Search

This paper examines how the policy process around initial teacher education (ITE) during the pandemic of 2020 was experienced by the leaders of ITE programmes across England.Education policies,it is argued, are solutions to perceived problems, revealing latent values that drive action. Group interviews with leaders of ITE programmes across the education sector, focused on the lived experience of ITE policy developments during the first wave of the COVID-19 period (March to July 2020). The analysis drew upon three policy drivers derived from an examination of teacher education policy (prior to the pandemic) in four 'high performing' English-speaking countries (according to PISA). The three policy drivers: the economy and global competitiveness (the rationale for change); accountability and regulatory framework (the technologies for change); and the core purpose of schooling and teacher professionalism (the values underpinning change); show how the temporary policy shift soon reverted back to previous priorities. Agency and autonomy were experienced by teacher educators which enabled them to exercise expert judgment, but there were also the significant 'gaps' in the expertise of policymakers. The research reveals how values influences policy formation, creating divisions within England's ITE community, and isolating it from international policy trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scoping review aims to explore the role of gender in refugees' educational access, experiences, and outcomes in Europe since 2015. Gender can act as a significant barrier to education, and gender stereotypes and bias can affect learning opportunities and outcomes. As a response, a scoping review was conducted to explore the role of gender in refugees' educational access, experiences, and outcomes in Europe since 2015. This review follows a systematic process of reviewing and synthesising texts compiled in the Hub for Education for Refugees in Europe (HERE) Knowledge Base to fill the gaps in knowledge about gender‐related post‐migration experiences of refugees and displaced individuals who have arrived in Europe. The review includes studies that focus on educational services for refugees in Europe and uses a meta‐ethnographic synthesis approach to data analysis and synthesis. Using a socio‐ecological framework, it was found that at the individual level, access and progression were shaped by previous educational attainment, health issues, survival tactics and future aspirations; at the micro‐level, by relationships with family, educators and peers; at the meso‐level, by public perceptions of refugee learners and home‐school interactions; and at the macro‐level, by administrative barriers, the asylum system, socio‐economic factors and the tailored opportunities and community support available. The majority of the studies referred to the experiences of women and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, Instagram is one of the most popular and influential social networking sites. The most controversial of Instagram's many interactive features has proven to be its augmented reality (AR) "face filters," which superimpose a variety of effects onto photos and videos of users' faces. Most contentious are "plastic surgery" filters, which drastically augment the user's features. These filters, along with the broader impacts of AR filters on women's experiences of their real-world bodies, are only recently becoming the focus of scholarly investigation; nevertheless, these issues have drawn significant attention in the popular press. To identify and harness critical insights from contemporary online journalism on this topic, this article presents targeted analysis of a carefully selected sample of articles published between 2019–2020. We identify emergent themes in this sample regarding the socio-cultural impacts of Instagram's AR filters—most notably: makeup norms, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), and corporeal liberation—and analyse these in consideration of cyberfeminist and feminist beauty/media theories. We find the sample's discussions of these filters offer a multifaceted exploration of both the negative impacts of this image-altering technology on women's self-perceptions, as well as its positive potentials in relation to the exploration of digital aesthetic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the century, mainstream media representations of trans people have significantly increased, and trans celebrities have been a determining force in this cultural movement. Media interest in trans people's lives has expanded to encompass trans children, and the trans child celebrity has become a relatively new recruit in the realm of stardom. Nevertheless, little scholarly work has attended to their specificities. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines the particularities and impacts of contemporary trans child celebrities, taking two celebrity case studies as its focus: North American trans celebrity Jazz Jennings, star of the long-running reality television programme I am Jazz; and Australian trans celebrity Evie Macdonald, who plays the central character in the Australian trans-themed children's television series First Day. This article examines intersections of transnormativity, gender norms, and discourses of 'childhood innocence' as they manifest in media representations of Jennings and Macdonald. We argue that there is a problematic tendency for mainstream media to present these trans child celebrities in transnormative frames; nevertheless, evident in these representations is the potential for broader shifts from transnormative to transformative approaches to representing trans child celebrities, and therefore to how they shape public discourse regarding trans people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unprecedented reform to teacher education in England, through the Initial Teacher Training Market Review, led to the threat of removal of the right for established providers to offer programmes of initial teacher education beyond 2024 without reaccreditation. Such policy reform has been constructed in relation to a perceived gap in research about knowledge of the best way to educate or train new teachers. Using Lee S. Shulman's concept of signature pedagogies we consider the varying ways in which theoretical ideas are underpinned by common models of, and approaches to, teacher education pedagogy. We mobilise Shulman to analyse five models, which we categorise as 'knowledge-first' or 'people-first', to see the extent to which, if at all, there is a theoretically informed signature pedagogy for initial teacher education. Our analysis shows that there is no one discernible knowledge base or theory that underpins a signature pedagogy for teacher education, but a suite of possibilities about how a signature pedagogy of teacher education could be understood. Moreover, it is our contention that policy reform of initial teacher education based on econometric analysis fails to recognise the most important dimension of a signature pedagogy, learning how to act with integrity as a professional teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unprecedented reform to teacher education in England, through the Initial Teacher Training Market Review, led to the threat of removal of the right for established providers to offer programmes of initial teacher education beyond 2024 without reaccreditation. Such policy reform has been constructed in relation to a perceived gap in research about knowledge of the best way to educate or train new teachers. Using Lee S. Shulman's concept of signature pedagogies we consider the varying ways in which theoretical ideas are underpinned by common models of, and approaches to, teacher education pedagogy. We mobilise Shulman to analyse five models, which we categorise as 'knowledge-first' or 'people-first', to see the extent to which, if at all, there is a theoretically informed signature pedagogy for initial teacher education. Our analysis shows that there is no one discernible knowledge base or theory that underpins a signature pedagogy for teacher education, but a suite of possibilities about how a signature pedagogy of teacher education could be understood. Moreover, it is our contention that policy reform of initial teacher education based on econometric analysis fails to recognise the most important dimension of a signature pedagogy, learning how to act with integrity as a professional teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present the increased visibility of trans young people as agentic actors within the media is paired with ongoing negative media coverage of trans young people's lives. Further, in order to secure visibility within the media trans young people are often expected to adhere to transnormative framings. This commentary highlights the need for a focus on how trans young people resist, rework, and engage with such framings, and for mechanisms that support trans young people's right to determine how they will be portrayed in the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government policies are forcing universities to narrowly emphasise employability, which does not bode well for the Creative Industries (CI). Despite being one of the fastest-growing and diverse employment sectors, CI degrees have been criticised for failing to deliver adequate employment prospects. The employability focus, which serves 'the [economic] system' [Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2 Lifeworld and Ssystem: The Ccritique of Functionalist reason, Translated by T McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press], ignores both the employment precarity in the sector and diminishes universities' capacity to serve the lifeworld (Harbernas) to facilitate graduate citizenship. Dichotomising employability and citizenship fail to consider the supercomplexity of the twenty-first Century [Barnett, Ronald. 2000a. Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Buckingham: Open University Press], constituted by the co-existence of a multiplicity of epistemological frameworks. In this paper, we draw on supercomplexity and the concept of the system and lifeworld to investigate how to develop CI curricula that foster employability and citizenship. Using an illustrative case, we demonstrate how CI curricula can be designed to support students to navigate multiple ideological geographies, facilitate employability, and contribute to civic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As researchers working within a neoliberalist academic regime propagated by discourses of responsibilisation, risk and prudentialism, we experienced a dilemma about whether to publicly present views expressed by research participants that critiqued the policy position of the government department that funded the research. Our dilemma was exacerbated because research funding is relatively difficult to attain for women academics. However, in recognising that rural women's voices are often marginalised in rural policy formation, and to maintain our ethical responsibility to these participants, in this article we share these potentially contentious research findings and in doing so problematise neoliberal strictures that can erode individual researcher autonomy and that of universities as independent agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the world, children are forced to leave their homes for far‐flung destinations. This global phenomenon has particular impact in Europe, where there are now more child refugees than since World War II. Education plays an important role for children with extraordinary experiences seeking to build meaningful lives in their new context. This article offers a new theoretical approach to underpin reforms to educational policy and practice for refugees in schools in resettlement contexts in Europe. The new conceptual framing is grounded in empirical work in England and Sweden, and brings two theories together: 'participatory parity' (Fraser) and 'resumption of an ordinary life' (Kohli). Kohli's concepts of 'safety', 'belonging' and 'success' have resonance with practitioners from Sweden and England as they work to meet the needs of their new arrivals. Fraser's conceptual lenses of redistribution, recognition and representation highlight the barriers to achieving the right to inclusive education for refugee children in each context. The interdependence of both theories shapes a new framework. The theoretical understandings offered in this article have been developed with practitioners and add to the field by offering a robust moral and operational approach to shaping pedagogical principles for policymakers and educators working in resettlement communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the multifaceted socio-cultural functions of Australian children's television. As social distancing measures forced school students to study from home, local children's TV producers and distributors contributed to home-based learning. Yet, in response to the pandemic, the Federal Government has indefinitely suspended Australian children's television quotas, the regulatory framework that sets minimum hours of local children's content for commercial television broadcasters. In response to government imposed budgetary restraints, public broadcaster, the ABC, has also made redundances in its children's content department. Such changes have occurred at a critical juncture in which the sector's long-standing contributions to the education of Australian children and pedagogy of local teachers, caregivers and parents have been brought to the fore. We argue that this pedagogical function is a core but often overlooked element of the socio-cultural value of the sector that has been highlighted during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports a study of the barriers faced by headteachers seeking to include young asylum seekers and refugees into secondary schools in England. We trace the new discourses and assemblages of authority created at city level by recent policy changes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with headteachers, we share their experiences of navigating layered ecologies of systemic challenges to their inclusive stance towards provision for newly arrived children. We argue that structural and policy moves in England towards greater emphasis on controlling (im)migration and economistic measures of educational performance, alongside centralised funding and governance and the reduction of place-based regional autonomy, have led to greater invisibility of asylum-seeking and refugee pupils and to greater vulnerability and visibility/accountability of school leaders. These changes have had an adverse impact on inclusion in English schools and cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the current global refugee crisis this paper emphasises the fundamental role of education in facilitating the integration of young new arrivals. It argues that a humanitarian problem of such scale requires a commensurate humanitarian response in the form of socially-just educational policies and practices in resettlement contexts within Europe. Utilising the theoretical concepts, 'participatory parity' (Fraser) and 'resumption of an ordinary life' (Kohli), we explore educational policy-making in Sweden and England, noting how the framing of these policies indicates how different nation states view their role in the global migration crisis. In England, child refugees are rendered invisible and not a legitimate focus of national educational policy, whereas in Sweden they are foregrounded in policy discourse though not necessarily in policy enactment. The paper concludes that newly arrived future citizens of Europe require socially-just policy and practice to best serve their own and their resettlement context's best interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The teacher preparation landscape in England has been subject to radical policy change. Since 2010, the policy agenda has repositioned initial teacher preparation as a craft best learnt through observation and imitation of teachers in school settings. Simultaneously, a market-based approach to the recruitment of pre-service teachers has led to significant changes for prospective entrants to the profession. In the enactment of policy between 2010 and 2015, the roles of universities and voices of prospective teachers were systematically silenced. Using critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate how both actors have been positioned in, and have accommodated and resisted, the current policy discourses. These findings highlight the importance of problematising and understanding these emerging issues at local and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgender is a marginalised category to which reality TV has given visibility, yet it is usually overlooked in observations regarding the minority groups that have gained mainstream representation through these programmes. Popular Australian reality TV shows have provided a unique space for the constructive representation of certain queer subjectivities. The Australian reality TV contestants in question present gendering that embraces ambiguity, that is, they demonstrate the deliberate disruption and blurring of gender/sex category divisions. This article examines the ways in which Australian reality TV's representations of transgender contestants remain robustly queer while also being negotiated and made palatable for 'family' television audiences. It asserts the reality TV shows that feature transgender performance orchestrate a balance between queer expression and its containment. This article also takes as a case study a particularly successful Australian transgender reality TV contestant, Courtney Act. It argues Act's representation of queerness was 'managed' within the normative framework of mainstream television yet she is still significantly troubled by gender binaries during her time on Australian screen. In 2014, she appeared as a contestant on the United States' queer-themed reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race and again proved to be a reality TV success. This transnational intersection of transgender performance signalled the productive possibilities of international cross-pollination in regard to affirmative reality TV representations of marginalised subjectivities. At the same time, however, it also revealed the localised nature of reality TV, even in those shows with an international queer appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools and the families they serve are sometimes perceived as deficient and in need of fixing. One response has been the implementation of evidence-based family intervention programmes, which may be highly regulated and prescriptive as a condition of their (often philanthropic) funding. This article seeks to explore and bring to the foreground the often hidden role of the pre-existing, informal community networks with a view to more authentic evaluation of these externally imposed programmes. The article draws on a range of qualitative data reflecting the lived experiences of participants-including parents and other community members-in a family and parenting programme at an English primary school. The analysis uses the work of Tönnies as a theoretical lens. It suggests that while there are tensions caused by the rigid requirements of external programmes, these are overcome in many cases by the highly effective, but often unacknowledged, contributions of the informal aspects of community. It is argued that these operate within and complement the formal programme. Far from subverting the more overt procedures, they actually enable it to function successfully, leading to additional, unanticipated transformations among participants. The article concludes that these organic, often invisible connections need to be identified, documented and nurtured if their full potential is to be recognised and realised when evaluating similar interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on research into the work of Greenshoots, a small company of creative practitioners who provide opportunities for young people to work on projects involving visual and creative practices with a strong link to local heritage. Two specific projects form the focus of the paper: Riot and Blank Canvas. Both aimed to provide opportunities for young people to work with professional artists and performers to create a site-specific exhibition and performance in a disused warehouse space on the edge of the developing Creative Quarter in Nottingham. The projects took place out of school, and the research focused on the creative processes and practices involved in the production of texts created by the young people as they inhabited the space and developed, within a community of peers and artists, representations of that urban space. This article explores the ways in which the projects open up the potential for young people to engage with literacy practices, which traverse the boundaries of space, of art forms and of notions of culture and heritage. Two theoretical frames are used in the paper: Lave and Wenger's 'legitimate peripheral participation' (1991) and various scholars' explorations of place-based approaches. In this way, the article aims to contribute to understandings of the diverse roles and potentials of young peoples' creative practices and literacies in and out of school contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study of support provided by non-school-based mentors of secondary science teachers in England. It focuses on the identity development of beginning teachers of physics, some of the recipients of the mentoring. Drawing on the analysis of interview and case study data, and utilising third space theory, the authors show how external mentors (experienced, subject specialist teachers who were not based in the same schools as the teachers they were supporting) facilitated opportunities for mentees to negotiate and shape their professional identities, and made valuable contributions to three distinct and important aspects of beginning teachers’ identity development. The paper argues that non-judgemental support from external mentors enhances beginner teachers’ professional learning and identity development through the creation of a discursive ‘third’ space in which mentees are able to openly discuss professional learning and development needs, discuss alternatives to performative norms and take risks in classrooms. Opportunities for beginner teachers to engage in such activities are often restricted in and by the current climate of schooling and teacher education within England. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The lived experiences of young people are becoming increasingly marginalised within the narrowly defined curricula of neoliberal contexts. Many young people are also cast within the media according to deficit discourses of youth, which contributes to the fragmentation of communities and the limitation of interaction between generations. This article describes a film project in which young people living in an ex-mining community in the Midlands of England worked in and with their community to create a representation of where they live. As part of the process, the young filmmakers did more than connect to other people’s memories as repositories of information; both as process and as product, their film can be seen to connect shared narratives of people and place, across time and space. We argue that this project offers a timely opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which we understand learning in and out of English classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beginning teachers of English are entering a profession in which their subject is increasingly framed according to prescriptive models of literacy. This is happening at a time of shift away from university ITE provision towards school-led training. We offer a spatialised theorisation of the ways in which beginning teachers of English have drawn from the balance of practical and theoretical approaches encountered in their qualifying year to engage with tensions between policy and practice. We suggest that university ITE provides important interstitial spaces in which they can explore some of these tensions and navigate pedagogies, principles and values. In doing so, they are negotiating alternatives, which, we argue, represent powerful potential for their future within the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study of the work of ‘external mentors’ associated with three programmes of support for the professional learning and development (PLD) of secondary science teachers in England. Focusing on outcomes from analyses of data derived from interviews with 47 mentees and 19 mentors, the paper supports and extends existing research on the construction and maintenance of fabrications in schools, and identifies omissions in the evidence base relating to teacher PLD. It is argued that the kinds of fabrications revealed by the teachers interviewed for this research present a serious impediment to their opportunities for school-based PLD, and that the deployment of external mentors (i.e. those not based in the same schools as the teachers they support) can provide a potentially powerful antidote to this. A number of implications for policy and practice in teacher professional learning and development are discussed. Amongst these, it is argued that more teachers should have the opportunity to access external support for their PLD, and that policy makers and head teachers should seek to reduce the degree to which teachers’ ‘performance’ is observed, inspected and assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the UK there are grave concerns about retention and attrition rates within the teaching profession, particularly in challenging schools. These are compounded by worries about the gap that will be left as long-serving teachers reach retirement age. This article is about the working lives of long-serving teachers in three high-poverty urban schools in England. In a climate in which teaching is tightly controlled and suffering from problems of retention and recruitment, the teachers discuss intensely personal and emotional commitments to their work-place. Qualitative in-depth interviews with 20 long-serving teachers, all of whom had management responsibilities, are used to explore their lives and careers. These histories evoke a strong sense of the ideas and values that make up their personal and professional identities. These are then contrasted with the ideas and values in officially mandated views of progression within the profession. Within the stories of their professional lives, the teachers talk about the emotional dimensions of their work and the emotional ties of their 'work-place'. The article concludes that recognition of the emotional dimensions within teachers' work at an official level could go some way to helping with recruitment and retention in schools facing challenging circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the evaluation of a unique university-based early professional development (EPD) programme in England that enabled newly and recently qualified teachers to have continued contact with their initial teacher preparation provider. The programme was designed to enhance the induction, EPD and retention of beginning teachers of secondary science, graduating from the university's Postgraduate Certificate of Education initial teacher preparation course, through the provision of development days and the growth of a support network involving beginning and more experienced teachers. The main findings are that the programme helped to compensate for limitations of existing induction and EPD provision and to provide continuity and coherence between the beginning teachers' initial teacher preparation and EPD. The new teachers perceived it to be a distinctive and strong programme that fostered reflective practice and addressed the emotional and affective side of teacher development. The findings are discussed within their broader research and policy contexts, and some implications for policy, practice and further research are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]