'Answer your names please': a small-scale exploration of teachers technologically mediated 'new lives'

Conducted over a three year period in an English secondary school, this study employs a distributional analysis across three scales to explore Real Time Attendance Registration (RTAR). Ethnographic data, Day and Gu’s teachers’ new lives, and Foucault’s normalisation, are mobilised to investigate how RTAR mediated the key informant’s work. I argue that the teacher in this study faced complex, demanding and normalised conditions emanating from register taking becoming a technology mediated and performativity led activity. I suggest that from examining RTAR, those interested in teachers’ new lives might gain an understanding of how, in the case in point, technology mediated the normalisation of the attendance registration process

Why bother with masterliness?

In this chapter, I draw on an empirical study to discuss how teachers inhabiting different stages of their career trajectories chose to engage with master's level professional development (PD) and masterliness (LaVelle, 2012). I argue that performative agendas in schools have increasingly led to two types of masterly professional development - the Institutional (IPD) and the personal (PPD). I maintain that IPD engagers choose an overt and career focussed model of masterliness and with it the mantra of tools such as Random Controlled Trials. This is in contrast to PPD engagers who saw masterliness as a self reflective, and potentially covert, process and those informants - master’s non-engagers (MNE) - who turned their backs on masterliness completely. I maintain that an examination such as this has implications for the PD practice of teachers, school leaders and policy makers

Archaeogenetic evidence of ancient Nubian barley evolution from six to two-row indicates local adaptation

Background Archaeobotanical samples of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) found at Qasr Ibrim display a two-row phenotype that is unique to the region of archaeological sites upriver of the first cataract of the Nile, characterised by the development of distinctive lateral bracts. The phenotype occurs throughout all strata at Qasr Ibrim, which range in age from 3000 to a few hundred years. Methodology and Findings We extracted ancient DNA from barley samples from the entire range of occupancy of the site, and studied the Vrs1 gene responsible for row number in extant barley. Surprisingly, we found a discord between the genotype and phenotype in all samples; all the barley had a genotype consistent with the six-row condition. These results indicate a six-row ancestry for the Qasr Ibrim barley, followed by a reassertion of the two-row condition. Modelling demonstrates that this sequence of evolutionary events requires a strong selection pressure. Conclusions The two-row phenotype at Qasr Ibrim is caused by a different mechanism to that in extant barley. The strength of selection required for this mechanism to prevail indicates that the barley became locally adapted in the region in response to a local selection pressure. The consistency of the genotype/phenotype discord over time supports a scenario of adoption of this barley type by successive cultures, rather than the importation of new barley varieties associated with individual cultures

Legitimation, performativity and the tyranny of a ‘hijacked’ word

Outstanding education is a high level policy narrative in England rehearsed by school leaders, politicians, policy makers and inspectors alike. Lyotard’s (1979) work on the 'legitimacy' of knowledge and performativity, and Foucauldian discourse-based analysis (1972, 1991), are mobilised to examine outstanding. The paper explores how informants in the English state secondary education sector described and experienced outstanding. From examining policy documents and empirical data, the paper suggests that outstanding has become a performative tool "hijacked" by inspection regimes. It concludes that, despite the informants' best efforts, the neo-liberal and performative policy discourses which surround outstanding appear to increasingly wield a disproportionate, even tyrannical, influence upon the English education system

Molecular dynamics of ion transport through the open conformation of a bacterial voltage-gated sodium channel

The crystal structure of the open conformation of a bacterial voltage-gated sodium channel pore from Magnetococcus sp. (NaVMs) has provided the basis for a molecular dynamics study defining the channel’s full ion translocation pathway and conductance process, selectivity, electrophysiological characteristics, and ion-binding sites. Microsecond molecular dynamics simulations permitted a complete time-course characterization of the protein in a membrane system, capturing the plethora of conductance events and revealing a complex mixture of single and multi-ion phenomena with decoupled rapid bidirectional water transport. The simulations suggest specific localization sites for the sodium ions, which correspond with experimentally determined electron density found in the selectivity filter of the crystal structure. These studies have also allowed us to identify the ion conductance mechanism and its relation to water movement for the NavMs channel pore and to make realistic predictions of its conductance properties. The calculated single-channel conductance and selectivity ratio correspond closely with the electrophysiology measurements of the NavMs channel expressed in HEK 293 cells. The ion translocation process seen in this voltage-gated sodium channel is clearly different from that exhibited by members of the closely related family of voltage-gated potassium channels and also differs considerably from existing proposals for the conductance process in sodium channels. These studies simulate sodium channel conductance based on an experimentally determined structure of a sodium channel pore that has a completely open transmembrane pathway and activation gate

Docility and dilemmas: mapping ‘performative evaluation’ and informal learning

Educators working in museums, zoos and botanic gardens are increasingly required to demonstrate impact. These requirements position ‘performative evaluation’ as the dominant model, one which also acts as a political, non-neutral and managerial form of accountability. In contrast, ‘practice evaluation’ is intended to be democratic, dialogic and developmental. To explore this contrast, Foucault’s concept of the docile body is directed toward interviews with five educators from Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom who worked in museums, zoos or botanic gardens. In addition to their work mediating informal learning, all five also had responsibilities to provide evaluation reports to audiences including managers, trustees, funders, policy makers and politicians. Analysis of these interviews identified a set of dilemmas that the participants faced - dilemmas which illustrate how performative evaluation becomes a disciplinary mechanism which produces docile bodies. I argue that such evaluation is not only inappropriate for the context of informal learning, but undemocratic and non-dialogic. The paper concludes that a reset of performative evaluation from an accountability technology, to a developmental one - along a more sophisticated reading of how informal learning is defined - would not only generate rich evaluate data but mitigate against educators being rendered docile by the process

Responsible participation and housing: restoring democratic theory to the scene

Tensions between individual liberty and collective social justice characterise many advanced liberal societies. These tensions are reflected in the challenges posed for representative democracy both by participatory democratic practices and by the current emphasis on (so-called) responsible participation. Based on the example of ‘community’ housing associations in Scotland, this paper explores these tensions. It is argued that the critique of responsibility may have been over-stated – that, in particular, ‘community’ housing associations offer the basis for relatively more inclusive and effective processes of decision-making than council housing, which relies on the traditional processes and institutions of representative local government for its legitimacy

Scarcely visible? Analysing initial teacher education research and the Research Excellence Framework

In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework is a mechanism used for ranking the quality of research in higher education institutions. While there has been analysis of the entire Research Excellence Framework, and of the Education unit of assessment more generally, analysis of how research on initial teacher education featured in the Research Excellence Framework has been minimal. In this article, we report on Phase I of an 18-month project that mapped the extent to which initial teacher education-focused research was included in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Employing a novel methodology and a theoretical framework based on policy as text and discourse, we identify a sample of 12 higher education institutions that provided initial teacher education programmes and returned outputs to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Analysis of over 1,600 outputs suggest that in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework only 5.5 per cent of these were focused on initial teacher education. We discuss the methodological approach, some headline findings and areas for future research, arguing that these add evidence to the literature of initial teacher education-focused research and, in doing so, can inform policy at the levels of schools, higher education institutions, Research Excellence Framework and the government. We conclude that although the Research Excellence Framework only concerns the UK, similar exercises are becoming increasingly prevalent globally, and therefore the extent to which research on initial teacher education was marginalised in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework is of interest to all concerned with teacher education