Making mature undergraduates’ experience visible:exploring sense of belonging and use of digital technologies

The aim of this paper is to explore the role that informal networks, interactions and digital technologies play in supporting the participation in undergraduate education of eleven mature students coming from widening participation backgrounds in one research-intensive United Kingdom (UK) university. For eighteen months mature students were co-researchers of the longitudinal qualitative study DD-LAB: Digital Diversity Learning and Belonging'. Along with problematizing the heterogeneity of students grouped under the category and home location were as influential as age when understanding their participation in university. Digital technologies played a role in fostering belonging and participation in academic and social spaces. Yet, engagement in a digital world did not necessarily mitigate their positioning as a minority group within a research-intensive institution. Although digital technologies and informal networks helped mature students overcome institutional struggles and expanded modes of belonging, we conclude that the institutional and social positioning constrained mature students sense of academic and social integration, leading to continuing inequalities that universities need to address

Representations of Dictatorship in Contemporary Chilean Children's Literature

This article addresses the disturbing fact that few contemporary Chilean children’s books deal with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990). It explores why dictatorship has such an elusive presence in contemporary Chilean children’s literature, how it has been represented in general, and how children are portrayed in books that do address Pinochet’s oppressive regime. Four Chilean children’s books are examined in detail: two that represent the dictatorship from an outsider perspective, produced by authors in exile, and two written from an insider perspective by authors that grew up under Pinochet’s dictatorship. While the former represent children as superheroes whose actions transcend the dictatorship’s repression, the latter depict children who are politically aware, but do not make the adults’ political fight their own. This key difference is problematized in terms of the implications for narratives of dictatorship produced for a young audience

Under-represented students’ university trajectories:building alternative identities and forms of capital through digital improvisations

This paper focuses on widening participation in relation to under-represented student negotiations of and trajectories through university by drawing attention to students’ informal digital practices for studying and social interactions associated with undergraduate student life. Drawing on a two-year UK study and Holland et al.’s [1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press ] framing of agency, culture and identity making across ‘figured worlds’, we consider the importance of informal studying and socio-academic practices and the role of digital technologies in fostering agency and identity making. The significance of this study lies in revealing the particular importance of improvisation and collective agency for under-represented students participating in university. Whilst acknowledging that the technologies can also reproduce social inequalities, we conclude that, through the increasing interconnectedness of academic and social interactions, the digital improvisations offer creative opportunities for students to negotiate spatial, social and academic inequalities and lead to new/alternative identities and develop stronger social, cultural and educational capital

Educational effectiveness in Chilean secondary education:Comparing different ‘value added’ approaches to evaluate schools

This article reports an original investigation into school performance measures and the multilevel nature of pupil achievement data in the Chilean school system using a sample of 177,461 students, nested within 7146 classrooms, 2283 secondary schools and 313 municipalities. The data-set comprised Year 10 students’ 2006 SIMCE test’s results in two subject outcomes (language and maths) matched to their prior attainment in grade 8 and family characteristics. The analyses showed the lack of precision of two-level models to draw conclusions regarding the effectiveness of Chilean secondary schools as well as the extent to which different pupil intake, background and context features of Chilean secondary schools influence students’ performance. The results show substantial and statistically significant municipal, school and classroom effects in Chile, and how the estimation of school effects changes according to the explanatory variables controlled for in the analysis and the outcome analysed. These results are compared with similar studies carried out in Latin America, as well as in other countries (England and China), in order to situate the findings in the broader knowledge base of Educational Assessment and Effectiveness Research

Place-based disparities faced by stuck schools in England: a contextual understanding of low performance and the role of inspection outcomes

In 2017 the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) identified stuck schools that have failed inspections continuously since 2005. Our study used quantitative methods to identify factors associated with improving or remaining stuck by analysing a sample of 580 primary and secondary stuck schools and their matched comparison group. We found that not only geographical location, student population, and deprivation play a part when explaining stuckness, but critically, persistently receiving less than good inspection grades contributed to this through two negative cycles: Schools located in more challenging places or with more disadvantaged pupils received worse inspection grades, which triggered increases in teacher turnover, and further received less than good Ofsted inspection judgements. These findings call for place-based inspections that consider school location and student composition, and recognise the detrimental role that inspections can play when judging school effectiveness, particularly of schools educating the most disadvantaged communities

School improvement and peer learning partnerships: building organizational resilience in primary schools in England

IntroductionThis article looks at organizational resilience (OR) through the analysis of a sub-set of data gained from an independent and embedded mixed methods implementation and process evaluation (IPE) of the Schools Partnership Program (SPP) implemented over 3 years (2018–2021) and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in England. We describe ways in which SPP ‘learning map’ addresses the (i) anticipation, (ii) coping and (iii) adaptation stages and the extent to which SPP helped building organizational resilience. Taking this theoretical framework as a foundation is a novelty, as despite OR has become prominent in the academic literature apart from a few exceptions there is a dearth of international research examining OR within the school sector.MethodsA sample of 422 primary schools that took part in SPP (treatment schools) and their comparisons are analyzed applying the organizational capability-based framework. Drawing on SPP empirical data from numerous data collection strategies (interviews, surveys, shadowing school reviews and improvement workshops), the extent to which schools’ resilience capacities were improved is analyzed.ResultsOur findings suggest that SPP supported the development of OR in SPP primary schools. Despite facing several challenging external factors (student deprivation, the COVID disruption, changes to the external accountability framework and competing demands of other partner organizations) and internal factors (teacher attrition, need to developing leaders, upgrade pedagogical skills and encourage student subgroups who were underperforming) SPP schools exert (1) knowledge building through training, the review process, professional dialogue, learning from each other, as well as receiving and giving feedback. Regarding (2) resource availability, schools used SPP as a scaffold to build improvised strategies to access and mobilize shared human and physical resources; (3) social resources were built in the SPP through social capital, sharing of knowledge, enhancing a shared vision and trust. Finally, (4) SPP promoted lateral power dynamics driven by professional learning and accountability.DiscussionOverall, the paper extends the understanding of school peer review approaches for school improvement and adds to the OR international literature by presenting features that extend it toward building system resilience

Value-added indicators for a fairer Chilean school accountability system:A pending subject

Although schools’ relative contribution to pupils’ progress is increasingly used in accountability systems around the world, momentum for value-added models (VAM) has not been reached in Chile. This small-scale study explores qualitatively the policy context in which this omission takes place, by analyzing policy documents and interviewing local policymakers and researchers about their views on VAM. These agents and official documents not only point to political, methodological and pragmatic reasons for and against value-added indicators, but also highlighted ethical and legal reasons pro (but not against) VAM. Overall, the most prominent reason for including VAM into the new accountability system was the ethical consideration. The notion that a fairer indicator could make justice, especially for those schools working in disadvantaged contexts, was a recurrent idea. In contrast, the most recurrent reasons against VAM were methodological. Whilst research on VAM for the Chilean school system has been conducted over the last decade, it has impacted very little the policy arena. Given that the creation of frameworks for assessing value-added indicators takes time, needs policy and research support and needs to consider potential unintended consequences, the road towards including them into the Chilean school accountability system is just starting