Search results

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the impact of organisational policies around inclusion on individual academic practices, and to develop an understanding of the factors which enable or prevent shifts towards inclusion in higher education learning and teaching.

The paper presents data from the document analysis phase of a larger research project. To achieve an understanding of the complex process of development towards an inclusive higher education culture within one focal university, the research took a qualitative approach, underpinned by a critical realist perspective which acknowledges and demands the investigation of multiple levels of reality. The documentary analysis presented here used a constant comparative technique. Documents were analysed inductively by the project team, leading to the identification of key emergent themes.

Three themes related to the development of an inclusive higher education culture emerged from the analysis of the data. These were: learner empowerment; changing practice through challenging practice; inclusive practice as good practice. The focal university’s vision for an inclusive culture was expressed inconsistently across data sources, and did not provide clear indications of concrete shifts in practice which would be required in order to enact that vision.

The data are analysed and discussed through the lens of socio-cultural theory, allowing for a complex understanding to emerge of the ways in which participation in the valued practices of a university community is affected by the influence of policy and strategy.

This paper discusses how educational policies have shaped the development of large-scale educational data and reviews current practices on the educational data use in selected states. Our purposes are to: (1) analyze the common practice and use of educational data in postsecondary education institutions and identify challenges as the educational crossroads; (2) propose the concept of Data Literacy (DL) for teaching (Mandinach & Gummer, 2013a) and its relevance to researchers and stakeholders in postsecondary education; and (3) provide future implications for practices and research to increase educational DL among administrators, practitioners, and faculty in postsecondary education.

We used two guiding conceptual frameworks to analyze the common practice and use of educational data in postsecondary education institutions and identify challenges as the educational crossroads. First, we used the 4Vs of Big Data by Rajan (2012) to examine the misalignment between the policy mandate and the practices. The elements of the 4Vs of Big Data – volume, velocity, variety, and veracity – help us to depict how Big Data enables educators to organize, store, manage, and manipulate vast amounts of educational data at the right moment and at the right time. Second, we used the conceptual framework for DL proposed by Gummer and Mandinach (in press). They interpret DL “as the collection, examination, analysis, and interpretation of data to inform some sort of decision in an educational setting” (p. 1, in press).

Using the guiding frameworks, we identified four educational data crossroads as follows:

Crossroad 1: Unintended Increase in Workload Volume;

Crossroad 2: Unrealistic Expectations of Data Velocity;

Crossroad 3: Data Variety in Silos; and

Crossroad 4: Data Veracity and Policy Agenda Mismatch.

In this paper, we explain each of these crossroads in more detail with some examples.

Much of the existing body of literature, exemplary practices, as well as federal and state funding has been focused on K-12 education contexts. In this paper, we identify current practices and challenges of educational data in the institutions of higher education. Additionally, this paper presents the application of the exemplary practices of data literacy development in postsecondary education and implications for future practices of data literacy development in postsecondary education.

Global focus on reforming teachers has resulted in the inclusion of multiple survey questions about teachers’ professional learning activities in large-scale international studies. A cross-national analysis of these survey data will likely enhance our understanding and inform the future direction regarding teacher professional development policy and practice. Yet we do not know whether these surveys measure the key features and their contextual factors of teachers’ professional learning activities to allow a systematic cross-national analysis. Based on international and U.S. literature, I develop a conceptual model of teachers’ professional learning activities in global context and analyze relevant survey items used in three major international studies – TIMSS, PIRLS, and TALIS. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the coverage of these survey items and a direction for improving data collections of teachers’ professional learning activities in large-scale international studies.

The purpose of this paper is to lay out how advanced practitioner development occurs in New Zealand primary health care settings. The paper specifically focuses on mechanisms occurring across policy creation and in practice leading to successful role development.

The authors applied a realist approach involving interviews, document review and field log observations to create refined theories explaining how successful development occurs.

Three final mechanisms were found to influence successful advanced practitioner role development: engagement in planning and integrating roles; establishing opportunities as part of a well-defined career pathway; and championing role uptake and work to full scopes of practice.

This research focuses on one snapshot in time only; it illustrates the importance of actively managing health workforce change. Future investigations should involve the continued and systematic evaluation of advanced practitioner development.

The successful development of advanced practitioner roles in a complex system necessitates recognising how to trigger mechanisms occurring at times well beyond their introduction.

Potential candidates for new roles should expect roadblocks in their development journey. Successfully situating these roles into practice through having a sustainable and stable workforce supply provides patients with access to a wider range of services.

This is the first time a realist evaluation has been undertaken, in New Zealand, of similar programmes operating across multiple sites. The paper brings insights into the process of developing new health programmes within an already established system.

This paper examines the introduction of neoliberal policies in the mining sector in Armenia and the civil society opposition to those policies and practices. While recognizing that neoliberal policies have global reach, the paper examines how neoliberal policies are locally translated, manifested, and resisted in Armenia and analyzes the factors that shape resistance to neoliberal policies. It argues that the anti-mining activists have created new subjectivities and spaces for activism where they resist and challenge neoliberal policies and practices in the mining sector as well as the heretofore accepted formal practices of civil society advocacy and engagement in policy processes. Although the anti-mining activists have not changed the way mining is practiced in Armenia, they have opened up debates around mining, and neoliberal policies more generally, and created new understandings and practices of civic activism and social mobilization in Armenia.

English governance has repeatedly had a tendency to veer between national, regional and local centres of power and influence. This has often led to profound disagreements, sometimes even open conflict. National policy guidance is usually helpful, if developed through consultation, to steer a clear, coherent direction for the system. But a narrow, excessively top‐down, mechanistic target‐driven approach can lead to a prevailing culture of ticking boxes at the expense of real patient priorities. Government ministers and civil servants, however, are often caught in a tension between being too dogmatic, or alternatively too flexible and giving responsibility to local agencies, whereupon people may complain about a ‘postcode lottery’ in services. Balancing perspectives and narratives in a coherent way for policy development and implementation and service improvement is a major challenge of leadership. The creation of the National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) was designed to bring together the local, regional and the national in a form that would see policy and practice mutually developed and nurtured at all levels of governance.

The paper presents and discusses the findings of a Strategic Insight Programme placement that explored the Youth Justice Board for Wales (YJB Cymru), a division of the YJB for England and Wales since the abolition of the regional structure in April 2012. The focus of the placement was on exploring the role of YJB Cymru in the development of youth justice policy and practice in the unique, partially devolved context of Wales. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The research was conducted over a six-month period from February to July 2013. A multiple methods design was adopted, consisting of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders (YJB Cymru staff, Welsh Government staff and Youth Offending Team staff), observations of policy and practice mechanisms (YJB Cymru meetings, YOT projects) and documentary analysis of YJB Cymru publications.

Thematic analyses demonstrated that YJB Cymru has an increasingly important role in policy and practice development structures and processes in England and Wales more broadly (e.g. within the YJB for England and Wales) and in the Welsh national context specifically. YJB Cymru fulfills a role of dual influence – working both with government (UK and Welsh) and youth justice practitioners (mainly YOT managers and staff) to mediate and manage youth justice tensions in the partially devolved Welsh policy context through relationships of reflective and critical engagement.

This study draws inspiration from the groundbreaking research of Souhami (2011) and builds on those findings to provide a unique insight into the organisation and role YJB Cymru in the complex and dynamic context of youth justice in Wales.

Global mobility remains one of the most pressing challenges of our times. Countries in the north are turning to major ‘sending’ countries in the south to secure their cooperation in controlling their borders and in repatriation processes. By explicitly linking migration to global security threats and weak governance, these migration control initiatives are justified by development goals and sometimes financed by official development assistance (ODA). By connecting criminology with international development scholarship, this chapter seeks to advance our understanding of the novel intersections between criminal justice, security and development to govern mass migration. Focusing on UK policies and the analysis of specific programmes, it interrogates what does the sustainable development goal (10.7) of facilitating ‘orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration’ concretely entail? And to what extent does the language of ‘managed migration’ legitimise restrictive border controls policies and even conflict with other global development goals?

This article describes the background to the What Works initiative launched by Barnardo's in the early 1990s, with a focus on the What Works for Children series of reports published from 1995 onwards. The author describes the intellectual and social context of the initiative, the approach taken, and some of the barriers to and levers for the adoption of research in practice are identified. The article describes more briefly the ways in which those in the Research and Development (R&D) team at Barnardo's worked towards knowledge transfer, both inside and outside the organisation. The article concludes with reflections on the impact of Barnardo's initiatives, the journey still to be travelled to strengthen the knowledge base of those providing services to children in education, health and social work, and the need for further work both to strengthen the evidence base and to increase synergies between research, policy and practice.