Enabling collaborative lesson research

© 2024 The Authors. The Curriculum Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association.In this paper, we interrogate and justify the design of a local project that used collaborative design research in a secondary school in England. As authors, we represent teachers and teacher educators engaged in design research, whereby we acknowledge the difficulties implicit to university and school collaborations within a performative culture. Our analysis recognises the struggle for research‐informed professional judgement in the decision‐making and actions of educators that are situated in schools. A professional learning project is analysed to position teachers and teacher educators as practitioner researchers. In this respect, Stenhouse's work provides an analytical framework that is both a lens through which to interpret the nature of collaborations, as well as a methodology that allows us to understand the way in which we navigate the gap between educators' aspirations and the curriculum design and teaching within the project. The collaborative design research project was stimulated by an aspiration to make trigonometry accessible to low prior attaining pupils in a secondary mathematics classroom. This provides a stimulus for understanding the conditions that enable collaborative lesson inquiry and to question whether it can provoke raised aspirations for young people in inclusive classrooms. This allows us to understand the work of teachers as researchers and research users in an increasingly messy teacher education context. We interrogate the potentially problematic connection between research and practice within collaborative inquiry, as we understand how we enable research that is “held accountable for its relevance to practice” because “that relevance can only be validated by practitioners” (Stenhouse, 1988, p. 49)

Active agents of change: A conceptual framework for social justice-orientated citizenship education

From Crossref journal articles via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: epub 2022-05-03, issued 2022-05-03Publication status: PublishedSocial justice–orientated citizenship education (SJCE) can help young people to develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to work collectively towards solutions to problems such as human rights violations, global poverty and environmental sustainability (DeJaeghere and Tudball, 2007; Banks, 2017; Hartung, 2017). Furthermore, SJCE can enable young people to think critically, consciously and compassionately and allow them to grow intellectually with a concern for equality and justice. This paper presents a conceptual framework for SJCE for educators and educational researchers wishing to explore citizenship education within social justice contexts. The framework is based on four constitutive elements: agency, dialogue, criticality and emancipatory knowledge, and has its philosophical foundations deeply rooted in the values and principles of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2004; McLaren, 2014; Giroux, 2016). This conceptual framework for SJCE is ultimately concerned with developing justice-orientated active agents of change who are concerned with making the world more democratic, equitable and just

Moving in the wrong direction: A critical history of citizenship education in England from the early twentieth century to the present day

This article critically explores the development of citizenship education in England from the early twentieth century to the present day. Using Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) citizenship education framework as a lens, it is argued that citizenship education in England, from the early twentieth century to the present day, has failed to move beyond education for personal responsibility and civic participation, towards a more justice-orientated conceptualisation. It is maintained that citizenship education during much of the twentieth century was framed around personal responsibility, deference and patriotism. However, with the election of the New Labour government in 1997 and the introduction of citizenship education as a statutory secondary school subject in 2002, there was a move towards the development of participatory dispositions and the enhancement of political literacy in young people. From 2010, however, there has been a retrograde shift towards citizenship education for personal responsibility and character education (Kisby, 2017; Starkey, 2018; Weinberg and Flinders, 2018), as well as an increased focus on Fundamental British Values. The article concludes by considering the recommendations from the House of Lords’ (2018) report on citizenship education and argues that, while they may help reposition citizenship education within a participatory framework, they still fail to move towards a justice-orientated conceptualisation of citizenship education which focuses on the solidarity of the global community and how best to take actions that benefit all of humankind

Handling Objects in Primary and Secondary Educational Settings: Facilitating Educational Processes and Challenging Heteronormative Gender Constructs: The Case Study of Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700

Using a case study from a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded project, Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700, this chapter seeks to investigate the way in which object handling sessions of original Museum objects in classrooms from age 6-16 for c.400 pupils can engage students with the discipline of History and challenge hegemonic and heteronormative gender constructs in educational settings

Touching, feeling, smelling and sensing history through objects. New Opportunities from the 'material turn'

Lots has been written in recent years about how history teachers can bring academic scholarship into the classroom. Here, this interest in academic practice a step further, examining how pupils can engage directly with the kinds of sources to which historians are increasingly turning their attention is highlighted. Building on a funded research network that brought together academic history and art history departments, Michael Bird and his co-authors worked with museum curators and trainee teachers to bring artefacts from the rich (but often overlooked) collections of their local museum into schools

Enabling collaborative lesson research

From Crossref journal articles via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2023-10-02, accepted 2024-03-10, epub 2024-03-18, issued 2024-03-18, published 2024-03-18Article version: VoRPublication status: PublishedAbstractIn this paper, we interrogate and justify the design of a local project that used collaborative design research in a secondary school in England. As authors, we represent teachers and teacher educators engaged in design research, whereby we acknowledge the difficulties implicit to university and school collaborations within a performative culture. Our analysis recognises the struggle for research‐informed professional judgement in the decision‐making and actions of educators that are situated in schools. A professional learning project is analysed to position teachers and teacher educators as practitioner researchers. In this respect, Stenhouse's work provides an analytical framework that is both a lens through which to interpret the nature of collaborations, as well as a methodology that allows us to understand the way in which we navigate the gap between educators' aspirations and the curriculum design and teaching within the project. The collaborative design research project was stimulated by an aspiration to make trigonometry accessible to low prior attaining pupils in a secondary mathematics classroom. This provides a stimulus for understanding the conditions that enable collaborative lesson inquiry and to question whether it can provoke raised aspirations for young people in inclusive classrooms. This allows us to understand the work of teachers as researchers and research users in an increasingly messy teacher education context. We interrogate the potentially problematic connection between research and practice within collaborative inquiry, as we understand how we enable research that is “held accountable for its relevance to practice” because “that relevance can only be validated by practitioners” (Stenhouse, 1988, p. 49)