RSS 1.0Education
The University of Chester traces its roots back to one of the earliest training colleges in the country, beginning the training of teachers in 1839. While it is one of the oldest higher education institutions in the UK, it is also a modern, innovative institution and has a well-deserved reputation for the quality of its education. The Faculty was recently awarded 'Outstanding' status by Ofsted, credited with delivering "high levels of academic and pastoral care" - Ofsted Report 2010.
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Dentistry in university education: Philosophy and purposeTertiary education or further education which is often synonymously used for higher education is to be found not only in universities but also in vocational or technical training schools, institutes, and colleges. Hence, all tertiary education is not equivalent to what is known as university education, but all university education is tertiary education. From this definition, dental education is university education. Therefore, the philosophical domains of dental education is vast and overwhelmingly numerous with great complexity and social significance in line with the philosophy of education as well as philosophy of higher education. Dentistry has evolved from a description of decaying teeth to a comprehensive program of independent professional discipline. Albeit, how dental schools are structured or how dental education is being offered within the university is not universal. Mostly the relationship between dental schools and medical schools and mode of offering dental education and medical education in relation to the overall healthcare system varies significantly. This chapter touches upon the philosophical issues of education in general with focused attention to dentistry as a university education.
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Exploring the reasons why former physics teachers in Scotland left teachingDespite significant effort, recruitment of physics teachers in Scotland has fallen short of Scottish Government targets for many years, but there is little data on the retention of teachers, or what factors influence teachers to leave the profession. This study examines the experiences of 11 former physics teachers in Scotland. Data were gathered using an online survey and a semi-structured interview with each participant. Factors emerging from the data included a lack of career progression routes, excessive workload, poor pupil behaviour, a lack of flexible working, and school leadership often driven by accountability pressures in the education system.
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Talking outside the box: Film as a stimulus for dialogic engagement around social justice issuesThis article explores how film, as a pedagogic device, can be used as a stimulus for dialogic engagement around social justice issues such as human rights, conflict and equity. Based on findings from a doctoral research study – and illustrated with an example from the film, it is argued that through dialogue, film can provide an inclusive and participatory site for learning where children are viewed as social agents, meaning-makers and co-constructors of knowledge.
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Beyond the Core Content Framework: Using experiential learning to develop agentic, creative and reflexive student teachersIn 2019, the Department for Education introduced the core content framework (CCF) in initial education in England. The framework, which has been criticised for being heavily shaped by research from cognitive science, has, inadvertently, become the baseline curriculum for initial teacher education. This article explores how experiential learning is being used on a history PGCE course to move beyond the limitations of the CCF and offer student teachers a mode of professional learning that is foregrounded in creativity and critical reflexivity.
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Adventures in the Play-Ritual ContinuumThe junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending. Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects. Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally.
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'Why do we have to learn this?’ A physics educator’s response to every teacher’s least favourite questionIn his years as a physics teacher, students often asked Mark Whalley why they had to learn the subject when most of them would never directly use it in their careers. Having never been satisfied with the answers he gave, he sets out the case for learning physics, even for students who don't pursue the subject further.
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Informal Music Making and Well-BeingIn order to define the nature of informal music, specifically music making and its multidimensional connections with one’s well-being, a brief history of how music making is understood is first offered in order to delineate associated research and music-learning models. It is hoped that this will provide some detailed definition of the contemporary context of music making, so that the approach of “Universal Design,” among others, in the making of music might be understood as a paradigm shift that might have benefits for well-being. Informal music making is in short defined as categorically separated from formal music making, but their overlapping and dynamic relationship is nonetheless recognized and also further expanded upon. Informal music making is also aligned to understandings of the intuitivist and rationalist composer.
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Seminar capital: An exploration of the enduring social and pedagogical benefits of seminar engagementThis article presents findings from a small-scale qualitative case study exploring how engagement with seminars might prompt a sense of community amongst students. Further, it considered if such engagement might afford students ‘seminar capital’, a form of academic social capital (Bourdieu 1977 in Preece 2010). The study also aimed to uncover how seminar pedagogy can support students to develop their academic voice and connect with others in learning communities. Reflecting on emergent learning (Bourner 2003) supports students to move between a range of language codes (Preece 2010). Students in the study reported that seminar discussions supported their conceptual understanding, consolidated their academic language skills and offered opportunities to apply their knowledge to their assessments. This took place within an emerging positioning of relationships between peers and lecturers.
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Retrospective narratives of the cultural and linguistic brokering roles of migrant children following resettlementThe resettlement practices of (im)migrating communities into Global North countries has long been the focus of academic research. This thesis explores the pivotal role that children play in this resettlement process, through their roles as cultural and linguistic brokers, specifically the extent to which child brokers are exercising agency, and the factors which maximise or constrain this agency within the context of family hierarchies and other societal structures. Using Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method, (Chamberlayne, Rustin and Wengraf, 2002; Wengraf, 2004) the project elicits retrospective narratives from five adults who engaged in myriad brokering roles during their childhood. The research positions (Bio)ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 1998, 2006) as a sociological framework for identifying the macro and micro factors impacting upon children’s cultural and linguistic brokering roles. The alignment between the chosen theoretical framework and the BNIM methodology in the context of children’s cultural and linguistic brokering roles is a key feature of this research. The research findings indicate that brokering activities take place across a range of formal and informal contexts, with children deploying complex metalinguistic and cultural negotiation skills from an early age and into adulthood. Many of the brokering roles suggest children exercise varying degrees of agency in situational contexts, influencing family practices and contributing to the resettlement process. Retrospective perceptions of these roles reflect shifting interpretations of the challenges and benefits for their families and for the children themselves, mediated by such factors as their age, sense of efficacy, family expectations, duration, frequency and context of the brokering activities. Finally, I critique normative constructions of childhood, and analyse the significance of socio cultural factors on child brokering practices and their positioning within communities. The application of Bioecological Systems Theory has revealed the importance of establishing conceptual frameworks for exploring child brokering roles which inform policy and practice across relevant academic and societal contexts.
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Talking everyday science to very young children: a study involving parents and practitioners within an early childhood centreThe acquisition of everyday scientific concepts by 3–6-year-old children attending early childhood institutions has been widely studied. In contrast, research on science learning processes among younger children is less extensive. This paper reports on findings from an exploratory empirical study undertaken in a ‘stay and play’ service used by parents with children aged 0–3 and located within an East London early childhood centre. The research team collaborated with practitioners to deliver a programme of activities aimed at encouraging parents’ confidence in their own ability to support emergent scientific thinking among their young children. The programme generated children’s engagement and interest. Parents and practitioners reported increased confidence in their ability to promote young children’s natural curiosity at home and in early childhood provision. The authors see no reason for positing qualitative differences between the way children acquire scientific and other concepts in their earliest years.
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A frame within a frame within a frame within … : Concluding essayThe junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules.
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Ramblings: A walk in progress (or the minutes of the International Society of the Imaginary Perambulator)In this paper, seven writers experiment with ethnographic and artistic responses to each others’ walking practices. We employed various forms of ethnography, sharing our attempts to transform a walk into other objects, all the while performing together. We are trying to push the representational limits of an ethnography of walking, reflecting on the various modes of inscription available to us. In this sense, this chapter is a report on our knowledge engagements with walking practices. The conversation between and within the passages sheds new light on our individual efforts but also produces knowledge that speaks about walking as a practice and an experience. At the level of transforming experiences into text, our paths kept intersecting through key metaphors that emerged from our individual observations. Without deliberately setting out to do so, we found ourselves approaching arts-based practice as research. This chapter is not to be seen as a conclusive result of our findings but rather as a manifestation of our collaborative meaning-making. It is (at its heart) PROCESS as both beginning and end. Moreover, it is a questioning of the dominant cultural modes which have a tendency to pedestalize the final product.
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Advocating a folkloristic disposition in the context of music pedagogyThis chapter introduces The Walk to Kitty's Stone, a unique choral composition that intertwines the personal narrative of the composer with indigenous epistemology to create an autoethnographic reflection. Originating in 2018, this 17-minute piece harnesses 140 voices to articulate an immersive experience. Central to its creation is the recognition of the landscape and its inhabitants as active participants, aligning with an autoethnographic approach that acknowledges the agency of both human and non-human entities. Drawing from Bausinger's folkloristic framework, the composition engages with temporal, social, and spatial dimensions, providing a multifaceted exploration of the journey. A key innovation in the composition process is the development of the perambulograph, a device enabling on-the-move graphic scoring to capture the nuances of the journey in real time. Employing this methodology across 30 iterations, the composer achieves a comprehensive understanding of the varied perspectives at play. Beyond its artistic merits, this work advocates for a folkloristic disposition within music pedagogy, positioning songwriting as a form of arts-based practice-as-research. Through The Walk to Kitty's Stone, the composer not only crafts a captivating musical narrative but also advances a broader discourse on the intersection of ethnography, creativity, and education.
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Decision-making of educational leaders: New insights from the Iowa gambling taskPURPOSE: Middle leadership in education is often considered one of the most challenging roles within educational leadership, and it is often under-conceptualised and theorised. A key role of a middle leader is making decisions. This paper presents some initial findings from a study of 22 middle leaders in England, exploring their decision-making ability. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This study uses the Iowa gambling task (IGT), a commonly used psychological tool designed to assess decision-making through risk-based activities. All participants were asked to complete the IGT online. They were asked to select one of four cards from a virtual deck. The decks yielded either a positive gain (a financial win) or a net (financial) loss. Participants repeated the selection of a card 100 times. FINDINGS: Participants quickly learned which decks provided a positive net gain. However, what was apparent was that between cards 40 and 60, there was a significant spike in their ability to gain net wins in the cards selected. This suggests that middle leaders are more risk-seeking when they are trying to minimise losses, as in blocks 1 to 3 in the experiment. However, once they have reached a self-determined threshold, they become risk-averse to maintaining the potential gains they have made. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Understanding how leaders make decisions is particularly important if staff are to be encouraged to take responsibility and make decisions within their roles as middle leaders. However, this study has limitations, notably that only 22 participants participated. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This paper offers a contemporary review underpinned by a preliminary study of middle leaders' decision-making ability against a backdrop of the limited literature on this topic.
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Evaluation of ADAPTS-Powys (Shared Prosperity Funding)The Accelerating Decarbonisation and Productivity through Training and Skills (ADAPTS) programme, funded by Powys County Council's UK Shared Prosperity Fund allocation, aimed to support up to 16 businesses across various sectors in Powys. The initiative provided access to knowledge transfer, training, upskilling, and advanced manufacturing technology to enhance digital and decarbonisation competencies. Participating companies benefited from assessments and reviews conducted by engineers from AMRC Cymru, focusing on automation, manufacturing intelligence, and design. The programme sought to decarbonise operations, boost productivity, foster innovation, and elevate employee skill levels.
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In two minds: what happens when we think in Role?‘In two Minds’ proffers a detailed concept of the in-role process. It illuminates hitherto underexplored phenomena regarding thinking and existing in the drama classroom. The contradictory dynamic of ‘escaping’ and ‘facing’ something ‘at the same time’ is unpacked revealing that the two are not, in this context, opposite processes but are necessary as bound forces progressing in the same emancipatory direction. This has significant implications for classroom drama practice reaching beyond the drama lesson, studio, and exam results, analysing how the in-role process facilitates self-transformation: the essential purpose of education. The research involves the stories of two 12-year-old girls, some 30 years apart. The first testimony provides the background to the thesis. The second provides the focus for the thesis, featuring the stimulus quote above, which forms the basis of an interview which took place in 2019 just before Covid lockdown. The interview fuels an online drama workshop for a group of contemporary PGCE students to excavate this paradox in their own way. The workshop takes place during the Covid lockdown, summer 2020. These unprecedented circumstances demanded new, creative dramatic online classroom pedagogies and research methodologies which capture unusual online video footage of the drama process and enable fresh ground to be explored. The work of three practitioners is drawn upon to illuminate the data arising from the interview and workshop, Konstantin Stanislavski’s work provides the early theoretical basis of how a role is adopted and sustained both physically and mentally. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological ideas about the unity of the mind and body and how this relates to learning casts more detailed theoretical light onto the in-role process. In addition, some aspects of Jacques Lacan’s thinking are brought into the study to consider our existential context while in role and its impacts on the thinking process. These theoretical lenses are considered alongside the work of Drama Educationalists, like Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton and Cecily O’Neill. The research illuminates internal role processes, considering embodiment in the here-and-now, alongside realms of existence in the not-here and not-now. While the focus is on positive self-transformation, the limitations of the study are also recognised. However, the limitations depend directly upon the skills, insight and education of the drama teacher. Consequently, the study provides strong arguments for the value of drama in schools as a subject in its own right, taught by subject specialists.
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Retention of secondary school teachers: what motivates them to stay? A narrative ethnographic study of five teachers' lived experiences of ongoing commitment to their professionThis thesis uses narrative methodology to explore the ongoing career journeys of five secondary schoolteachers in England, presented from my perspective as a former schoolteacher. I aimed to understand how and why they remained committed to their profession by gaining insight into their professional motivation and their means of reconciling known demotivators associated with teacher attrition. I developed flexible mixed methods to capture a snapshot of their individual professional experiences. During the Covid pandemic of 2020, the year self-isolation and social distancing entered our lexicon, I conducted semi-structured interviews which were used to create thematic networks, and transposed the hand-transcribed accounts to third person narratives which participants had the opportunity to comment on. The methodology aimed to construct a three-dimensional research space (Clandinin, 2006), incorporating participants’ interaction with others, the continuity of their experience, and the situation(s) they inhabited. I draw on the work of Stronach et al. (2002) to show that the three components of motivation collectively referred to as Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Ryan & Deci, 2000b) occur within divided, pluralistic, conflicted professional identities. The findings show how the first component of SDT, competence, becomes interwoven with the principles and language of performativity; how the second, relatedness, is complicated by competing allegiances which undermine teacher security; and that the third, autonomy, is always limited. I elicit a sense of fulfilment as an additional feature of motivation and identify acceptance as a further contributor to teachers’ ongoing commitment. I conclude that whilst teacher motivation is shifting and individualised, as are the conflicted professional identities underpinning reasons to teach, both motivation and identity are always a response to the circumstances and system of which they are products. The study shows that motivated teachers are generally able to maintain a positive outlook despite the tensions they must navigate, as long as they perceive an omnipresent possibility to alter their path.
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Does machine learning risk reinforcing societal prejudice in education?Machine learning is increasingly being applied in sectors ranging from healthcare to finance; however, in education, it is typically only used for predicting students’ grades. On the other hand, deeply rooted societal prejudice is more challenging to measure, so could machine learning contribute to the current discourse? As a result of a gap in existing literature in the use of machine learning in education, this study uses this novel approach to investigate the potential links between the levels of prejudice of college students and their parents’ levels of education. An Implicit Association Task (IAT) was used to collect the information from the participants. Before applying three different machine learning models: Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN). It was found that KNN marginally outperformed not only the DT model but also SVM, with the results being validated by using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS). This demonstrated a clear correlation between the parents’ education and their children’s prejudice levels. The paper adds to the limited research that is available on the use of machine learning in education and proposes that a larger study be conducted to provide a more nuanced understanding of prejudice in education.
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Enacting Remote Working in an Era of (Un)certainty: Care of Personal and Professional SelfThis research explores the experiences of US based professional workers engaged in enforced remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a Critical Ethnographic methodology (Clair, 2003; Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Given, 2008) underpinned by Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Byrne, 2022), it examines how employees in a large, US multinational company called OmniSat navigated the shifting boundaries between home and work life from March to September 2021. Data was collected through virtual semistructured interviews and digital instant chat messages, allowing opportunity for insights into key themes such as corporate expectations, self-care, self-perception, and certainty/uncertainty. Reflexive practice (Bazeley, 2007; Behar, 1997; Denzin & Lincoln, 2018) was concurrently engaged with throughout the entire research process, with researcher reflexive commentaries embedded in each chapter. The theoretical framework used draws from Foucault’s (1997; 1984; 1982; 1979) post-structuralist theory and Ball’s (2003; Ball & Olmedo, 2012) neoliberal performativity to explore how workers self-regulate under a corporate gaze, balancing autonomy with pressures to perform. The findings suggest that remote working reshaped the concept of the professional ‘self’, highlighting both opportunities for greater flexibility and autonomy and challenges such as isolation and the reallocation of domestic space for work. These experiences reflect broader uncertainties in a neoliberal employment landscape. This research contributes to an understanding of how professional and personal ‘self’ is continuously redefined in response to changing work practices, offering a critical perspective on the dynamics of power, performativity, and resistance in contemporary work environments.
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Constructions of agency in children’s cultural and linguistic brokering practicesConstructions of children’s agency have been an influential and dominant arena for discussion since the emergence of the ‘new’ paradigm of childhood in the 1990s. Cross-disciplinary studies recognise the different social, cultural and temporal influences upon perceptions of childhood and acknowledge the impact of such constructions on how children’s agency is understood and realised. Many of the definitions of agency reflect Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states the child’s right to be involved in decisions affecting them. However, as with other articles of the convention, Article 12 is prone to subjective adult interpretation predicated on assumptions of competence and capability, and subject to the same uneasy tension between participation, protection and provision which characterises the convention more broadly. Furthermore, the presumed relationship between children’s involvement in decision making as an indicator of agency is misleading. This paper argues that children’s agency is a poorly defined concept, whose lack of clarity contributes to children being constrained as active change agents within and beyond contexts which directly affect them. Using the context of child language brokers, the paper argues that despite offering children the ‘socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’ brokering practices frequently take place in response to adult-determined objectives, rather than in contexts freely chosen by the child, potentially compromising their agentic potential. This paper draws upon the findings from Crutchley’s doctoral thesis which used Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method to explore the retrospective narratives of adults who assumed the role of cultural and linguistic brokers during their childhoods.
