Special section on human development as a critical voice in education: Editor's introduction

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including human development, the importance of economic context for young people, children's perspectives within school governance

Ditching Dualisms: Education Professionals View the Future of Technology and Disabilities

Small groups of educational psychologists, disability educators, and teachers with special education training were interviewed about the likely impact of new technologies for bodily enhancement on their future practice. New theories of embodiment (e.g. Deleuze, Grosz) consider human selves beyond bounded, individual containers. Such ideas also appear in popular media, because films often challenge conventional notions of character and time. To frame the research discussions, three short documentary films were created to present issues that raised questions about dualisms such as nature/nurture and natural/technological. Professionals reflected critically on nature and saw many parallels between different kinds of enhancement, whether mechanistic, chemical, or genetic. Questioning dualistic ideas about nature was also seen as having the potential to alter contemporary views of prosthetics, expanding possibilities for what it means to be human

Special section on human development as a critical voice in education: Editor's introduction

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Review: Erica Burman: Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 356 pp. £21.50 ISBN 978—0—415—39562—5 (pbk) Erica Burman: Developments: Child, Image, Nation, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 328 pp. £21.50 ISBN 978—0—415—37792—8 (pbk)

The article reviews the book “Deconstructing Developmental Psychology”and “Developments: Child, Image, Nation”, By Erica Burman

When educational supervision meets clinical supervision: what can we learn from the discrepancies?

The authors question the taken-for-granted notion of supervision. Their concerns arose out of an attempt to introduce 'clinical' supervision into academia as a way of addressing an increasing number of the ethical issues which confront lecturers. They recognise that knowledge can impact adversely on students and that lecturers at times find themselves compromised. They settled on supervision as an organisational space in the domain of power in which to address the distress they observed. However, through their different experiences of supervision, they soon found themselves talking past each other. When clinical supervision meets educational supervision, several anomalies are brought to the fore. The authors draw on Foucault's notion of discourse, and of knowledge as power, in order to foreground these and conclude by cautioning against an uncritical acceptance of supervision as an ethical practice. They believe there is a benefit in bringing together the two discourses of clinical and educational supervision for further discussion

Supervision in educational contexts: raising the stakes in a global world

This paper brings together discourses surrounding two areas of supervision, educational and clinical, in order to address the increasing complexity of academic life. Educational supervision of postgraduate student researchers resonates with more clinical supervision practices. All are widely perceived as beneficial and promoted on ethical grounds. However, a comparison foregrounds supervision's problematic and questionable association with a neo-liberal economic agenda. Following a desire to speak the unspeakable in academic spaces, we apply a discursively informed critical analysis to describe supervision as an affluent, professional response to an increasingly restrictive individualism, which compounds the isolating function of an unsustainable regime. We explore the possibilities that supervisory practices offer as an organisational space in the domain of power, locating untapped potential in their ambivalence. We invite a radical revisioning of supervision as a platform that might have potential for an increasingly subversive and inclusive voice in higher education

Vygotsky from ZPD to ZCD in moral education: reshaping Western theory and practices in local context

This article explores Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in the Malaysian context to support local reform of the Moral Education (ME) classroom. Small groups of students in three different types of school were involved in a participant action research (PAR) project. Such classrooms in Malaysia bring together students from various ethnicities aligned with Hindu, Confucian and Christian beliefs and understandings. Using the Malaysian multicultural ME classroom as a case study, we offer some examples of group conversations around moral dilemmas that illustrate ways that collaborative processes beyond the individual might expand an individual student’s ZPD and the consensual as well as divergent views of each group as a whole. This suggests possibilities for an extension of the ZPD into a zone of collaborative development (ZCD)

The personal is still political: Collective biographical memory work and feminist practice

abstract We are a group of women working across a variety of domains within a tertiary education context, in a time of transition in tertiary education, who are using a process of collective biographical memory work in our research. Working with our memory of co-constructed fictional characters from our childhood, we trace our development as a diversity of third wave feminists sensitive to the privileges and exclusions of our positions. What were the gendered influences at play in our early memory and how have these shaped who we have now become? In particular, how have these influences positioned us as women academics in the current regime of performance-based accountability and multiple redundancies? Our analysis uncovers layers of negotiation between expected behaviour and new possible selves

Supporting students with impairments in higher education: social inclusion or cold comfort?

This paper uses a discursive analysis to examine the experience of ‘inclusion’ from several stakeholder groups in one university. The research team included disability support staff at the institution, external disability consultants and academic researchers. A critical focus group investigation centred on four groups: students who were identified as having an impairment (SWIs), academic staff (teachers), administrators and students who did not identify as having an impairment (non‐SWIs). Interviews had facilitators with both research and disability expertise. Groups recounted different experiences of inclusion. SWIs, drawing on a rights discourse, emphasised a lack of resourcing and barriers created by the teaching staff. In contrast, teachers, administrators and (to a lesser extent) non‐SWIs emphasised the importance of social inclusion, reflecting discourses around needs and humanist notions of care and support, which largely seemed to miss the core of SWI concerns about recognition of their technical competence. For all groups, questions around disclosure of disability were of greater concern than tensions between needs and rights or the recent publication of a Code of Practice for the higher education sector. The findings challenged some of the researchers’ own assumptions, with unexpected implications for practice