103 research outputs found
How childâcentred education favours some learners more than others
Debates on how best to educate young children have been raging over the last 100 yearsâmore often fuelled by ideological preferences rather than empirical evidence. To some extent this is hardly surprising given the difficulty of examining pupil progress in a systematic and comparative way. However, the introduction of a new childâcentred curriculum in Wales provides the opportunity to undertake just such an examination. The Foundation Phase curriculum, introduced in 2008, is designed to provide all 3â to 7âyearâolds with a developmental, experiential, playâbased approach to learning. Evidence from a major 3âyear evaluation of this intervention finds that, overall, pupil progress and wellâbeing is fostered in those settings where the principles of the Foundation Phase have been most closely followed. However, the evidence also suggests that even within these contexts, progress is uneven and that some kinds of children seem to gain more from this approach than others. The âlosersâ appear to be boys and those living in poverty. Drawing on the theories of Basil Bernstein, the paper explores why this may be the case and examines the relative significance of teacher dispositions, teacherâlearner dynamics and the availability of resources. The paper concludes by arguing that these issues will need to be addressed if the benefits of childâcentred approaches are to benefit all
From Ideal to Practice and Back Again: Beginning Teachers Teaching for Social Justice
The five authors of this article designed a multicase study to follow recent graduates of an elementary preservice teacher education program into their beginning teaching placements and explore the ways in which they enacted social justice curricula. The authors highlight the stories of three beginning teachers, honoring the plurality of their conceptions of social justice teaching and the resiliency they exhibited in translating social justice ideals into viable pedagogy. They also discuss the struggles the teachers faced when enacting social justice curricula and the tenuous connection they perceived between their conceptions and their practices. The authors emphasize that such struggles are inevitable and end the article with recommendations for ways in which teacher educators can prepare beginning teachers for the uncertain journey of teaching for social justice
Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: Insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom
A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to âclose the gapâ. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse âpolitics as theoryâ and âpolitics as practiceâ. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a âpedagogical pyramidâ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens
Evaluating assessment quality in competence-based education: A qualitative comparison of two frameworks
Learning Through Modeling: Developing Preservice Teachersâ Understanding of Reflection
Emotions and pedagogies of discomfort: Teachersâ responses to sexual and gender diversity in the Free State, South Africa
Emotions are central to social justice work in education but receive scant research attention in South Africa. Our study explores the role of emotions in teachersâ approaches to teaching about sexual and gender diversity in schools in the Free State. Using in-depth interviews, we found that teachers experienced discomfort with the topic, had inherited bitter knowledge about non-normative sexual and gender identities, and experienced strong negative affect when discussing the topic. In many ways, participants unconsciously and unreflexively perpetuated heterosexism and homophobia in their classroom teaching and school settings. We conclude that the growing emphasis in educational policy in South Africa on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) learners requires a greater awareness among educators of the role of emotions in enabling or hindering this form of social justice work in education
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