Literacy policy and English/literacy practice: : Researching the interaction between different knowledge fields

This article considers the role of research in disentangling an increasingly complex relationship between literacy policy and practice as it is emerging in different local and national contexts. What are the tools and methodologies that have been used to track this relationship over time? Where should they best focus attention now? In answering these questions this paper will consider three different kinds of research perspectives and starting points for enquiry: 1. Policy evaluation. The use of a range of quantitative research tools to feed policy decision-making by tracking the impact on pupil performance of different kinds of pedagogic or policy change (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2010). 2. Co-construction and policy translation. This has for some time been a central preoccupation in policy sociology, which has used small-scale and context specific research to test the limits to the control over complex social fields that policy exercises from afar (Ball, 1994). Agentic re-framings of policy at the local level stand as evidence for the potential to challenge, mitigate or reorder such impositions. 3. Ethnographies of policy time and space. Ethnographic research tools have long been used to document community literacy practices, and in training their lens on the classroom have sought to focus on the potential dissonance between community and schooled practices. It is rarer to find such research tools deployed to explore the broader policy landscape. In the light of debate within the field, part of the purpose of this article is to examine how ethnographic research tools might be refined to study how policy from afar reshapes literacy practices in the here and now. (Brandt and Clinton, 2002)

Negotiated literacies: how children enact what counts as reading in different social settings

This thesis takes as the object of its enquiry children's talk about the range of different media texts which they circulate amongst themselves in informal settings. It uses this data to raise questions about how we can conceptualise literacy in a multimedia age; the role that talk about texts plays in establishing what it means to read and to be a reader; and the relationship between talk, text and context. The thesis contributes to the development of a social theory of literacy by linking differences observed in ways of talking about texts to different aspects of the social contexts in which those texts circulate. It redefines the social contexts for reading which shape a given literacy event in terms of the social processes through which texts are made available to particular readers ii. particular settings. These social processes are described in terms of the social regulation of texts. The methodological and theoretical issues the thesis tackles arise largely from the attempt to construct a new language of description (See Bernstein, 1996) for the range of talk about texts collected as part of the research data. The language used to describe the data has become the means for making visible aspects of literacy as a social practice which have been previously overlooked. In this respect, the act of description is therefore in itself theoretical: it helps formulate what it refers to

Researching the prospects for change that COVID disruption has brought to high stakes testing and accountability systems

This paper explores the disruption that COVID has brought to the normal functioning of performance-based accountability systems and asks whether this has created new possibilities for those organising against the use of high stakes testing in education. Drawing on a sequence of research projects exploring primary schools’ responses to the pandemic in England during 2020-21, this article considers the ways in which the pandemic creates new conditions for dismantling high stakes testing and accountability regimes, and the role of research in making the case for change

Teacher recruitment, retention and development – rethinking policy and practice priorities

This first event in the What Matters in Education? panel discussion series, considered why governments have struggled to find effective and sustainable solutions to the teacher recruitment retention and development crisis. These are global concerns. Yet without clarity on the underlying issues, the solutions offered may risk making things worse

The impact of covid-19 on education: three proposals to help develop a more resilient system

Gemma Moss considers whether COVID-19 can act as a catalyst for change in education, leading to different policy choices and a more stable education system, better able to address the dilemmas that prolonged disruption in education and which current policy does so little to address

Women in and out: Forster, Social Purity, and Florence Barger

Women and contemporary women’s movements exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable or developed female characters are conspicuously absent from the narrative. Maurice’s apparent disinterest in women has been read as evidence of Forster’s misogyny, which was one of the reasons the novel was roundly dismissed when it was posthumously published in 1971, as critics – self-identified feminists included – turned on Forster with highly gendered accusations of childishness and fantasy. Admittedly, Maurice is significantly different from Forster’s previous work, in which narration is often focalised through central female characters – one thinks especially of Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View, and Margaret Schlegel in Howards End. Forster does not need to be entirely exonerated to note that the marginal position of women in Maurice stems from more complex issues. The novel rejects not women per say, but the sexual conservatism of the social purity movement, which had a substantial social influence at the time Maurice was being written. The historical and social context of the novel’s original composition, in 1913-14, is important to appreciate how Maurice’s characterisation of women – and also its attitude towards sex and the body, which has since been lauded by feminist critics – works against contemporary social purity narratives, which argued for women’s innate and superior virtue, and connected morality with sexual restraint