Search results

The impact of political change in England between 2010 and 2016, has been particularly evident in the way the neoliberal agenda has shaped legislation for Initial Teacher Education (ITE). This chapter will explore the way in which the teaching profession in England has seen tensions mounting between those who see teaching as merely a technical “craft,” something that requires a scant “training” program, and those who frame the education of teachers as a more holistic activity; one that should take account of the pedagogies of adult learning, being a journey of critical reflection and lifelong learning. Drawing on evidence from recently published research studies and a small scale research project with members of Association for Partnership in Teacher Education in England, six dimensions of the current school–university partnership culture are identified. How those involved in ITE are affected by these elements is then critiqued. The findings show how ITE providers now find themselves juggling involvement in a variety of routes into teaching – like the roman rider straddling various horses. Their ability to balance the “disturbances” that arise from the rapidly changing central government policies in England, potentially challenges the integrity of the teaching profession.

This study uses a phenomenology method to investigate the experiences of married Muslim women while having romantic conversations via online dating sites during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixteen participants were selected via purposive sampling, and the data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. The results confirm that resistance to Islamic marriage limitations is the underlying reason accounting for Muslim women's romantic chat. However, “premarital experiences in virtual space” and “chat as a remedy for loneliness” create the causal conditions of romantic chat, and “experience of family restrictions” and a “sense of freedom” provides the foundation for an online romantic chat. It is worth noting that those who voice a sense of “unhappy marriage” and “husband's sexual coldness” are more likely to turn to sex chat during the COVID-19 pandemic. The consequences of digital romantic conversations for married Muslim women are “chat addiction” and “feeling a sense of betrayal.”

School choice is a global phenomenon with significant variations in terms of conception, design, and viability. In the city of Buenos Aires, State funding to the private sector of education allows for free choice. The purpose of this study is to analyze the values that are at stake in the family process of school choice. I draw on the theory of cultural evolution (Inglehart, 2018) to analyze the interviews. I interviewed 30 parents who live in the city of Buenos Aires and had to choose school for their children. It was possible to infer four categories that condense the materialistic and post-materialistic values: preeminence of materialistic values relative to security and protection; preeminence of materialistic values relative to academic achievement; preeminence of post-materialistic values relative to socialization and preeminence of post-materialistic values relative to political concerns.

The English sector is characterised by an expanding and increasingly differentiated set of higher education providers (HEPs) and an ever-more diverse student body. As a consequence, HEPs are as differentiated in their widening participation (WP) approaches as they are in every other aspect of the business of HE, and this has led to tensions between why and how they should go about the business of WP. Are HEPs driven by the desire to enhance social justice or merely responding to regulatory pressure? This chapter discusses how changing market regulatory regimes have interreacted with, and often conflicted with, institutional missions as they try to respond to the dual policy imperatives discussed in earlier chapters: the economic, human capital expansionary dynamic and the desire to enhance social justice through access to the HE system.

This chapter examines the differing ways in which the criminal responsibility of children has been understood in English and Australian common law. The doctrine of “doli incapax” has for many centuries worked to establish a presumption in law that children between the ages of around 10 and 14 are incapable of forming criminal intent, unless it can be shown that they are capable of ‘guilty knowledge’ about their actions. In this approach, children are presumed to be ‘naughty’ until it can be shown that they are ‘bad’. However, events such as the murder of James Bulger in 1993 have led to the abolition of the doctrine in the UK, and its questioning in Australia. The chapter will outline how and why the law’s distinction between adults and children in relation to crime has become unstable, and explain the implications of the legal conception of childhood for the sociology of childhood more broadly. It will also explore how a closer look at the history of the doli incapax presumption sheds considerable light on the central and active role played by the judiciary and the legal profession, as opposed to other social and professional groups, in the development of a particular legal construction of childhood.

Teacher professional development is a perennial topic in teaching and teacher education. While it is largely agreed that the professional development of teachers is a necessity, what that professional development entails and who decides its content and delivery is disputed. This chapter revisits critical issues in the professional development of teachers. Different forms of professional learning, the influence of collaboration, the pursuit of inclusion and social justice, and the role of technology are discussed. In the future, it is expected that professional development contexts and opportunities will be reimagined along with a new calibration of face-to-face and virtual pedagogies.

This is a conceptual paper. I argue that knowledge-construction, or learning in a profession, has changed with the introduction of professional doctorates, though the divide between these new forms of doctoral study and the older and more established forms such as the PhD are now not as wide as they once were. In particular, three elements of the knowledge-construction process are implicated here. The first of these is a move towards learning environments which prioritise situated-theoretical applications of the theory-practice relationship at the expense of technical-empiricist, technical-rational, multi-methodological and multi-discursive variants. The second is movement towards different sites of learning, so that instead of the knowledge-construction process taking place exclusively in universities or institutes of higher education, the workplace is now central to the construction of learning environments. And the third is the development of new types of knowledge-construction, and these are now acting to reframe relationships between the professions and the state. This has resulted in forms of deprofessionalisation, with some professions in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world experiencing significant losses of autonomy and independence in relation to ownership of their specialized bodies of knowledge and skills, control of the means for credentialising these bodies of knowledge, and renegotiated professional mandates, leading to restrictions on their capacity to determine for themselves these specialized bodies of knowledge and those learning environments in which practitioners acquire them.

England is a clear example of a country where government has imposed a stranglehold over curriculum development over the last 30 years, driven by a belief in the power of markets and testing to improve education. We provide an account of the evolution of a national curriculum in England, along with the growing importance of the school inspection system, which has served as a form of surveillance and as a constraint on curriculum development in schools, resulting in a very subject dominated curriculum. This has been exacerbated by demise of many traditional meso level curriculum actors and the emergence of a different assemblage of support. We give particular attention to the prominence given to interventions in pedagogy and curriculum, set within a school effectiveness paradigm. We explain that within government rhetoric there is encouragement to innovate but we show through research evidence that accountability pressures overwhelm this message and that younger teachers have not been introduced to or trained in curriculum development processes. In the final section of the chapter, we describe some schools which are going against the grain and innovating, but they do stand very much as oases in a curriculum desert.