A critical approach to global citizenship in initial teacher training in the UK

This paper compares the evidence and robustness of a critical approach to global citizenship in the English Initial Teacher Training (ITT) sector of school-based training with that of Higher Education-based training. In recent years there has been a shift in market from mainly Higher Education provision to equal allocation of provision between school-based and Higher Education-based providers. It is core to the arguments in this paper that the impact to ITT provided via a Higher Education Institution (HEI) is likely, by virtue of their global recruitment of students, to take a critical approach to global citizenship to ensure that their international reputations are not only maintained, but enhanced. It is also likely that this will reflect in the content of the university-based courses. Additional to this is that the HEI ITT awards are made at Masters level, which school-based training is unable to offer. The paper examines the contrasts between the local paradigm for school-based training and the national and international paradigm of the HEI route. The comparison will further identify underlying issues of the pathways, which may impact on preconceptions of students entering Higher Education in particular and as such assist in informing policy approaches to developing a critical approach to global citizenship both by HEIs and of students

Pre-service teachers’ social media usage to support professional development: a communities of practice analysis

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of EducationThe current study was based in one higher education institution and examined pre-service teachers’ use of social media to support their own professional development whilst on school placement, through a community of practice lens. The trainees were registered on a one year secondary course designed to lead to a Post Graduate Certificate in Education with 60 credits at Masters Level combined with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) for England and Wales during which the researcher repeatedly interviewed a focus group sample from each subject cohort and analysed transcripts of these interviews through the lens of Wenger’s (1998) concept of a community of practice. The research took place in a national context of review and reform of teacher education in England. Some trainees, for example those studying at the higher education establishment at question, might experience considerable challenge in the school placement. Authentic self-reflection requires a safe place in which pre-service teachers can openly articulate with others what they might see as their own failures as well as successes in the classroom in order to develop a greater sense of self-efficacy and new ideas about teaching. In some instances, such as in the area of behaviour management, the national focus on maintaining good order means that it may become even more challenging and ultimately riskier to share the experience of failure because acknowledgement of this risks the possibility of failing to achieve the requisite standard for qualified teacher status. Besides, to gain qualified teacher status a trainee must attain the Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2013) which include a requirement that a professional teacher upholds the ethos of the school to which the trainee might not be sympathetic. Findings from this research cannot be generalised. However, in this small-scale study it was found that pre-service teachers used private social media to support each other on the course in a number of ways: to establish a group that might be viewed as a community of practice and then, as part of the core enterprise of becoming a qualified teacher, to offer or to receive shared practice or support from another pre-service teacher in the role of more knowledgeable other and to broker new ideas about teaching to each other and to schools themselves from the other communities to which they belonged. Those who networked socially as part of the community of practice were more organised around deadlines. They also more likely to manage risky and stressful situations collaboratively and present an enhanced image of “…a body of common knowledge, practices and approaches” (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2007, pp. 4-5) during their school placement which was unavailable to the trainee who did not participate within the online community. The scope for openly sharing practice and the development of learning communities among pre-service teachers is potentially restricted by the current national and local context of teacher education. However, one conclusion from this study might be that social media can potentially enable pre-service teachers to communicate privately in important ways that support their professional development whilst undertaking their training

Near-Field Limits on the Role of Faint Galaxies in Cosmic Reionization

Reionizing the Universe with galaxies appears to require significant star formation in low-mass halos at early times, while local dwarf galaxy counts tell us that star formation has been minimal in small halos around us today. Using simple models and the ELVIS simulation suite, we show that reionization scenarios requiring appreciable star formation in halos with $M_{\rm vir} \approx 10^{8}\,M_{\odot}$ at $z=8$ are in serious tension with galaxy counts in the Local Group. This tension originates from the seemingly inescapable conclusion that 30 - 60 halos with $M_{\rm vir} > 10^{8}\,M_{\odot}$ at $z=8$ will survive to be distinct bound satellites of the Milky Way at $z = 0$. Reionization models requiring star formation in such halos will produce dozens of bound galaxies in the Milky Way's virial volume today (and 100 - 200 throughout the Local Group), each with $\gtrsim 10^{5}\,M_{\odot}$ of old stars ($\gtrsim 13$ Gyr). This exceeds the stellar mass function of classical Milky Way satellites today, even without allowing for the (significant) post-reionization star formation observed in these galaxies. One possible implication of these findings is that star formation became sharply inefficient in halos smaller than $\sim 10^9 \,M_{\odot}$ at early times, implying that the high-$z$ luminosity function must break at magnitudes brighter than is often assumed (at ${\rm M_{UV}} \approx -14$). Our results suggest that JWST (and possibly even HST with the Frontier Fields) may realistically detect the faintest galaxies that drive reionization. It remains to be seen how these results can be reconciled with the most sophisticated simulations of early galaxy formation at present, which predict substantial star formation in $M_{\rm vir} \sim 10^8 \, M_{\odot}$ halos during the epoch of reionization.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; minor updates. Published in MNRAS Letter

Radio in advertising

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University, 1933. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations

We introduce a set of high-resolution dissipationless simulations that model the Local Group (LG) in a cosmological context: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (ELVIS). The suite contains 48 Galaxy-size halos, each within high-resolution volumes that span 2-5 Mpc in size, and each resolving thousands of systems with masses below the atomic cooling limit. Half of the ELVIS galaxy halos are in paired configurations similar to the Milky Way (MW) and M31; the other half are isolated, mass-matched analogs. We find no difference in the abundance or kinematics of substructure within the virial radii of isolated versus paired hosts. On Mpc scales, however, LG-like pairs average almost twice as many companions and the velocity field is kinematically hotter and more complex. We present a refined abundance matching relation between stellar mass and halo mass that reproduces the observed satellite stellar mass functions of the MW and M31 down to the regime where incompleteness is an issue, $M_\star \sim 5\times 10^5 \, M_\odot$. Within a larger region spanning approximately 3 Mpc, the same relation predicts that there should be $\sim$ 1000 galaxies with $M_\star > 10^{3}\,M_\odot$ awaiting discovery. We show that up to 50% of halos within 1 Mpc of the MW or M31 could be systems that have previously been within the virial radius of either giant. By associating never-accreted halos with gas-rich dwarfs, we show that there are plausibly 50 undiscovered dwarf galaxies with HI masses $> 10^5\,M_\odot$ within the Local Volume. The radial velocity distribution of these predicted gas-rich dwarfs can be used to inform follow-up searches based on ultra-compact high-velocity clouds found in the ALFALFA survey.Comment: 22 pages, 19 figures, 3 tables; v2 -- accepted to MNRAS. Movies, images, and data are available at http://localgroup.ps.uci.edu/elvi

On the stark difference in satellite distributions around the Milky Way and Andromeda

We compare spherically-averaged radial number counts of bright (> 10^5 Lsun) dwarf satellite galaxies within 400 kpc of the Milky Way (MW) and M31 and find that the MW satellites are much more centrally concentrated. Remarkably, the two satellite systems are almost identical within the central 100 kpc, while M31 satellites outnumber MW satellites by about a factor of four at deprojected distances spanning 100 - 400 kpc. We compare the observed distributions to those predicted for LCDM suhbalos using a suite of 44 high-resolution ~10^12 halo zoom simulations, 22 of which are in pairs like the MW and M31. We find that the radial distribution of satellites around M31 is fairly typical of those predicted for subhalos, while the Milky Way's distribution is more centrally concentrated that any of our simulated LCDM halos. One possible explanation is that our census is bright (> 10^5 Lsun) MW dwarf galaxies is significantly incomplete beyond ~ 100 kpc of the Sun. If there were ~8 - 20 more bright dwarfs orbiting undetected at 100 - 400 kpc, then the Milky Way's radial distribution would fall within the range expected from subhalo distributions and alos look very much like the known M31 system. We use our simulations to demonstrate that there is enough area left unexplored by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its extensions that the discovery of ~10 new bright dwarfs is not implausible given the expected range of angular anisotropy of subhalos in the sky.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRA