Teacher quality in the twenty first century: new lives, old truths

This chapter is based upon a keynote address to the first global teacher education summit, organised by Beijing Normal University in 2011, in which research across the world about influences which affect teachers' sense of professional identity, capacity for compassion, commitment, resilience and effectiveness long after they have graduated from their pre-service education and training programmes in universities and colleges were shared. The findings suggest that teaching pre-service students about how the conditions in which they work may enhance or diminish their capacity to teach to their best and how they might act to mediate these is a key part of the work of all teacher educators and an important focus for the work of educational researchers

Preference for novel faces in male infant monkeys predicts cerebrospinal fluid oxytocin concentrations later in life

The ability to recognize individuals is a critical skill acquired early in life for group living species. In primates, individual recognition occurs predominantly through face discrimination. Despite the essential adaptive value of this ability, robust individual differences in conspecific face recognition exist, yet its associated biology remains unknown. Although pharmacological administration of oxytocin has implicated this neuropeptide in face perception and social memory, no prior research has tested the relationship between individual differences in face recognition and endogenous oxytocin concentrations. Here we show in a male rhesus monkey cohort (N = 60) that infant performance in a task used to determine face recognition ability (specifically, the ability of animals to show a preference for a novel face) robustly predicts cerebrospinal fluid, but not blood, oxytocin concentrations up to five years after behavioural assessment. These results argue that central oxytocin biology may be related to individual face perceptual abilities necessary for group living, and that these differences are stable traits

Transformative Learning in English Further Education

This chapter draws on the Further Education in England: Transforming Lives & Communities project, commissioned by UCU. The study aims to understand and provide evidence of how the further education (FE) sector is vital in transforming lives and communities in 21st century Britain. The research provides learners, teachers, family members and their communities with the opportunity to tell their stories, linking the distinctness of FE to the impact it has on individuals, society and the economy. The study provides evidence for how further education offers a “differential space” (Lefebvre 1992) that can subvert the prescriptive, linear spaces of compulsory education and lead to transformative learning. The study exposes educational practices as ideologically imbued, driven and shaped by policy. The model of curriculum can determine whether education is an emancipatory or oppressive process. While productivist approaches to VET support and perpetuate ideologies that legitimate and authenticate prescribed knowledge, reproducing inequality and injustice through the practices employed (Beck, 2005; McLaren, 1988; Duckworth 2013. Ade-Ojo and Duckworth 2016, Duckworth and Smith 2017), transformative learning tends to adopt a holistic approach. It seeks engagement with learners through a purposeful acknowledgement with learners’ cultural background and biography and nurtures critical insight into education as a socially situated process. Transformative learning is orientated to affirming agency and as such, has a ripple effect that impacts on learners’ families and the communities they come from. Bourdieu’s work offers an appropriate and illuminating theoretical frame to explore the theme of capital / or lack of capital that emerged strongly from participant accounts. Their experience of symbolic violence is a central focus of our analysis. The symbolic and institutional violence that shaped the students' understandings of themselves within the educational context and the creation of a transformative critical provided a space which enabled the participants to explore and transcend the internal and external influences and violence that shaped their learning journey. This symbolic violence consists of labelling individuals, reifying social division and the current (dis)order, and stymying creativity through a denial of critical insights. It seeks to locate ‘failure’ within the individual as a determining and essentialist aspect of their identity of thwarting the development of empowering learner identities, We suggest that in challenging inequalities in learners’ lives and communities, adult education should reflect a transformative pedagogy, providing a curriculum that is culturally relevant, learner driven, and socially empowering (Auerbach, 1989; Freire, 1993; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; Quigley, 1997; Shor, 1992, Giroux 1997; Lankshear and McClaren 1992; Duckworth & Ade-Ojo 2016; Duckworth & Smith 2017)

Education, globalisation and new times

© 2007 Stephen J. Ball, Ivor F. Goodson and Meg Maguire. All rights reserved. Education, Globalisation and New Times comprises a selection of the most influential papers published over the twenty-one years of the Journal of Education Policy. Written by many of the leading scholars in the field, these seminal papers cover a variety of subjects, sectors and levels of education, focused around the following major themes: education, globalisation and new times; policy theory and method; policy and equity. Compiled by the journal's editors, Stephen Ball, Ivor Goodson and Meg Maguire, the book illustrates the development of the field of education policy studies, and the specially written Introduction contextualises the selection, whilst introducing students to the main issues and current thinking in the field

Heading south: time to abandon the ‘parallel worlds’ of international non-governmental organization (NGO) and domestic third sector scholarship?

Since third sector research emerged as a full-fledged interdisciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained-in common with many other social science disciplines-between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who work on the third sector in the so-called developing world. Whilst internationally focused researchers tend to use the language of 'non-governmental organizations', those in domestic settings usually prefer the terms 'non-profit organization' or 'voluntary organization', even though both subsectors share common principles and are equally internally diverse in terms of organisations and activities. Whilst there has long been common-sense logic to distinguishing between wealthier and poorer regions of the world based on differences in the scale of human need, the 'developed' versus 'developing' category can also be criticised as being rather simplistic and unhelpfully ideological. As the categories of 'developing' and 'developed' countries become less clear-cut, and global interconnectedness between third sectors and their ideas grows, this paper argues that we need to reconsider the value of maintaining these parallel worlds of research, and instead develop a more unified approach