Showing papers in "British Journal of Educational Studies in 2022"

Reining in the international: how state and society localised international schooling in china

Abstract: ABSTRACT There is a growing literature studying the ‘non-traditional’ type of international schools. However, a less explored and under-theorised area is the changing dynamics of the global-local interactions in the way these international schools are being redefined and shaped by local processes, regimes of control, and mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evidence from sixteen ‘non-traditional’ international schools in urban China, our paper contributes to the literature in three ways. Theoretically, we developed the notion of ‘reining in the international’ to draw analytic attention to the state power and social agency in controlling and directing the global flows of international schooling. Empirically, our paper provides concrete evidence to show the disjuncture occurring when the global/international is interrupted and transformed by local/national conditions. Third, we argue that in the case of China, the local has taken charge as the ‘content supplier and negotiator’ in the global-local confluence of forms adopted by international schools.

A ‘shadow education’ timescape: an empirical investigation of the temporal arrangements of private tutoring vis-à-vis formal schooling in india

Abstract: ABSTRACT Private tutoring is a globally pervasive phenomenon. While scholars have explored the demand for and supply of private tutoring, how tutoring centres organise their services, and the role of temporality in this, remains underexplored. To address this gap in the scholarship, this article draws on ethnographic data, produced during 2014–15 in Dehradun (India), to discuss four aspects of a ‘shadow education’ timescape: how tutoring services are mapped onto the formal schooling structure (Mapping); how tutorial centres benefit from having more time to allocate to educational services over formal schools (Advantage); how tutorial centres diversify the nature of academic support they offer throughout an academic year (Diversity); and, how tutoring services accommodate changing schooling practices over time (Adaptability). This discussion unveils the specific ways in which the temporal facets of private tutoring help tutoring businesses circumvent the schooling system to secure their space alongside – rather than by attempting to replace – the formal institutions of education within the Indian educational landscape. Although this article is empirically grounded in India, the conceptualisation of temporalities of private tutoring it generates will be valuable to the investigations of organisational framings, structural arrangements and practices of tutoring provisions in other contexts.

Covid-19 and the international baccalaureate: a computer-assisted discourse analysis of #ibscandal

Abstract: ABSTRACT Covid-19 has occasioned ongoing shifts in discourse as language changes to reflect and shape new stages of the global pandemic and different voices weigh in on topics, such as infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy. This study looks at an instance of this that relates to the ‘global education industry’, where cancellation of the International Baccalaureate’s May 2020 high stakes examination instigated a wide-ranging discussion about the organisation. This was triggered by the publication of IB results for 174,355 students in 146 countries, many of which showed large discrepancies between predicted and final grades. Using computer-assisted discourse analysis and a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #ibscandal, patterns of language use are analysed, providing valuable new insights into the impact on students in different national contexts.

Indigenous Knowledge: Philosophical and Educational Considerations:

Abstract: relate her account more closely to previous studies of Dartington Hall. The author several times suggests that among the principal reasons Dartington failed to connect productively with the wider local community was that Devon was an unusually conservative county. There are two difficulties here. The first is that virtually the whole of rural England – or at least agricultural England – had become staunchly conservative by the 1930s. Even if the Elmhirsts had located their ‘practical utopia’ in a more industrialized or urbanized county such as Essex, it is unlikely that they would have found the local farmers, farmworkers, clergymen and landowners any more ideologically sympathetic. Secondly, the lack of ideological fit between the Elmhirsts and their neighbours in the surrounding villages need not in itself have been an insuperable barrier to good relations. Although always in an eccentric minority, there was a longstanding tradition of radical and socialist landowners in rural England, and aristocrats like Lord Byron, Daisy Greville, Charles Trevelyan or Richard Acland were able to maintain their position in the local community. It was possible, to an extent, to defy the normative aspects of rural society if you were already a privileged part of it; the problem with the Elmhirsts was not necessarily their politics as such, but rather that they were outsiders, flaunting their radical views before they had succeeded in gaining social acceptance from their new neighbours. Despite these reservations, the book offers an accomplished study, carefully documenting Dartington’s links with wider international influences while situating it admirably in relation to current scholarship. Neima demonstrates that, like so many other contemporary social reformers, the Elmhirsts moved from an ad-hoc, voluntarist approach in the 1920s to a desire to contribute to planned, statutory measures by the 1940s, and Dartington moved with them. This rapprochement with the authority of the state, albeit in the service of what was seen as progressive social reform, seems to have allowed Dartington to project its influence more widely than ever before. However, the bright utopian hopes of its earlier years were fading away.

International higher education and the pursuit of ‘chinese’ capitals: african students and families’ strategies of social (re)production

Abstract: ABSTRACT This paper intervenes in debates on Chinese higher education and social (re)production strategies in the contemporary African diaspora, developing the link between ‘Chinese’ capitals, social status and spatial mobility. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with both disadvantaged and middle-class African international students, I unpack how migration to China will enable them to accumulate prized forms of capital and position advantageously in different spheres of African society. The paper focuses on two ‘Chinese’ capitals – specifically high proficiency in the Chinese language, and exposure to and internalisation of Chinese lifestyles and practices – which are convertible to profit, distinction and secure coveted jobs in their respective home countries. By exploring how China’s ‘in the middle’ position within the global political economy and exercising its soft power over peripheries are reflected in the ways these African students and their families play the ‘class game’ and make higher education choice, this paper moves beyond the ‘West’ vs. ‘the Rest’ gaze and nuances an emergent mobility pattern within the Global South. I conclude by presenting an argument that in seeking these ‘Chinese’ capitals, the students and their families may enhance China’s geopolitical standing and facilitate its movement towards the ‘core’ within the arena of the world (knowledge) system.

Historical and cultural refractions in recent education transitions: the example of former socialist european countries

Abstract: ABSTRACT Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and personal variations are prematurely attributed to fundamental, if often poorly argued, cultural differences. We seek to introduce and to preliminarily summarise the existing understandings of refraction in education and social research. Sporadically used but seldom defined, the refraction metaphor appears to feature: (a) a multiplicity of viewpoints as an incentive for social research, (b) non-relativistic, scientific progress as an end value for understanding social reality, (c) a balanced approach towards homogeneity and heterogeneity in social research, and (d) a substantially historical orientation towards analysing homogeneity and heterogeneity. Education in the former socialist European countries demonstrates how heterogeneity is rhetorically overstated and how variations can be more adequately addressed by analysing refractions.

Cultivating Virtue in the University

Abstract: What is the role of colleges and universities in forming the character of students? Should universities even attempt to cultivate virtue? If so, how can they do so effectively in a pluralistic context? Cultivating Virtue in the University seeks to answer these questions by gathering diverse perspectives on character education within twenty-first-century universities. Bringing together experts from a variety of academic disciplines, this volume catalyzes a critical debate about the possibilities and limits of character education in the university while offering theoretical and practical perspectives on what such education could look like in increasingly global, pluralistic, and intercultural institutions. Ultimately, by engaging insights from education, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology, the volume encourages faculty, staff, and administrators to embrace the opportunities and challenges of cultivating virtue in the university.

Interrogating systemic inequalities in discourses surrounding academic diaspora and transnational education-driven mobilities: a focus on vietnam’s higher education

Abstract: ABSTRACT This article responds to scholarly calls to engage with diaspora in the context of transnational educational mobilities in global higher education. It maintains that transnational academic mobilities produce a particular kind of academic diaspora, that is often valued by both home and host countries but in ways that vary and serve different interests and aspirations. While the contrasting perspectives on brain circulation and brain drain persist, what this article argues is that systemic inequalities are (re)produced through the processes of transnational academic mobilities, which privilege the mobility of some and not others, and at the same time under-value the home-grown academics and overseas-trained academics that return home. The current diaspora politics is located within this complex, hierarchical, and dynamic cultural, political and economic space. In particular, it pinpoints how the promoted desirability of diasporic brains and talents in policy and practice has co3ntinued to reproduce and consolidate academic inequalities. The article then argues for place-based/at home transnationality, seeing it as productive counter position to help reduce inequalities. The article employs self-study research and is informed by a bricolage of data on Vietnam and its Vietnamese transnational academic diasporas gathered at different points in time and in different contexts.

Critical research and theorizing: a collection of essays from the critical pedagogy networker. 1988-2002

Abstract: national contexts. Barry Kanpol’s essay focuses on how critical pedagogy can be implemented in the classroom. This, he recognises, is difficult – teachers have much to grapple with in their jobs, and Kanpol’s essay illustrates some of the challenges of engaging them with the principles and practices of critical pedagogy. It is nevertheless, as he points out, better to accomplish something rather than nothing. This point remains as important today (perhaps more so) than when Kapol’s paper appeared in the Critical Pedagogy Networker some twenty-five years ago. This final point is worth considering a little further. Each of the essays contained within the book is at least twenty years old – but they are, in different ways, still pertinent nowadays, perhaps even more than they first written. Many of the problems faced by teachers, schools and other sites of education the authors write about have intensified and multiplied since the chapters were first published. The ‘project of disruption’ which underpinned the Critical Pedagogy Networker is, as Smyth argues, more relevant today than ever.

Education: a compulsory right? a fundamental tension within a fundamental right

Abstract: ABSTRACT This paper is on the paradox of a right, the right to education that is almost universally declared as compulsory. The reason for the compulsion seems to be in its nature as a right. Within a Hohfeldian framework, any claim-right has a corresponding duty. Given that making education compulsory equates to establishing a duty, the possible candidates to the duty generating right-bearers are considered. The rationales for compulsion from the points of view of positive (for one’s own good), negative (no compulsion at all), and republican liberty (society right) are analyzed, and the conclusion is reached that none of the three can produce sufficient justification for compulsion. The main conclusion is that education is a right, not an obligation. Therefore, neither the children nor their families can be legally forced to an unrestricted exercise of this right without even being heard. The law must reflect, in its progressive flexibility, the growing possibilities of choice for right-holders who are adults ‘in fieri’.

Becoming an international public intellectual: maria montessori before the montessori method, 1882 -1912

Abstract: INTRODUCTION This paper considers the process of becoming an international public intellectual, taking the case of Maria Montessori (1870–1952), the Italian physician who became an authority on education and, unusually for a woman, a public intellectual. The focus is on her experience from the age of 12 which contributed to her emergence on the international stage. In 1909, she set out her child-centred, resource-based pedagogy in Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini (Montessori, 1909). This translates as ‘The Method of Scientific Pedagogy applied to infant education in the Children’s Houses’. In 1912, the English translation was entitled The Montessori Method, as her name was already known. The following year in the United States, her public lectures attracted audiences of thousands, receiving wide press coverage. Few women feature in the literature on public intellectuals. No mention of Montessori has been found. The tendency, described by Stefan Collini, ‘to always represent intellectuals as Other People – sometimes as idealised romanticized others’ (Collini, 2002, p. 206), certainly applies to this Italian doctor, who spoke no English and dressed in a feminine way (Cunningham, 2000, p. 209). This ‘otherness’ and her engagement with the wider public may also have resulted in her being regarded as ‘more public and less intellectual’ (Posner, 2003, p. 167). She does, however, demonstrate three other features common to public intellectuals. They engage audiences beyond the academic world by applying their academic research to contemporary concerns. Richard Posner describes Hannah Arendt, who used her philosophy to comment on issues of the day, as ‘the consummate embodiment of what we now refer to as the “public intellectual”’ (Posner, 2003, p. 24). Regarded as authorities on their subject matter, public intellectuals also have ‘the courage to say that that is what is before us’ (Said, 2002, p. 39). As a result, they can, as Gary McCulloch points out, regarding Ivor Goodson, move their subject matter ‘to a different plane’ (McCulloch, 2020, p. 97). British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 70, No. 5, 2022, pp. 575–590

Lessons for teaching social science research methods in higher education: synthesis of the literature 2014-2020

Abstract: ABSTRACT The underdevelopment of a pedagogical culture for research methods education and the lack of a body of knowledge with the potential to influence practice have been highlighted by previous studies. This systematic review explores the pedagogic approaches and strategies evident in recent literature (2014–2020) on teaching social science research methods in higher education. It synthesises 55 papers offering a detailed rationale for the approach and strategies employed in doctoral/post-doctoral education. While dispersed across journals, there is a plethora of case studies and reflective accounts about teaching approach, strategy, tactics and tasks in research methods education. Most studies reviewed report on teaching qualitative methods and represent authors’ own teaching practices. Consistent with previous studies, experiential, active learning and student-centred approaches are predominantly discussed, often overlapping or combined with other approaches. This paper illustrates a growing pedagogic culture, represented by an increased volume of papers and theoretical discussion of practices, rationale and reflection on how research methods are taught and learnt. It is concluded that clear intention to engage in dialogue and contribute to evidence-based practice and knowledge in research methods education is evident, and that the ‘how to’ element is richly articulated and justified.

Criticality and teachers’ work: a collection of essays from the critical pedagogy networker. 1988-2002

Abstract: yet imaginative thinking, aimed at addressing the practical problems central to life, and public life more specifically. In parallel to Warnock’s philosophical contribution, Graham’s biography presents also a detailed and interesting account of her influence on British public policy. As he notes, Warnock was known as a philosopher ‘able to bring her analytical mind and powers of clear explanation to ethical questions in public policy’ (Graham, 2022: 270). And ‘Her common-sense approach and her skills in bringing resolution to often difficult and emotive debates meant she was always in demand’ (Graham, 2022: 270). Her role in chairing the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, which produced the internationally influential 1978 Warnock Report, and the Committee on Human Fertilisation and Embryology (1982), are very well-known, together with her membership of various advisory bodies, such as the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), and her contributions to discussions at the House of Lords on matters such as assisted dying and medical ethics. Particularly interesting for educators is Graham’s account of the sittings of the committee that produced the Warnock Report. As a member of the committee, Graham notes how Warnock, who had no previous experience of the characteristics of children with special educational needs, and importantly no vested interests, was indeed always able to see and address the core ethical questions underpinning the committee’s deliberations (Graham, 2022: 176– 77). Graham’s recollection of the discussions and the atmosphere of those meetings is insightful and revealing at once for educators and philosophers alike. Throughout the biography, Warnock is presented as a determined, discerning, and original thinker, but also as a deeply caring teacher, academic tutor, and colleague, often ahead of her time in her choices. Aspects of her personality are also richly described, and events and decisions in her personal life are situated within the cultural, social, and academic atmosphere of the time. As Graham notes, ‘it is the task of the biographer to exercise their own imagination in creating a coherent account which, it may be hoped, conveys some truth and insights, based, as Mary would have insisted, on evidence rather than opinion’ (Graham, 2022: 258). His informative and engaging biography of Warnock has certainly achieved such a high task.

The poet as public intellectual: tony harrison’s war poetry

Abstract: ABSTRACT The poet Tony Harrison has created work for the stage and television, and even assumed the role of poet/journalist, writing newspaper reports in verse from war-torn Bosnia. His work is underpinned by a belief in the political nature of the act of writing. He has generally attracted a non-working-class readership; nevertheless, he has never abandoned his quest for a ‘democratic’ poetry. Much of his work has taken the form of a poetry of immediate response to current events. He has also been insistent, at times, on where his poetry should be published. When he wrote ‘Initial Illumination’ for The Guardian, for example, he argued it should not appear in the ‘literary’ section, but on the news pages. Harrison sees himself as a ‘war poet. He uses his position as a public intellectual to engage in a struggle against dominant discourses and ways of seeing and to bring audiences to confront the horror of war. The article focuses in particular on his Gulf War poem, ‘A Cold Coming’, in which he uses strategies such as ekphrasis, to position the reader as a kind of ‘secondary witness’ of a war that had been turned by the media into a distant, anaesthetised spectacle.

Developing the labour party’s comprehensive secondary education policy, 1950-1965: party activists as public intellectuals and policy entrepreneurs

Abstract: ABSTRACT The main aim of this article is to use the case study of comprehensivisation to examine the role of party activists as policy entrepreneurs and public intellectuals during the period 1950–1965. The intention is to widen the traditional notion of the public intellectual in order to better evaluate policy-making processes within the Labour Party. It will be argued here that these figures were also policy entrepreneurs, who actively created and advocated new policy solutions, not just unconnected idea merchants hawking impractical or ignorable ideas without a clear strategy. Previously, Labour policy on comprehensivisation was viewed as a ‘missed opportunity’, a case study of ambivalent policymakers lacking vision. However, this article demonstrates that, over a long period of time, a methodical policymaking process considered and adopted a position that advocated a more comprehensive schooling system. In this process, the sustained activities of Fabian Society and NALT members, acting as policy entrepreneurs within the Labour Party’s policymaking organs to transform often non-committal and vague conference resolutions into a usable policy solution.

Serving divided communities: consociationalism and the experiences of principals of small rural primary schools in northern ireland

Abstract: ABSTRACT Previous studies suggest that small rural schools experience a range of challenges relating to their size, financial difficulties and geographical isolation, as well as potential opportunities relating to their position within their communities. In Northern Ireland, these schools are situated within the comparatively rare context of a religiously divided school system. However, research on these schools in this jurisdiction is scarce. The notion of consociationalism is highlighted as central to an understanding of the prevailing schooling system and the peace process in Northern Ireland as a post-conflict society. Set against this backdrop, the paper reports on a survey of principals of small rural schools in Northern Ireland; the challenges they face and their engagement with the communities they serve. The findings reveal how these small rural primary schools, while encountering many similar challenges to such schools globally, continue to play a central consociational role in serving their respective divided communities. Their relationship with the Church is seen as particularly important. The findings raise important broader questions as to the extent to which the current system of schooling is able to contribute to the building of a more integrated society.

Mary Warnock. Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain

Abstract: "Mary Warnock. Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain." British Journal of Educational Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Scripting the moves: culture and control at a no-excuses charter school

Abstract: In her first book, Joanne W. Golann takes on the challenge of examining America’s most celebrated franchise of charter schools, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). While many academics have penned concern about KIPP’s approach to schooling low-income children of color, Golann is among the first to provide an ethnographic account that details the nature and consequences of this model. Further, her work extends beyond the realm of education policy and practice, exploring whether the cultural capital key to facilitating social reproduction can be explicitly taught. Beginning in 2012, Golann spent 18 months at a KIPP school she calls Dream Academy (a pseudonym). As a network charter school, Dream Academy is publicly funded but privately run. The school, like its peers, overwhelmingly enrolls low-income children of color. Those families whose lottery numbers are called sign contracts promising to abide by KIPP’s no-excuses philosophy. Golann found that administrators and teachers make good on many of their promises, implementing a behavioral script with militaristic precision. Students learn how to wear a uniform, enter a classroom, occupy a seat, and track a speaker, each according to the school’s exceptionally detailed method. While this approach to schooling low-income children of color might sound immediate alarm bells in earlier eras, the no-excuses model is couched in a narrative that many families, practitioners, and policymakers find compelling – one that promises college and mobility. As Golann insightfully conveys, those involved believe passionately in educational equity and work tirelessly toward this end. Scholars have been rightfully critical of the role that teachers play in implementing a no-excuses model that – at best – has harmful unintended consequences. Scripting the Moves brilliantly captures the complexity of teacher labor. Dream Academy’s leadership and staff approach their work with admirable intentions, insightful reflections, and relentless effort. The no-excuses script, however, eliminates any opportunities for adults to grapple with complexities of children'’s lives and to build on the strengths demonstrated in students' lived experiences. Golann writes, ‘If “no excuses” is supposed to be about the school making no excuses for student failure, it ends up being about the school accepting no excuses from students for deviating from the school’s rigid behavioral script’ (p. 40). Staff face immense pressure to single-handedly close achievement gaps with heroic teaching alone. As Golann reminds us, even the most relentless scripting cannot address the underlying systems of oppression that produce educational inequity in the first place. Golann critiques administrators’ and reformers’ measures of success, which are limited to test scores and college acceptance rates. As she aptly demonstrates, these measures of success, in combination with the means employed to achieve them, push out many no-excuses students and leave the survivors to flounder in the realities of college life. Part of the story of social reproduction, though, centers on the processes of social closure and credentialism. A more explicit critique of the college-for-all ethos might add to an already powerful argument by calling attention to an important reality of capitalism. That is, there are only so many good spots available, and those who already occupy them British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 70, No. 4, 2022, pp. 523–531

Rethinking the Socialist Intellectual in the British First New Left

Abstract: ABSTRACT The first British New Left formed in response to a crisis in international and British socialism. Although never a formal movement, its associated members set themselves the tasks of, first, confronting the rapid change transforming social life at both global and national scales, and second, articulating a new political culture able to accommodate the good and resist the bad of it. As part of this process, a series of intense debates took place on the role of the socialist intellectual in stimulating such a culture. In this article, I consider three of the NL’s main protagonists, EP Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Raphael Samuel, and the different positions they took on this issue. I argue here that while all made important contributions to the argument, Samuel’s practice as an intellectual, currently the least well known of the three, is worth closer attention for its relevance to contemporary educational debates.

A cultural history of school uniform

Abstract: producing equivalent responsibilities where there is disparity. The inconsistency of this perspective was demonstrated by several Truth Commissions, which scrutinised state terrorism of National Security Dictatorships in many Latin American countries. Similarly, a third problem is the positioning of Latin American guerrillas as a tactic detached or contradictory to ‘popular education’, while in fact they were deeply connected. The procedure of detaching articulated struggles (armed/educational) is repeated when the author emphasises economy and culture when defining the ideological positions of Illich, Freire and Guevara (for example, pp. 88–9, 102–3, 105). Economy and culture are sometimes treated in the book in a hierarchical and non-dialectical perspective, even though the three educators were dialectical in their understanding of revolutions’ dimensions, noticing the absence of hierarchies between economic and cultural transformations, which were strategically combined in their theories, practices and horizons. Finally, a fourth critical point would be the generalisation of a deleterious sectarianism that was supposedly spread among all left-wing intellectuals from the 1950s to 1970s. In contradiction to the brilliant purpose of the book, the author belittles a generation of intellectuals and their ability to engage in dialogue: ‘every intellectual knew that the truth was on his side, and that what he had to do was to fight until victory was attained’ (p. 31). This statement, and others that generalise ‘every intellectual’, takes the risk of normalising heterogeneous behaviour and mistakenly labels an entire generation of thinkers. It is curious that Illich, Freire and Guevara themselves were great promoters of qualified and non-sectarian dialogues, within an intellectual environment that – despite the vortex of sectarianism – produced foundational sociological arguments, cultural practices and economic theses regarding Latin America, whose explanatory efficiency has not yet been totally surpassed. In that same sense, the brief conclusions that compare Illich, Freire and Guevara could be more sophisticated. The third (and last) part of the book delivers a less compelling synthesis than the brilliant second part offers. In short, this is an excellent introductory book, with clear and informative language, unquestionable relevance and skilful communication across academic boundaries. Nonetheless, it contains a few inaccuracies and generalisations that could be avoided without losing its targeted popular audience.

Education, crisis, and the discipline of the conjuncture: scholarship and pedagogy in a time of emergent crisis

Abstract: rooted in the work of Dobbins et al. (2011). This analytical approach, which combines contextual comparison and higher education governance theory, enables the chapter to convey much about higher education, teacher education, and ‘Teach for all’ in Norway whilst connecting such developments to what goes on in other nations. A comparison of Teach First in the United Kingdom and Teach South Africa forms the subject matter of Chapter 5. It has a clear methodology centred on two contrasting cases, one from the global north and one from the global south, that are analysed using critical discourse analysis. This chapter serves as a useful analysis of the different challenges teacher education policy faces in different contexts, but with a common theme of teacher shortages. The chapter also challenges the global and interconnected nature of TfAll as presented by the organization itself and discusses the global spread of TfAll and why Teach South Africa subsequently disappeared from the TfAll network. The movement and enactment of TfAll in Australia forms the basis of Chapter 9. It does so through a qualitative lens where policy analysis is combined with interviews with teacher educators. The chapter provides a helpful overview of the Australian teacher education context and the complex place of TfAll within it. Moreover, the chapter covers a broad range of literature on education policy and pedagogy. The chapter thereby connects the case under study with the wider context, such as policymakers emphasis on ‘what works’ and apprenticeship models, as well as issues of inequality in education. Chapter 13 analyses TfAll’s leadership by employing critical discourse analysis to archived videos of the Teach for all talks series. The conclusion is here is that TfAll sees itself as a leadership organization and programme rather than one of teaching. The chapter also delves into TfAll’s definition of leadership, which provides important and intriguing insights. A great strength of this chapter is how it does not project the authors definitions of leadership onto TfAll but analyses what definitions TfAll themselves employ.

Editorial

Abstract: En este segundo fascículo de la Revista de Psicología se exponen diversas investigaciones en las que se entrelazan temas relevantes tales como el efecto psicológico del Covid-19 en distintas poblaciones, así como la gran gama de reacciones conductuales que el ser humano muestra antedistintos acontecimientos, especialmente en niños, adolescentes y madres de familia; por otro lado, se presentan investigaciones que realizan un análisis sobre la importancia y efectividad de la terapia psicológica. Todos estos trabajos muestran lo relevante que sigue siendo que el profesionistaen salud mental se continúe preparando e indagando sobre los eventos psicosociales que acontecen en nuestra sociedad día con día.

The benefits of meeting key grade thresholds in high-stakes examinations. new evidence from england

Abstract: ABSTRACT In England, failing to achieve a ‘good pass’ (C/4 grade) in key subjects is thought to have serious negative implications. Yet evidence on this issue remains relatively sparse. This paper therefore presents new evidence on the link between meeting a key threshold on high-stakes examination and a wide array of future outcomes. Using Next Steps survey data collected from around 4,000 young people in England, we explore the short-to-medium term benefits of achieving a ‘good pass’ (grade C/4) in English Language, double science and mathematics. Results from our regression analyses point towards a sizable association with future educational attainment; those who achieve a good pass in GCSE mathematics are around 5 percentage points more likely to hold a university degree by age 26 than observationally similar individuals who fail to meet this threshold. No link is found with future wellbeing and mental health, while results for labour market outcomes are somewhat mixed. The findings potentially motivate the need for GCSEs to move away from awarding a set of discrete grades and towards a continuous measurement scale. Alternatively, if discrete grades are to be retained, computer adaptive testing should be introduced for GCSEs to increase measurement precision around high-stakes grade boundaries.

Hegelian Bildung in Childhood Education

Abstract: This study aims to critique the concept of active learning in childhood education based on Hegelian Bildung. We have defined childhood education from the perspective of Hegel’s Bildung in The Phenomenology of Spirit. We describe childhood education as a ‘primary Bildung’ having the aim of ‘entering into the conceptual world’. This aim indicates that children can and are required to express their experiences in conceptual language. Finally, we critique the conceptual components of active learning from the Hegelian point of view and suggest three alternative components: ‘child-educator interaction’, ‘understanding historical knowledge’, and ‘addressing concrete-abstract affairs.’ We suggest that the concept of active learning needs to be replaced by ‘Communicative-Interactive Learning (CIL)’. CIL takes both objectivity and subjectivity into account during the process of knowledge formation in education.

Practical Utopia. The Many Lives of Dartington Hall

Abstract: "Practical Utopia. The Many Lives of Dartington Hall." British Journal of Educational Studies, 71(1), pp. 121–122

Understanding the unsettled evidence of the effectiveness of selective education in the value-added approach

Abstract: ABSTRACT This study compares the estimated grammar school effect in different regression models, and explains why previous evidence of the effetiveness of grammar school is mixed. Like most studies of school effectiveness evaluation, previous research on grammar school effect usually applies regression to control for confounding between-school factors and determines whether attending grammar schools is associated with an academic benefit. While this value-added approach is very feasible and widely adopted, there is usually substantial variation in the evidence produced when statistical choices differ. Applying the national data with more than 149,000 pupils, the study presents the sensitivity of grammar school effectiveness when baseline variables, outcome variables, and regression techniques differ. The findings will help researchers understand the mixed evidence of the effectiveness of grammar schools so far, and the unsettled debate on grammar schools nationally. While inconsistent estimations due to passive design is a common trait in school effectiveness evaluation studies, grammar schools’ effectiveness might be even more sensitive to statistical choices due to their special student intakes. Interpreting the variation between different statistical models, the findings caution researchers in dealing with the evidence in grammar school effectiveness and call for stronger designs as well as more carefully selected explanatory variables.