Learning and Instruction: Social-Cognitive Perspectives

In this article, we try to expand the lenses classically used in social psychology of development, and in particular, in the post-Piagetian tradition, to recent contributions of social and cognitive dynamics in development and learning. Psychological development has to be redefined as involving socially framed, culturally mediated, and interpersonally negotiated processes, and the dynamic relation between the person, others, objects, and instruments that are reconfigured through teaching–learning activities. The units of analysis, besides the traditional focus on the individual and/or isolated cognitive event, also include nowadays peer interaction and partners' roles, dialogical processes, argumentation, and specific institutional features of human practices, as illustrated through experimental social psychology. According to this general framework, learning and thinking appear more clearly as the collaborative result of autonomous minds confronting viewpoints and cultural artifacts (tools, semiotic mediations, tasks, division of roles) and trying to manage differences, feedbacks, and conflicts to pursue their activities. Moving from one activity to another, and from one space to another (pretest, joint activity, posttest), children have to reorganize their understanding, their language, and the organization of their social interactions

Bringing the politics back in: public value in Westminster parliamentary government

We challenge the usefulness of the ‘public value’ approach in Westminster systems with their dominant hierarchies of control, strong roles for ministers, and tight authorizing regimes underpinned by disciplined two-party systems. We identify two key confusions: about public value as theory, and in defining who are ‘public managers’. We identify five linked core assumptions in public value: the benign view of large-scale organizations; the primacy of management; the relevance of private sector experience; the downgrading of party politics; and public servants as platonic guardians. We identify two key dilemmas around the ‘primacy of party politics’ and the notion that public managers should play the role of platonic guardians deciding the public interest. We illustrate our argument with short case studies of: the David Kelly story from the UK; the ‘children overboard’ scandal in Australia; the ‘mad cow disease’ outbreak in the UK; the Yorkshire health authority's ‘tea-parties’, and the Cave Creek disaster in New Zealand

The ‘curriculum challenge’: Moving towards the ‘Storyline’ approach in a case study urban primary school

This article draws on an inquiry into the design and implementation of the curriculum in a case study urban primary school in the north of England. In response to the introduction of the revised National Curriculum in September 2014, teachers and the school head engaged in a critical discourse around their perceptions of students’ attainment and engagement across the curriculum, and explored alternative curriculum design and pedagogies. Supported by ‘academic partners’ (Beckett, 2011, 2016; Beckett and Wrigley, 2014), teachers were introduced to the ‘Storyline’ approach (Bell et al, 2007) and encouraged to consider a shift from a rigid and functional curriculum towards more flexible approaches which emphasise problem solving, critical literacy and communication in multiple form. The argument presented here is twofold: firstly, it is suggested that moving towards more ‘open architectures’ (Wrigley, 2007) improves students’ engagement with learning by reducing teaching to the test and creating more socially responsive and real-life learning experiences; this is then contrasted with current ‘top-down’ models of prescriptive curriculum design tied to a raft of high-stakes standardised tests which constrains teachers’ efforts to engage in this process