‘Health first, safety first’:An analysis of the legal system and professional ethics for curriculum enactment in China

Nation-states have concerns about the health and wellbeing of their citizens and these concerns have directly or indirectly influenced educational reform and curriculum development. In 2000, China issued a directive of ‘Health First’ which applied to all elements of the education system. In its scale and scope, this represented a significant and far-reaching reform, ushering in a period where school leaders and teachers were expected to engage with new policy documents and develop curriculum practices to reflect the ambitions of ‘Health First’. This article provides an opportunity to explore the complex and dynamic processes of teachers’ curriculum enactment within the broader socio-political context. Our analysis offers a unique insight into the legal system in China and how this played an important role in teachers’ decision-making and professional practice. Guided initially by grounded theory, 22 physical education teachers in the north of mainland China were interviewed to explore their experiences of the reform to the curriculum. To develop a better understanding of how ‘Health First’ was taken up and enacted by teachers and specifically recognising the characteristics of a non-western research context, we deployed two theoretical concepts–‘technologies of the self’ and ‘self-cultivation’. Our findings reveal, rather than prioritising ‘Health First’, curriculum enactment was predicated on ‘safety first’ as a result of the complex interplay between teachers’ awareness of the legal system and their professional ethics, which led to these teachers interpreting the maxim of ‘Health First’ as ‘safety first’.</p

Pragmatic innovation in curriculum development: a study of physical education teachers’ interpretation and enactment of a new curriculum framework

There is an assumption that the ways in which teachers engage with policy are known, yet there is very little evidence to demonstrate how teachers engage with new policies and how this engagement patterns their approach to curriculum development (Kulinna, Brusseau, Cothran, & Tudor-Locke, 2012). Previous research has not clearly distinguished between teachers’ understanding of policy discourses and their subsequent enactment of curriculum. An opportunity to do so arose with the introduction in Scotland of a new curriculum. This new curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), intended to provide a framework within which teachers would exercise professional judgment and engage in School Based Curriculum Development (SCBD). The Scottish Government determined the overarching policy for education and Local Authorities were responsible for overseeing the development of the curriculum. CfE intended to empower teachers by encouraging innovation with the proviso that key experiences deemed to be central for pupil learning were addressed. This study aimed to provide insights into the process of SBCD in physical education as teachers prepared for the first year of teaching CfE. The research questions therefore focused on developing an understanding of how the lead teachers tasked with designing the physical education curriculum, within a newly formed curriculum area of health and wellbeing, had engaged with policy and enacted the curriculum. In order to gain a fine-grained understanding of curriculum leaders’ experiences of SBCD, this study drew its sample from a single local authority. The study adopted a research design of repeated interviews with nine teachers who led curriculum development in their respective schools. Two related orders of SBCD as reported and experienced by curriculum leaders emerge from the study: first order SBCD pertains to the process of engagement with policy discourses; and second order refers to the activities associated with the enactment of the curriculum. The findings reported in this thesis showed that events organised by the local authority to support teachers led to the development of a professional learning community which facilitated teachers' active engagement in SBCD. This active engagement required careful tailoring of new developments to the constraints and affordances of their individual schools. First order SBCD was a complex process of engagement/active interpretation and reinterpretation of policy as teachers considered the context for SBCD. These processes led to teachers viewing the broad aims of CfE as a reinforcement of existing practice and curricula. Discourses of accountability appear to have had the most influence in curriculum design decisions, overshadowing the discourses of health and wellbeing within CfE. Teachers’ professional judgements were influenced by regimes of accountability at national and local levels which patterned but did not determine schools’ and teachers’ responses. This is because second order SBCD reflected teachers’ perceptions that a wholescale transformation of physical education was not required or possible within the constraints of their contexts. Curriculum leaders concentrated their efforts on covering the broad aims of CfE and the ‘experiences and outcomes’ outlined in CfE through focusing on their approach to teaching and learning the existing physical education curricula. Thus, they saw health and wellbeing as only one element of physical education rather than as the key focus of their enactment of the curriculum. Teachers’ collective efforts at curriculum enactment were therefore depicted as pragmatic innovation as this encapsulates their responses to policy discourses as they developed a curriculum that would in their view effectively address the broad aims and purposes of CfE while taking account of the constraints of their local context. In contrast to preceding work, a more nuanced account of teacher agency is revealed; teachers were neither wholly the subject of policy discourse nor were they wholly free agents. It follows that if policymakers are seeking transformational change in physical education and an orientation of the subject towards health and wellbeing, there is a need not only for mechanisms to support professional learning, but also for regimes of accountability such as the inspection framework to reflect the policy aims of health and wellbeing more closely

The Lantern, 2015-2016

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Paternal Care in Biparental Rodents: Intra- and Inter-individual Variation

Parental care by fathers, although rare among mmmals, can be essential for the survival and normal development of offspring in biparental species. A growing body of research on biparental rodents has identified several developmental and experiential influences on paternal responsiveness. Some of these factors, such as pubertal maturation, interactions with pups, and cues from a pregnant mate, contribute to pronounced changes in paternal responsiveness across the course of the lifetime in individual males. Others, particularly intrauterine position during gestation and parental care received during postnatal development, can have long-term effects on paternal behavior and contribute to stable differences among individuals within a species. Focusing on five well-studied, biparental rodent species, we review the developmental and experiential factors that have been shown to influence paternal responsiveness, and consider their roles in generating both intra- and inter-individual variation. We also review hormones and neuropeptides that have been shown to modulate paternal care and discuss their potential contributions to behavioral differences within and between males. Finally, we discuss the possibility that vasopressinergic and possibly oxytocinergic signaling within the brain, modulated by gonadal steroid hormones, may represent the "final common pathway" mediating effects of developmental and experiential variables on intra- and inter-individual variation in paternal care