A collaboration environment to support distributed eXtreme programming

NUL

Citizenship education, truth and learning : some thoughts on professional deliberation

Through consideration of a classroom context observed as part of a PGCE student teacher’s professional development, reading as a learning activity is considered. It is proposed that ‘learning to read’ engages pupils in a critical social-cultural-political project. Through further analysis of a pupil response identified as ‘wrong’, learning in citizenship education is considered through the prism of realist and constructivist perspectives. Finally, current educational ‘good practice’ is identified as offering more than just ‘things to do in the classroom’; aspects are shown to be concordant with elements of constructivist thinking, thinking which potentially offers professionals a prism through which to examine practise. In short, this paper does not propose that teachers ‘become’ constructivist in orientation; rather it offers, as an example, how adopting various theoretical positions from which to deconstruct education can and does provide for alternative perspectives both on educational policy and personal-professional viewpoints

Ego & eXtreme programming in the libre software context

NUL

Teaching PSHE in secondary schools

This Spotlight article looks at teaching PSHE in secondary school

Teaching PSHE (and citizenship) in primary schools

This spotlight article looks at teaching PSHE and citizenship in primary school

Towards supporting agile practice within the Libre software paradigm

Abstrac

Tool support for the effective distribution of agile practice (extended abstract)

Abstrac

How do kinship (family and friends) foster carers experience their role and working relationships within the children’s workforce? (Sharing our experience, Practitioner-led research 2008-2009; PLR0809/054)

This research was undertaken in a London local authority and consisted of semi-structured interviews with five kinship foster carers approved by the local authority. The research used a qualitative approach consisting of one-off, face to face interviews with the aim of finding out how kinship foster carers experience their role and working relationships within the children’s workforce. Kinship foster carers are family and friends who look after children and young people in public care, on behalf of the local authority and within the terms of the Children Act 1989. A semi-structured interview schedule was devised to address the areas of interest, with a series of open questions and prompts. The interviews, with the participant’s permission, were digitally recorded alongside contemporaneous notes being made, and were subsequently written up to produce the dataset for the analysis. The main findings from the research include: • The carers in this study were very positive about the support they received from their supervising social workers, but were critical of the fact that children were often not provided with a consistent social worker. • Some carers in this study were dissatisfied with the level of financial remuneration. • In terms of the working relationship with education and health professionals, all participants reported positive experiences, but while this study sought to see how kinship carers were viewed as part of the children’s workforce, the carers themselves wanted to be viewed as ‘family’ and not professionals. • In relation to the possibility that relative and non-relative kinship carers experienced their role differently, there is no evidence from this brief study to suggest that this may be the case. Both relative and nonrelative carers demonstrate a warmth and commitment to ‘their’ children, reinforcing the importance of kinship care as a preferred placement option for many children

Towards the effective distribution of agile practice

The agile methods are quickly gaining notoriety amongst software engineers. Having been developed over the past decade, they now present a mature, lightweight alternative to the "classic" approaches to software engineering. Although agile methods have solved some of the problems of established software engineering practice, they have created some problems of their own. Most importantly, we can infer a, potentially problematic, requirement of collocation. In this research I intend to develop a system that will allow the effective distribution of agile practice, with a particular focus on the eXtreme Programming method. This paper discusses the motivation for this research and outlines the proposed research method and evaluation