Search results

This chapter explores the use of three different approaches to capturing other perspectives in lesson study: lesson artefacts, pupil voice and pupil participatory approaches. Lesson artefacts and pupil voice appear to be the more common, whereas pupil participatory approaches are more recent initiatives in a lesson study context. Observation of pupils provides one perspective, but is limited because, among other things, it does not include the pupils’ perspectives. These approaches, especially when used together in triangulation, can provide a broader and potentially deeper understanding of pupil learning.

The roles that ethnographers adopt in their fieldwork are “perhaps the single most important determinant of what he [or she] will be able to learn” (McCall & Simmons, 1969, p. 29). My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate that these roles can be in a state of rapid flux, depending not only on who the researcher is interacting with, but also on a complex system of constantly changing settings for those interactions.

This chapter examines how lesson study is reported with pre-service teachers in initial teacher education programmes. Different voices are included talking about the ways in which lesson study has been reported in various settings so far. The chapter concludes with a qualitative study of student-teachers’ reflections drawn from their reports, written after finalising the lesson study cycle at the Universidad Católica de Valencia. The analysis provides support for the premise that lesson study significantly promotes research in ITE and develops a more critical approach to literature about pedagogy and good practice in teaching.

This article is a response to Carpenter’s ‘Virtue Ethics in the Practice and Review of Social Science Research: The Virtuous Ethics Committee’. While applauding his attempt to introduce the concept of ‘virtue ethics’ into the contemporary discourse about the practice and review of social science research, I suggest that his thinking is overly dependent on the work of Macfarlane (2009 & 2010); particularly with respect to drawing a sharp contrast between this concept and the use of principles to construct an ethical framework for research and its review. I argue that Carpenter’s article would have benefited from a critique of the conceptual limitations of Macfarlane’s work, particularly in a context where social science research is increasingly participatory. Following O’Neill (1996), I argue that ethical principles can be understood as universal values that orientate practical reasoning or deliberative inquiry into what constitutes virtuous action in particular cases. Such deliberative inquiry may also be guided by what Nussbaum (1990) depicts as ‘rules of thumb’; summaries of good concrete judgements and decisions that are the cumulative outcomes of past deliberations about how to realise ethical principles in action. I argue that these ‘rules’ do not prescribe action since they cannot be considered as ethically prior to concrete descriptions of cases. Rather, they evolve out of the deliberative process of case study itself. As Nussbaum (1990) points out, Aristotle argued for the ethical priority of concrete description over any general rule that might be applied to it. This does not, however, deny the practical significance of summaries of judgements based on a constant comparison of cases. Instead, such rules can be understood as practical hypotheses to be tested by participants in a social practice within each new concrete situation. I argue that one limitation of the dispositional frameworks that Carpenter cites as providing a basis for the practice and review of social research is their highly generic character. Much research aimed at achieving social ends is shaped by more specifically orientated professional and social practices governed by particular ends-in-view that can be conceptually linked to them. In conclusion, I suggest that, since much social research explicitly aspires to be a participatory and democratic process of knowledge construction, it should provide a starting point for ethical review, where engagement between ‘the committee’ and ‘researchers’ transcends the bureaucratic exercise of reviewing documents.

Working as a teacher and an educational psychologist in England and in Iceland for a number of years, I slowly realised that I had to abandon much of what I had learned during my training in psychology and research methodology. The social world of school children was simply far more complex and uncharted for the known theories and methods to suffice. I had to function at a different level to that of a traditional scientist or a clinical psychologist if only to be accepted by the children I worked with let alone gain answers to the type of questions I had been asking for some time (Marinósson, 1998): Why are so many children and youths disaffected by school since the purpose of education is ostensibly to serve their needs? How do children who find their life in school difficult perceive the school and other people there? How do the adults at school understand these pupils and their work? What shapes their reactions in the school context?

Despite the fact that almost two million learners in state-funded schools in England learn English as an additional language (DfE, 2020), there is no official policy for developing home languages (HLs), even though the use of HL in classrooms for academic purposes is linked to academic attainment (Smyth, 2012). Cummins' (1976) language interdependence hypotheses were employed as the analytical framework for the original study underpinning this chapter, as it showed the benefits of HL in the classroom. The study included 13 Somali-origin pupils in a Key Stage 2 class (8 boys and 5 girls – 10–11 years) and their 7 parents. Parents and pupils were separately taught HL literacy once per week for 24 weeks as extracurricular activities. HL literacy pre- and post-assessments, semi-structured interviews with pupils and parents and a researcher reflective diary were used for data collection (Abikar, 2020). The data from HL assessments when comparing the pre- and post-assessments showed improvement in areas assessed, except for writing. The semi-structured interview data demonstrated that learning HL literacy was beneficial for: social and spiritual identity, cognitive skills needed in the classroom and fostering communication between the family, relatives and the wider community. Additionally, positive attitudes to learning HL were evident within the study findings. The study strongly highlighted that it would be beneficial for pupils if there were strategies which would help them to maintain their HL; thus, this chapter will argue the case for the introduction of a HL policy for primary education in England. Overall, the study made recommendations for policymakers to introduce HL literacy sessions for the benefit of pupils.

Contemporary primary school populations in the Netherlands represent a wealth of languages, ethnicities, and cultures. In 1999, 14.7% of the total population of 1.54 million pupils were registered as minority pupils (Statistics Netherlands, 2001). Most of these are of Turkish (23.7%) and Moroccan (20.4%) origin, speaking Turkish, Arabic, and/or Berber at home apart from or instead of Dutch (Extra et al., 2001). As in many other Western European countries, a significant difference can be observed between the school achievements of pupils belonging to a cultural-linguistic minority and the pupils belonging to the majority group (Walraven & Broekhof, 1998). Turkish and Moroccan pupils, for instance, lag behind a bit less than half a learning year in arithmetic and more than two learning years in Dutch language proficiency by the end of primary school (Tesser & Iedema, 2001). Besides sociolinguistic background, socio-economic, cultural, and school factors account for the underachievement of language minority pupils.