This doctoral research investigates possibilities and limitations of 'education borrowing' in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago in the midst of competing objectives of improving quality in secondary education, encouragement of 'sharing' by the international community and the impulses towards the 'centre'. Two types of 'borrowing' are identified. The first involves 'horizontal borrowing', in which countries borrow from each other in the manner suggested by UNESCO and Commonwealth Secretariat policy documents. The second involves 'vertical borrowing' in which states are influenced by policies from the 'centre', usually countries of powerful significance due to relationships with the metropole or in the bid to raise achievement. The thesis analyzes literature on both types of 'education borrowing' and identifies policies encouraging 'horizontal borrowing' by the international community. Fieldwork was undertaken to identify pulses of foreign influence and innovation for policies in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. 50 interviews and 87 hours of observation for the purpose of triangulation took place between January - November 2007. Respondents include teachers, heads of departments, senior school managers, policymakers, local academics and members of regional and international institutions. Mathematics curricula and teaching were selected as the focus for examining policy. Drawing on the policy review and fieldwork data, patterns of policy 'borrowing' in the Caribbean are uncovered and considerations for policymakers are noted. There are two main findings: 1) Despite encouragement by UNESCO and Commonwealth Secretariat policy documents, there was no evidence of 'horizontal borrowing' between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago and 2) Possibilities for cross-national attraction were limited due to the overriding attention paid to the global 'centre' for 'vertical borrowing' rather than concern for regional growth and cohesion. There appear to be three tenets of limitations to 'horizontal borrowing': 1) Island policymakers look internationally for innovation, thereby rejecting policies advocating 'borrowing' from each other; 2) Sharing is not part of the island histories and cultures; and 3) Forces of tradition bind existing teaching and education values. Although some of the implications of this thesis may be valuable in other contexts, the findings cannot be extrapolated to the whole of the Caribbean, to other small states or to developing countries in general. As states are often treated similarly in policies advocating 'horizontal borrowing', more analysis is needed to unpack patterns of influence, dynamics of change and the needs of under-researched countries.

This study aims to contribute to the development of models of teaching science at Key Stage 2 (pupils aged 7-11 years) by considering the role of 'interactive whole class teaching', a teaching strategy advocated by the UK government's primary literacy and numeracy strategies in the late 1990s. An exploration of the meaning of 'interactive whole class teaching' brings a sociocultural perspective on the role of talk to the predominantly social constructivist models of teaching science in primary schools. Two case studies of primary teachers' practice have been constructed, each consisting of a sequence of lessons that make up an entire science topic, providing a rich, situated account of the role of interactive whole class teaching in science lessons over an extended time. A key method of enquiry has been the analysis of video data and respondent validation through video stimulated reflective dialogues. The meanings of dialogic and authoritative episodes of whole class teaching are considered in terms of the development of conceptual and procedural scientific knowledge on the social plane of the class over episodes, lessons and sequences of lessons. The findings indicate that whole class teaching has a role in the ongoing elicitation and discussion of children's ideas about concepts and procedures, creating and maintaining an intermental development zone for the class. It also has a role in modelling scientific procedures, and in exploring the relationship between phenomena, experiment and explanations to construct a version of science. Recommendations are made as to how the existing models of teaching science could make the relationships between the nature of whole class interactions, type of teaching activities and pedagogical aims more explicit. The case studies raise questions about determining an appropriate balance between dialogic and authoritative talk in primary science to develop a discourse that values both existing scientific knowledge and children's appropriation and transformation of this knowledge through negotiation within the social plane of the primary classroom.

This submission provides a commentary on thirteen of Richard Riddell's publications between 1999 and 2010. It explains the professional and policy contexts from the early 1990s onwards, when the author was a senior Local Authority officer, which gave rise to the thinking behind the first phase of his publications. These included the development of a bespoke school improvement process, deeply rooted in the context of the communities served by a school, and involving the development of an urban pedagogy and curricula. The centre piece of this phase was Schools for Our Cities (Riddell, 2003b). Attention then moved for phase 2 of the publications towards the social processes outside school that advantage middle class children within it. Research for this phase identified a managed model of social reproduction being operated by middle class families with children at independent schools, and an independent school/prestigious university nexus. Policy interventions of the 2000s might have begun to create analogous kinds of social processes for working class children, but they are no longer in place. The central piece for phase 2 was Aspiration, Identity and Self-Belief (Riddell, 2010).

No description available.

This thesis is premised on the indivisible unity of pedagogy and self and predicated on researching, in Frederic Jameson’s words, “pedagogy as autoreferentiality”: writing about the practices of pedagogy is writing about the practices of self, and writing about the practices of self is writing about the practices of pedagogy. The writing, it is argued, becomes a reflexive shaping tool which is instrumental in the reconstitution of pedagogic self, and writing of, and from, the self is poiesis and the mode of (re-)production. An ideological infrastructure for an autopoietic construct of pedagogy is contextualised in the systems thinking of Fritjof Capra, and in the ethical and political ecology of postformal critical pedagogy and complex critical ontology reviewed in key texts by Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe. The study centres on the recovery of pedagogic selfhood through debating, as Kincheloe espouses, ‘critical’ questions on ethics and aesthetics, morality and politics, emotions and ‘gut feelings’, and these form the structuring themes for a theorisation of autopoietic pedagogy. Using activity theory, this theorisation proposes a working hypothesis of learning as a particular form of human activity in which meta-experience – the experiencing of experience – and identity formation ‘couple’ with the wider structuring forces of social systems. It finds that the normal flow of information intended to produce teacher learning is an insufficient explanation of expert teacher activity and that the ‘retroviral’ notion of i-learning, characterised as instinct, intuition, insight, and accessed through critical introspection, opens up a relatively young and unturned field of educational enquiry dubbed here as autochthonology. The paper argues for autochthonography as a genre of self-expression, combining the elenctic and exegetical, which represents a synthesis of thinking, in the Deweyan sense, as an aesthetic activity and Lebesgue’s practical philosophy of thinking in front of one’s students.

In the last decade, there has been a strong focus on educational policies to improve social mobility with universities required to demonstrate through their Fair Access Agreements what action they are taking with regard to making Higher Education available to underrepresented groups. The literature review presented here used the ideas of Bourdieu to examine which groups are underrepresented in Higher Education and to explore to what extent this underrepresentation may be attributed to poor initial education, recruitment bias on the part of institutions or an alienation on behalf of the learner with the dominant culture found in Higher Education. Some of the different approaches to widening participation were considered, focusing on the role of Foundation Programmes in order to site the programme analysed in this thesis in the range of widening participation activity generally and the national Foundation Programme sector specifically. The literature on graduateness and academic thinking skills was explored as a way of articulating a desirable outcome for degree preparation in a research intensive university. This then led to an examination of the issues around teaching and learning for non-traditional students. The research described in this thesis was conducted on the factors affecting successful outcomes for students studying on the Foundation Programme at Durham University using both available audit-style demographic and academic outcome data for seven cohorts of Foundation students and a more in-depth analysis of one cohort. The data were analysed using the relatively novel approach of Qualitative Comparative analysis as this case-led approach retains the nuances within the data and allows for the variety of different combinations of factors within individual students. The results show that there were a range of combinations of factors leading to a successful outcome for students, that previous qualifications were not necessary for success, but that attitudinal factors, as measured using a Conscientiousness Index, were important. A link was established between an ability to use concepts of evidence, a high average score on the Foundation Programme and achievement of a good honours degree. The implications of the results were then considered in respect of taking a deficit approach to remedy gaps in initial education, aspects of recruitment policy for non-traditional students and managing diversity of learner identity.

This is an exploratory case study describing the context and content of young children’s technology activities. The study approach is based on ethnographic techniques so as to explore children’s learning experiences of technology use at home and school. It combines research perspectives from the fields of early years learning and the use of technology at home and in the classroom. The study draws on Dewey’s theory of growth and the continuity of experience as an analytical framework, also incorporating literature from early childhood learning theories and research about children’s technology use. The study shows that technology use is a constructive and integrated part of family interactions at home, while at school the teachers use technology mostly for curriculum continuity. The data was based on 62 hours of observations, of two children from one family in the home setting and their respective classrooms. It indicates that both of the teachers focused on the achievement of specific curriculum targets and mostly provided task-oriented activities and interaction. As a result their vision of children’s technology use and learning at school seemed to be fragmented. They missed the totality of children’s learning experiences with technology and the potential to build on their learning through understanding the continuity of their learning experiences. At home the parents appeared to have broader goals and values for their children’s learning. Children along with their parents used technology in relation to other experiences in order to cover broader needs of development and learning. This provided a continuity of experiences in the home setting where the intentions or goals of the experience were either set by the child or shared between the child and other family members.

This study aims to understand how young people in Malaysia use their smartphones for learning and to uncover the meaning of these lived experiences. A review of the research literature reveals an apparent lack of theoretical and conceptual understanding of everyday mobile practices with regard to learning with smartphones. Applying the principles and practices of hermeneutic phenomenology, this study seeks to gain access to a phenomenon that is often subconscious and to interpret the participants’ learning experiences. Hermeneutic phenomenological research methods comprised the use of interviews, and a written reflective exercise. 12 youths ranging from 16-19 years old, participated in 3 rounds of semi-structured interviews over a period of 6 months. The findings reveal that participants’ learning is associated with self-identity and management of their images; dependent on their perception of its value and subject to influences from their peers, parents and the community at large. This study’s contribution lies in the discovery that for the participants, learning embedded in everyday mobile practices can be either serendipitous or purposive. Beyond the serendipitous and fragmentary learning of everyday mobile practices, there is evidence of deep, prolonged and purposive learning activities with the engagement lasting from 30 minutes to 4 hours per day. Both learning practices are characterized by personal agency, satisfaction and joy in the learning. The findings would suggest the importance of understanding more about the different types of learning occurring with the use of smartphones, the values attached by learners to this learning and the transferability of such skills and knowledge across spaces, time and dimensions. Further research including careful qualitative studies is suggested to better theorize the phenomenon. Policy makers and education authorities should support a research agenda developed and aimed at theorizing learning with smartphones and other smart devices using a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches. These studies should relate to one another by focusing on developing knowledge and understanding of learning with smartphones and would enable policy makers and practitioners to develop more well-informed polices and strategies to enhance learning, either in the classroom or outside it.

This study critically examines the congruence of liberal democratic values with a conceptual framework for a national system of state-funded cultural identity schools. The study argues that the Modernist-Enlightenment response of difference-blind neutrality to the fact of social pluralism implicitly sanctions dominant socioeconomic structures. For this reason, the claim is made that the equal rights of citizenship justify cultural identity schools under a stance of difference-sensitivity. It is conceptualized that the existence of these schools benefit the liberal democratic state in two major ways. First, they incorporate non-Western immigrants into increasingly polyethnic societies as free and equal citizens. Second, in an era where deliberative democracy is threatened by global market forces, these schools serve as engines of healthy civil society by reinvigorating local voluntary associations. The study looks to the state educational system of the Netherlands to empirically ground theoretical formulations. For almost a century, the government there has funded and regulated a diverse array of schools with considerable autonomy in pedagogical content and practices. In terms of group rights, the educational structure reflects the historical experience of pillarization, a form of legal pluralism which proportionately distributed resources and political representation to national subgroups. The thesis proposes educational pillarization has utility to the current problem of disaffected immigrant groups in Western democratic states. Especially with regard to pleas for state-funded Islamic schooling, the study modifies consociational theory to reconcile imperatives for religo-cultural development and rights with those for liberal democratic principles. The study concludes that the consensus-making processes at the heart of legal pluralism encourage intercultural competence and reconfigure the meaning of citizenship to reflect the exigencies of the present day. Though many people see freedom from their childhood/received cultures as enriching, cultural attachments, provide the psychological terrain for evaluating the meaning of choice. However, a delicate balance exists. The study argues that cultural identity schools should not close students off from alternate life pathways since the right to exit or modify one’s culture is firmly embedded in liberalism.

Across healthcare, evidence-based practice (EBP) has been recognised as a core component of providing safe and effective patient care and, consequently, research and EBP are important components of the undergraduate nursing curriculum. Despite the attention given to research and EBP in nursing education literature, the evidence base for effective learning and teaching strategies is weak. There is also evidence that undergraduate nursing students find aspects of these topics difficult and that negative attitudes may be a barrier to learning. However, little is known about the detail and processes of learning in this area. This narrative research study investigated the difficulties that nursing students encountered in learning about research and EBP and explored changes and transformations in their understanding. Using threshold concepts as a theoretical framework, the study aimed to identify thresholds associated with research and EBP, in the context of undergraduate nursing education. Seventeen third year students, from a large school of nursing, took part in at least one unstructured narrative interview and 13 of these gave two interviews, at the beginning and end of a research and EBP module. The interviews explored learning during the module, as well as students’ experiences in the first two years of their study. This included learning in practice and university settings. The findings show that the learning environments were characterised by variability and complexity. Students encountered different sources of trouble in their learning and they demonstrated varying degrees of change and transformation, which also linked to their developing nursing identity. From the narratives, a set of academic thresholds concepts emerged that underpins acquisition of a professional threshold of evidence-based thinking and practising. These findings have implications for undergraduate nursing curricula and suggest that there are changes required in education and practice settings, for EBP to be embedded in nursing practice and identity.