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This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek’s formulation of Lacan’s “prisoners game,” whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances are then related to the reflexive “praxes” of the authors’ doctoral study. We conclude that reflexivity is always part of a necessary uncertainty, whose “remainder” between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, generates an inescapably qualitative symbolon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of 'translation', reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE undertakes in placing numerical values on the quality of research outputs. How do we measure our 'pounds of flesh'? As a practical 'hermeneutics of suspicion' it seeks a 'provocative validity' in that its aim is to provoke clarity and reassurance from the authors of such RAE documents. In that ambition it has had some success, as the response from Margaret Brown, Chair of the Education sub-panel, demonstrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the state's contemporary construction of 'sex' as an educational problem in England. It does so by interrogating the notion of the 'pregnant teenager' as it is semantically and statistically constructed in accountability discourses, as well as research constrained within them. It then examines certain features of an exemplary solution to the problem, as proffered by one of the largest contemporary research projects into sex education in the United Kingdom (the RIPPLE project). A critique is offered of the 'scientific' nature of some of these findings. The authors claim conclusions to be undermined by statistical and rhetorical gerrymandering, a prejudicial rendering of pupil 'voice', and an underlying reductionism. The article concludes that many of the features of such current problem-constructing and solution-rendering can be characterised as a false invocation of 'Science', and that their conjunction fuels an enduring infantilisation of educational discourses about sex and sex education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the current state of qualitative inquiry by constructing an allegory of neo‐imperialism. It is based substantively on a history and contemporary anthro‐politics of the Congo and in particular the city of Kisangani; metaphorically on Conrad’s unsettling deployment of that same place as ‘the heart of darkness’; and ironically on homologies between certain kinds of quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) inquiry that currently seek to colonize and civilize unruly educational discourses. Overall it draws on postmodernist/poststructuralist theoretical and narrative strategies, and on philosophies of difference, in order to explore novel ways of thinking and telling the Other to the Same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information about the December 2004 issue of the journal "British Educational Research Journal."

Focuses on the development of professional user reviews (PUR) of educational research in Great Britain. Purpose of PURs; Description of the PUR process; Comparison between academic research reviews and PURs.

Editorial. Discusses developments in the August 2003 issue of 'British Educational Research Journal.' Appointment; Editorial board membership; Special issue for 2005; Contributors.

Editorial. Introduces a series of articles on the British government's education policy.

Stands of groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L. cv. Kadiri-3) were grown in controlled environment glasshouses at mean atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 375 or 700 μmol mol-1 and daily mean air temperatures of 28 or 32°C on irrigated or drying soil profiles. Leaf water (Ψl) and solute potential (Ψs), relative water content (RWC), stomatal conductance (gl) and net photosynthesis (Pn) were measured at midday for the youngest mature leaf throughout the growing season. Elevated CO2 and temperature had no detectable effect on the water relations of irrigated plants, but higher values of RWC, Ψl and Ψs were maintained for longer under elevated CO2 during progressive drought. Turgor potential (Ψp) reached zero when Ψl declined to -1.6 to -1.8 MPa in all treatments; turgor was lost sooner when droughted plants were grown under ambient CO2. A 4°C increase in mean air temperature had no effect on Ψs in droughted plants, but elicited a small increase in Ψl; midday gl values were lower under elevated than under ambient CO2, and Ψl and gl declined below -1.5 MPa and 0.25 cm s-1, respectively, as the soil dried. Despite the low gl values recorded for droughted plants late in the season, Pn was maintained under elevated CO2, but declined to zero 3 weeks before final harvest under ambient CO2. Concurrent reductions in gl and increases in water use efficiency under elevated CO2 prolonged photosynthetic activity during drought and increased pod yields relative to plants grown under ambient CO2. The implications of future increases in atmospheric CO2 for the productivity of indeterminate C3 crops grown in rainfed subsistence agricultural systems in the semi-arid tropics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent shifts within the popular conception of education as an aspect of the market economy positioning parent as consumer, teacher as producer and educated child as product have reformulated the various stakeholders as 'partners' in the business of educating children. This article, based upon data collected in an action research and development project, attempts to open up an interpretation of the dynamics of home-school relations in terms of a matrix of 'mobilisations' and 'demobilisations' between parents, teachers and children. In interpreting the agency/structure dualism in terms of such an interactive matrix, the article aims to establish some additional bases for practical and theoretical manoeuvres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a recurring complaint that practitioner-focused action research is under-represented in the literature. This article is written as an accessible account of an action research collaboration aiming to improve learning outcomes. It reports a teacher's innovation in regard to children's narrative writing strategies and evaluates the responses of the children to the changed processes of learning, and their prior and subsequent written work. It offers one approach to research-based professional practice and reflects on the viability of such approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a deconstruction of global evaluative discourses concerning school effectiveness and improvement. It portrays these discourses in anthropological terms, as 'cultural performances', and examines the ways in which technical discourses obscure elements of ritual, philosophy, myth and shamanism. The author concludes that such discourses, especially in their mediatized forms — as league tables — are a form of contemporary'spectacle'.They are our Olympic Games. The relation between these discourses and their cultural critique is then itself deconstructed in order to reflect on the nature and purpose of deconstruction as a means to contemporary cultural and educational insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a retrospective deconstruction of research compromises undertaken during `quick and dirty' contract evaluation. Constraining changes in the nature of research contexts; Methodological developments that create `transgressive validity'; Notions of `hybridity' in research methodology; `Negotiation' in research procedures.

Defines the lines between modernism and post-modernism in education. Exploration of a way of deconstructing the separation between modernism and post-modernism; Metaphors of difference.

1. An earlier version of this paper appears as a chapter in Stronach, I., ‘Transition Learning: a reflexive approach to education and politics in a new age’ unpubl Ph.D., CARE, University of East Anglia, 1989. A condensed version of the ‘ritual’ section of the paper appears in eds Brown, S. & Wake, R. ‘Education in Transition. What role for research? A collection of papers to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of The Scottish Council for Research in Education’, SCRE, Edinburgh, 1988. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]