The impact of professional learning on the teaching identities of higher education lecturers

Higher Education is currently undergoing some of the most profound changes in its history. Against a backdrop of increasing marketization, rising levels of student debt and far greater fully online offerings, the higher education lecturer is grappling with new ways of working and high expectations of teaching quality. This 3 year qualitative study based in The Open University UK investigates the ways in which HE distance learning lecturers are approaching professional development and learning, identifying what type of learning may be most effective in creating and sustaining an online teaching identity. The study also examines ways in which resistance discourse is shaping these identities and practices revealing emerging re- conceptualisations of what it means to be an effective and well-motivated distance learning lecturer. The investigation uses a framework for identity analysis which analyses professional identity via the expression of hegemonies, phenomenological, narrative articulations of identity, and a post-modern, constructivist view of identity which is shaped by social interactions and communities of practice. It highlights the importance of personal agency in identity formation. The results revealed a number of insights into the ways in which a combination of resistance discourse, professional learning and reflections from student interactions are shaping new understandings of professional knowledge in this context

Young people's uses of celebrity: Class, gender and 'improper' celebrity

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01596306.2012.698865.In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young people's identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young people's responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.The Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology

Examining the five‐stage e‐moderating model: Designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession

This paper highlights the need for learning technologists to establish their ‘academic legitimacy’ within the complexities of online learning and teaching practice. Frameworks such as the ‘five stage e‐moderating model’ can be useful in developing the knowledge base but there are dangers in them becoming too reified within an increasingly commodified higher education (HE) environment. The paper calls for greater professional reflexivity and contestation within learning technology practice and concludes by inviting the Alt‐J readership to engage in a critical debate with regard to these issues

Multi-Level governance: Towards an analysis of renewable energy governance in the English regions

governance, renewable energy

Doing it differently: youth leadership and the arts in a creative learning programme

Notions of youth ‘leadership’, partnership or collaborating with young people as ‘service users’, are currently being endorsed and elaborated across a very broad spectrum of thinking, policymaking and provision. This paper argues that if we want to understand this phenomenon, we should not look in the first instance to young people as the prime source of commentary or agency: instead, we need to understand it as a way of ‘doing’ – in this instance - the arts or education differently. The paper draws on research into how one organization, the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships run in schools between 2002 and 2011, attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. It argues that youth leadership should be analysed as it is enacted within and through specific sites and practices, and in terms of the subjectivities, capacities and narratives it offers to teachers, students, artists and others involved. The result is a more ambivalent account of participatory approaches, acknowledging their dilemmas as well as their achievements, and observing that they reconfigure power relations in sometimes unexpected, and sometimes all-too-familiar, ways

Critical Literacy and Second Language Learning in the Mainstream Classroom: An Elusive Nexus?

Critical Literacy (CL) is now a core component of Queensland secondary school English programs. These programs are delivered to a significant number of students from Non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) whose linguistic and cultural resources are diverse and not necessarily representative of mainstream high school cultural capital (Bourdieu 1990). In response to the current emphasis on CL, it is vital for English as a Second Language (ESL) educators to identify the points of contention as well as the possibilities for promoting critical engagement with texts with adolescent ESL learners and to seek to create pedagogy that reflects the critical needs and capacities of these learners. This paper outlines the version of CL in secondary schools as theorised by a number of Australian researchers; discusses the relevance and importance of CL to NESB learners and finally raises a number of issues that need resolving if such learners are to be provided with a well-rounded literacy education amid contemporary Australian social relations and textual practice

Constraints, creativity and challenges: educators and students writing together

Australia's national curriculum calls for the prioritisation of teaching and learning in literacies. From 2013 there is also a requirement for schools to familiarise students with a broad range of literature, and teachers are required to engage children in creating plays, stories and poems in traditional and multimodal forms. Similarly, universities must prepare future teachers with a deep understanding of the creative processes involved in thinking about, writing and editing such works, with a consideration of audience and genre. Drawing upon the experiences of pre-service teachers in their co-writing with young students, the author considers how writing within literary genres may support possibility thinking, relational and dialogic pedagogies and learner agency, as well as what challenges and constraining factors may operate upon the teacher writer partnership

Critical Literacy and Second Language Learning in the Mainstream Classroom: An Elusive Nexus?

Critical Literacy (CL) is now a core component of Queensland secondary school English programs. These programs are delivered to a significant number of students from Non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) whose linguistic and cultural resources are diverse and not necessarily representative of mainstream high school cultural capital (Bourdieu 1990). In response to the current emphasis on CL, it is vital for English as a Second Language (ESL) educators to identify the points of contention as well as the possibilities for promoting critical engagement with texts with adolescent ESL learners and to seek to create pedagogy that reflects the critical needs and capacities of these learners. This paper outlines the version of CL in secondary schools as theorised by a number of Australian researchers; discusses the relevance and importance of CL to NESB learners and finally raises a number of issues that need resolving if such learners are to be provided with a well-rounded literacy education amid contemporary Australian social relations and textual practice

New media practices in India: bridging past and future, markets and development

This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in India, focusing on the country’s youth's use of mobile phones and the Internet, as well as new media prosumption. One particular feature of the Indian case is the confluence of commercial exploitation of new media technologies and their application for development purposes in initiatives that aim to bring these technologies to marginalized segments of the Indian population. Technology usage in turn is shaped by the socioeconomic location of the user, especially in regards to gender and caste. The potential of new media technologies to subvert such social stratifications and associated norms has inspired much public debate, which is often carried out on the Internet, giving rise to an online public sphere. In all of the writings reviewed here, the tension surrounding new media technologies as a meeting place of the old and the new in India is paramount