'We don't learn democracy, we live it!' : consulting the pupil voice in Scottish schools

As the education for citizenship agenda continues to impact on schools, there is a need to begin the discussion around examining the kind of initiatives that can push it forward. In Scotland the proposals should, it is argued, permeate the curriculum throughout the school. Yet there is the fear that the responsibility of all can become the responsibility of none. This paper examines, through case study research carried out by the authors, initiatives in schools designed to take forward the citizenship agenda in the light of children's rights. The first two relate to firstly the impact of pupil councils in primary schools and secondly the impact of discussing controversial issues in the primary classroom. The third outlines the impact on values and dispositions of developing more participatory, democratic practice in the classroom. The paper concludes by calling for both more initiatives of this type and more evaluation of their worth

Targeting Mr Average: Participation, gender equity and school sport partnerships

The School Sport Partnership Programme (SSPP) is one strand of the national strategy for physical education and school sport in England, the physical education and school sport Club Links Strategy (PESSCL). The SSPP aims to make links between school physical education (PE) and out of school sports participation, and has a particular remit to raise the participation levels of several identified under-represented groups, of which girls and young women are one. National evaluations of the SSPP show that it is beginning to have positive impacts on young people's activity levels by increasing the range and provision of extra curricular activities (Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), 2003, 2004, 2005; Loughborough Partnership, 2005, 2006). This paper contributes to the developing picture of the phased implementation of the programme by providing qualitative insights into the work of one school sport partnership with a particular focus on gender equity. The paper explores the ways in which gender equity issues have been explicitly addressed within the 'official texts' of the SSPP; how these have shifted over time and how teachers are responding to and making sense of these in their daily practice. Using participation observation, interview and questionnaire data, the paper explores how the coordinators are addressing the challenge of increasing the participation of girls and young women. The paper draws on Walby's (2000) conceptualisation of different kinds of feminist praxis to highlight the limitations of the coordinators' work. Two key themes from the data and their implications are addressed: the dominance of competitive sport practices and the PE professionals' views of targeting as a strategy for increasing the participation of under-represented groups. The paper concludes that coordinators work within an equality or difference discourse with little evidence of the transformative praxis needed for the programme to be truly inclusive. © 2008 Taylor & Francis

Repositioning of special schools within a specialist, personalised educational marketplace - the need for a representative principle

This paper considers how notions of inclusive education as defined in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Salamanca Agreement (1994) have become dissipated, and can be developed and reframed to encourage their progress. It analyses the discourse within a range of academic, legal and media texts, exploring how this dissipation has taken place within the UK. Using data from 78 specialist school websites it contextualises this change in the use of the terms and ideas of inclusion with the rise of two other constructs, the 'specialist school' and 'personalisation'. It identifies the need for a precisely defined representative principle to theorise the type of school which inclusion aims to achieve, which cannot be subsumed by segregated providers. It suggests that this principle should not focus on the individual, but draw upon a liberal/democratic view of social justice, underlining inclusive education's role in removing social barriers that prevent equity, access and participation for all

PLoS. Biol.

Certain bacterial adhesins appear to promote a pathogen's extracellular lifestyle rather than its entry into host cells. However, little is known about the stimuli elicited upon such pathogen host-cell interactions. Here, we report that type IV pili (Tfp)-producing Neisseria gonorrhoeae (P(+)GC) induces an immediate recruitment of caveolin-1 (Cav1) in the host cell, which subsequently prevents bacterial internalization by triggering cytoskeletal rearrangements via downstream phosphotyrosine signaling. A broad and unbiased analysis of potential interaction partners for tyrosine-phosphorylated Cav1 revealed a direct interaction with the Rho-family guanine nucleotide exchange factor Vav2. Both Vav2 and its substrate, the small GTPase RhoA, were found to play a direct role in the Cav1-mediated prevention of bacterial uptake. Our findings, which have been extended to enteropathogenic Escherichia coli, highlight how Tfp-producing bacteria avoid host cell uptake. Further, our data establish a mechanistic link between Cav1 phosphorylation and pathogen-induced cytoskeleton reorganization and advance our understanding of caveolin function

The influence of distributed leadership on teachers' organizational commitment: a multilevel approach

In the present study the effects of a cooperative leadership team, distributed leadership, participative decision-making, and context variables on teachers' organizational commitment are investigated. Multilevel analyses on data from 1522 teachers indicated that 9% of the variance in teachers' organizational commitment is attributable to differences between schools. The analyses revealed that especially the presence of a cooperative leadership team and the amount of leadership support played a significantly positive key role in predicting teachers' organizational commitment. Also, participative decision-making and distribution of the supportive leadership function had a significant positive impact on teachers' organizational commitment. In contrast, distribution of the supervisory leadership function and teachers' job experience had a significant negative impact

Protein Arrays: Issues to Be Addressed

Protein arrays are fast becoming established as a means to monitor protein expression levels and investigate protein interactions and function. They present particular technical demands that will need to be solved in order to achieve the maximum capability of efficient and sensitive protein analysis in the high throughput setting of functional genomics. The following resumé of some major issues around this new technology was made as the chairperson’s introduction to the workshop session on peptide and protein chips

Protein Microarray On-Demand: A Novel Protein Microarray System

We describe a novel, simple and low-cost protein microarray strategy wherein the microarrays are generated by printing expression ready plasmid DNAs onto slides that can be converted into protein arrays on-demand. The printed expression plasmids serve dual purposes as they not only direct the synthesis of the protein of interest; they also serve to capture the newly synthesized proteins through a high affinity DNA-protein interaction. To accomplish this we have exploited the high-affinity binding (∼3–7×10 −13 M) of E. coli Tus protein to Ter, a 20 bp DNA sequence involved in the regulation of E. coli DNA replication. In our system, each protein of interest is synthesized as a Tus fusion protein and each expression construct directing the protein synthesis contains embedded Ter DNA sequence. The embedded Ter sequence functions as a capture reagent for the newly synthesized Tus fusion protein. This “all DNA” microarray can be converted to a protein microarray on-demand without need for any additional capture reagent.

Ethical leadership in an age of evaluation: implications for whole—school well-being

The evaluation and inspection of many public services, including education, has become increasingly common in most countries in the developed world (McNamara & O’Hara, 2004; MacBeath & McGlynn, 2002). There are various reasons why this may be the case. It can be argued that it is, on the one hand, part of the movement towards low trust policies derived from the ideology of neo-liberalism which seeks to apply the values of the market to the public sector. On the other hand, it can be argued that increased evaluation is a necessary and defensible component of democratic accountability, responsibility and transparency (O’Neill, 2002). The research reported here sets out to explore the idea of a personal vision or core of ethics as being central to educational leadership, through in-depth interviews with a number of school leaders. The chapter begins by briefly placing educational leadership in the modern context, characterised by the paradox of apparently greater decentralisation of responsibility to schools being in fact coupled with a further centralisation of actual power and greatly increased surveillance of performance (Neave, 1998). Relevant developments internationally, and then specifically in the context of Ireland, are described. It is suggested that in Ireland the modern educational context may indeed be creating difficult ethical and moral dilemmas for leaders to face. To see if this is so in practice, five in-depth interviews with school principals are reported. The evidence arising from these interviews indicates that school leaders do feel guided by a strong moral or ethical compass

The relation between school leadership from a distributed perspective and teachers' organizational commitment: examining the source of the leadership function

Purpose: In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers’ organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership perspective. The relation between teachers’ organizational commitment and contextual variables of teachers’ perceptions of the quality and the source of the supportive and supervisory leadership function, participative decision making, and cooperation within the leadership team are examined. Research Design: A survey was set up involving 1,522 teachers from 46 large secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium). Because the data in the present study have an inherent hierarchical structure, that is, teachers are nested into schools, hierarchical linear modeling techniques are applied. Findings: The analyses reveal that 9% of the variance in teachers’ organizational commitment is attributable to differences between schools. Teachers’ organizational commitment is mainly related to quality of the supportive leadership, cooperation within the leadership team, and participative decision making. Who performed the supportive leadership function plays only a marginally significant positive role. The quality of the supervisory leadership function and the role of the leadership team members in this function were not significantly related to teachers’ organizational commitment. Conclusions: The implications of the findings are that to promote teachers’ organizational commitment teachers should feel supported by their leadership team and that this leadership team should be characterized by group cohesion, role clarity, and goal orientedness. Recommendations for further research are provided

School self-evaluation and its impact on teachers’ work in England

This study, based on in-depth interview data from a sample of schools in the midlands of England, offers an analysis of UK teachers’ perceptions and understandings of school self evaluation at a point when national accountability procedures have required that all schools complete and constantly update a web-based self evaluation schedule, which is then used as the basis for high stakes external inspection. School systems and cultures of self evaluation were found to be diverse, complex and school-specific. Three broad cultural categories are proposed as a heuristic to illuminate: issues of compliance and resistance, teacher motivation and behaviours, understandings of professionalism and leadership, school ethos, job satisfaction, and the use and interpretation of school level data in relation to school self evaluation