     

A 21st century collaborative policy development and implementation approach: a discourse analysis

Abstract

The article used Unisa Framework for the implementation of a team approach to curriculum and learning development to explore and analyse the views and experiences of academic lecturers and curriculum and learning development experts on the conceptualisation and development of the said framework and its subsequent implementation thereof. I used a qualitative poststructuralist paradigm underpinned by the case study research design to critically analyse the processes that were followed to craft the policy. I posit that a policy that is conceptualised by an inflexible classical hierarchical organisational structure without the full collaborative participation of all the stakeholders is bound to fail in its crucial implementation processes. I used online blogging, facebook, documents and face-to-face tape-recorded interviews to collect the data. Results indicated that the elite mass (traditional) policy-making model was used to craft the policy and as a result its operationalisation process received indifferent attention and responses by Colleges.     

Exploring discursive barriers to sexual health and social justice in the New Zealand sexuality education curriculum

Sexuality education is a compulsory part of The New Zealand Curriculum for state-funded schools. In 2015, the Ministry of Education has published an updated revision of their official guidelines for schools on the teaching of sexuality education. This paper employs Foucauldian discourse analysis to argue that this policy document, Sexuality Education: A Guide for Principals, Boards of Trustees, and Teachers, reflects and reproduces particular ways of knowing which constrain possibilities for socially just sexuality education. These discourses include the adoption of an intellectual approach to teaching sexuality, the mandate to measure learning objectives, and a narrow emphasis on positive sexuality. Intentions for the curriculum to deliver a holistic, socio-ecological vision of sexual health as well as one which embeds Māori values are undermined by dominant understandings of individual action which shape approaches to both sexuality and pedagogy. Furthermore, the liberal recognition of cultural, ethnic, sexual and gender diversity in the curriculum unintentionally reinscribes an unmarked white, secular, heterosexuality as the norm. This paper reflexively critiques the discursive tensions that inhibit the realisation of sexuality education in schools which meets the needs of diverse students and offers it as a possible site for social justice.