L'enseignement /

Titre de la couv.Bibliogr.: p. 34-3

Does gender matter? A cross-national investigation of primary class-room discipline.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupFewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male ‘role models’ in schools has an adverse effect on boys’ academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined ‘teaching’ as institutional talk, men’s linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter?Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

A Choice, Not A Duty

David Berliner has argued that some educational psychologists need to engage publicly in policy debates. I agree, and I commend him not only for being willing to do so, but for doing so in ways that reflect the ideals of professionalism outlined in his article. He has delivered truly expert testimony to governmental representatives, based initially on syntheses of policy-relevant research conducted by others, and more recently on studies of his own that were carefully designed to provide fair tests of the assumptions or claims made by advocates of policies that he suspected were counterproductive. But his article focuses almost exclusively on the positive side of the case for professionals’ involvement in public policy debates. I want to express some concerns and qualifications about this idea