This study investigated the intergenerational relationships between grandparents, parents and children from Bangladeshi British families in East London, and the impact these relationships had on the learning that took place between the generations. The study also investigated how this contributed to the child's learning experiences at home and at school. I collected data within an ethnographic framework using participant observation, interviews, questionnaires and video recordings. Through an ethnographic approach and an approach to analysis which I refer to as an ‘analysis of verbal and non-verbal interactions’ I was able to analyze the data from the four children, their grandmothers, mothers and teachers who participated in the study. The analysis highlights the complexities of their interactions and the way learning took place as each child completed a puzzle with the help of their mother, grandmother or teacher. The study reveals how the children negotiated their way through the different intergenerational interactions to complete the puzzle activities, bringing together the jigsaw pieces of their learner identities to construct their ability to be ‘Flexible Learners’ as a whole. I argue that children consciously adapt their learning styles depending on the adult they are interacting with and the context in which that learning experience takes place. I emphasize that their ability to do this and the contribution of the grandparents to this role are not adequately acknowledged at present. There is also evidence that participants bring their ‘funds of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et al, 2005) to the way in which they think learning should take place, and this enables the child to develop what I refer to as ‘learner flexibilities’ which is a skill that needs recognition within families and schools in order to improve children’s educational and cultural experiences.

The number of Gulf students, particularly those from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who travel specifically to the United Kingdom (UK) for tertiary educational purposes, are continuously increasing. Immigration and sojourning discussions have been informed by concepts of globalisation, postmodern identity and cultural nationalism. This work discusses and draws on such concepts to inform the study, which focuses on acculturation experiences of Emirati student sojourners. Reflecting upon sojourner identities during their time abroad, as well as repatriation experiences when back in the UAE, this study explores cultural identity transformation for Emiratis between two different locations. The samples were of 25 participants in total. Of those, there were 16 UK based sojourners (4 as pilot studies) and 9 UAE repatriates. Different sets of students were interviewed and therefore the sojourners were not the same repatriated students. Their interviews were collected, coded, analysed using deductive thematic analysis, guided by research questions and the theoretical framework, that resulted in the identification of five themes: Emirati cultural identity, Emirati cultural identity affected through acculturation, sojourner acculturative strategies used in the UK, repatriation difficulties and repatriation strategies used upon return to the UAE. A stronger connectivity to the cultural dimensions of Emirati identity resulted in a more successful acculturative outcome, with fewer repatriation challenges for Emirati students. The study aims to extend understanding of cultural identity and acculturation through the data emerging from this investigation. Implications of the study for support of Emirati students in higher education are also explored.

This study is an exploration of how teachers deal with uncertainty in the classroom. The particular context of the European Commission funded HANDS project, which developed a mobile technology tool to help children with autism to develop social and life skills. The first prototype of the HANDS tool, running on smartphones, was tested at four special schools across Europe in the 2009/10 academic year. The context of teachers working with children with autism combined with the introduction of a technology innovation is viewed as a fertile crucible for exploring teacher uncertainty. The concept of uncertainty is developed via an integration of Donald Schön‘s idea of reflection in action and Wilfred Bion‘s epistemology. In tandem, a psycho-social interpretivist approach to understanding the teachers‘ work in the classroom, based on infant observation, is developed and applied to a detailed consideration of the work of five teachers at the UK school using HANDS. Several areas of potential uncertainty are identified, including uncertainty relating to areas of practice including diagnosis, the relationship between expert knowledge and practice, the implications of autism for autonomy and agency, and uncertainties in relation to the understanding of and use of new technologies per se. Conclusions are drawn about teacher identifications to new technology, the potentially productive role of uncertainty in the intersubjective relationship between teacher and child, and the relevance of a psycho-social approach to considering professional thinking.

Through the research submitted here for the award of a PhD by publications at UEL, I track the significance of my research in the field of early childhood over a period of some 25 years, since I joined the Institute of Education’s Thomas Coram Research Unit at London University in 1985. Alongside the research itself, this thesis takes the form of a critical appraisal of the nine peer reviewed publications (Annex A) selected from a much wider body of work produced during this quarter century (Annex B). This included international academic journal articles, edited academic books, book chapters, official research reports and evaluations commissioned by UK government departments, academic reviews, reports for NGOs and contributions to practitioner publications. In this thesis I aim to demonstrate that the submitted body of research, some of it collaborative, is both original and methodologically rigorous. As well as illustrating its significance to the field and beyond, I argue that it is conceptually coherent in a way which over time has come to characterise my academic output as a whole. These nine publications not only address omissions in the field, but evidence a distinct contribution to the emerging sub-discipline of early childhood policy research within the wider body of early childhood research, attempting an interdisciplinary integration of perspectives. In the present section of this thesis I discuss the origins and conceptual coherence of this body of research, setting the publications within the context of different stages of my research career (Annex C). Each stage built on the learning of the previous one and their interaction has arguably shaped my entire research output and my positioning as a researcher in distinctive ways.

This study focuses on generic competences that have been considered to be lacking in graduates from Malaysian polytechnics specifically their problem solving, critical thinking, communication skills, and team building. The argument concerning generic competences has focused upon teachers' pedagogical approaches and their relation to students' learning. There is therefore a need to explore innovative learning environments which will help students to improve their attitudes and skills as well as their learning achievements, with regard to these generic competences. The creation of a hybrid teaching approach was proposed in order to consider whether this would enhance students’ generic competences, as well as to enhance their academic achievements. This study is significant and original in that it aimed to establish an alternative pedagogical approach in teaching engineering subjects at polytechnics and assesses its validity. The approach was based on the combination and integration of collaborative learning and metacognitive strategies to produce a hybrid system (HybCoMet Strategy). A central objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the instructional module using the HybCoMet Strategy compared to the more traditional approaches. The study used both quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to obtain the data including: questionnaires distributed to students, pre and post-test quasi-experiments design, diary methods and semi structured interviews with lecturers. The quantitative data was used to support the qualitative data in order to triangulate the study. The First Semester Students in Civil Engineering Courses from three polytechnics and lecturers who were teaching the selected engineering subject were selected as a sample. Findings from this study show that the pattern of teaching and learning processes in the majority of polytechnics under investigation were more traditionally focused with an emphasis on teacher-centred approaches. By introducing the HybCoMet Strategy, students considered that the hybrid classroom helped to establish an atmosphere in which they felt more valued and more comfortable. Above all, it helped students to think critically; solve complex problems; write and speak effectively; have respect for others; be able to adapt to change and be ready to engage in lifelong learning. The HybCoMet Strategy, it is considered, can challenge students in their learning so that, in employment, they will be able to transfer this learning to workplace environments.

Positive psychology has emerged as an antidote to the negativistic focus of mainstream psychology and human flourishing has recently been identified as its underlying aim. Flourishing is also the aim of positive education, an applied area of positive psychology that uses wellbeing theories and research on students in educational settings. Although there are several positive psychological theories of flourishing, a key limitation of these is “contextlessness,” or the tendency to neglect the role of context in flourishing. I argue there are three specific facets of contextlessness: in the conceptualisation of flourishing, in its measurement, and in the relationships between flourishing and its wider contexts. To address this gap, I present a series of exploratory studies aimed at contextualising flourishing. Higher education was selected as an appropriate setting for this work as positive education is limited at tertiary level and would benefit from contextualised understandings of flourishing. Findings of the studies – both qualitative and quantitative – provided novel and insightful understandings of flourishing as it is understood by students in higher education, aided the development and validation of a psychometric tool that measures context-specific flourishing in higher education, and enabled the exploration of flourishing in higher education in the political, economic, and cultural contexts within which higher education operates. Overall, results suggest flourishing in higher education is a complex and unique notion not always accountable by extant positive psychological theories. The thesis culminates in the proposition of a new theoretical framework, complementing extant theories, which enables flourishing to be understood and researched with greater recognition of the role of context. Further implications of the research and suggestions for the future are discussed with regard to the findings.

This research studies five homeless people’s experience focusing on two key research questions - what is the place of faith and a faith based organisation in the lives and minds of people using the service and what does an in depth analysis of the emotional biographies of a gr oup of homeless people tell us about the psychic, material and spiritual needs that they bring to the centre? Each person interviewed was of no faith or a different faith to the host organisation. Using Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method and Grounded Theory the research generated in depth insights into the life experiences of some of the most vulnerable in our society, giving them a voice. Based on a single narrative seeking question, the interviews disclose long histories of personal and social suffering, and a connection between those histories and peoples’ pathways into homelessness, both external and internal. There are traumatised people for whom literal homelessness is not the outcome, but the path into homelessness for all the research subjects suggests a typical picture of people balanced on a knife-edge between a number of sets of pairings including meaning and meaningless, hope and despair and life and death. To aid u nderstanding I think of these subjects as distributed along a spectrum, with some occupying positions closer to hopelessness, despair or suicide, and some in more hopeful or connected states. All of this is both what brings people to the host organisation, and what they bring into that organisation. The research findings enable better understanding of key issues affecting homeless people not only for faith-based organisations but for all that work with social exclusion and homelessness. Noting the occurrence of similar emerging issues over each of the case studies what begins to emerge are a number of implications for practice. These include the importance of developing meaningful relationships; the need to meet service users higher needs particularly spirituality from the point of admission, the importance of a full knowledge of the housed history, the importance of giving the opportunity to explore important life issues and to be listened to. A possible implication of the research undertaken relates to the organisation itself . The way the organisation does or does not respond , introducing the notion that it operates defences against anxiety and pain drawing on its own theological dogma, an ideology that functions as a defence against being over whelmed. The organisation’s position within the homelessness field is also consider ed. Finally there are the defences towards the inner projections of the residents. It is how the organisation responds to these elements that the research suggests assists or hinders the progress of the homeless person’s route out of homelessness.

This thesis examines the interaction between the language in education policy and classroom practices in The Gambia, West Africa. This examination takes place against a background of current and vigorous academic debate regarding policies for language in education and the learning and teaching of students, particularly in post-colonial countries. Using an ethnographic case study this thesis builds on the analysis of more than 38 hours of data collected during classroom observations of 10 teachers in three schools. Conversational interviews were held with 10 teachers and field notes from all observations were produced. Stimulated recall interviews were held with four teachers. The findings of this research suggest that the language in education policy currently in use in The Gambia is regularly subverted by the teachers and students in order to meet the pragmatic and pedagogic needs of the classroom. It was noted that the local languages were used differently in the urban sites, where evidence of a language amalgam was recorded, when compared with the rural sites, in which a phenomenon of serial monolingualism was observed. The impact of historical, political and cultural norms also affected the language in all the sites in the study. The thesis argues that there is an observable subversion of the language in education policy and different language practices are present as a result of heteroglossic conflict (Bakhtin 1981). The conflict is caused by the imposition of a monolingual language in education policy on a multilingual community. The findings reveal that the teachers and learners have developed a repertoire of pedagogic techniques, some of which are geographically specific, in order to present a demonstration of effective teaching and learning. In answering the research questions this thesis demonstrates that local languages do have a place in classroom interactions and that a reconsideration of the current English Only policy would be appropriate. There are few studies of language use in classrooms in The Gambia. This research therefore makes a significant contribution to this literature and to the ways in which language use is theorised.

The thesis explores the way in which a megaevent, such as the Olympics, interacts with the educational environment –those aspects of culture, politics and economics that define the field within which educational institutions exist. The study critically reflects upon the processes that operate within the field of education, drawing on the conceptual work of Bourdieu to do so. The Olympics are used as a lens to make explicit aspects of practice within the field through the ‘disruption’ that the opportunities of the Games bring. These disruptions are characterised within the thesis as ‘event structures’ which change location factors for a number of activities (Preuss, 2006) including education. Consideration is given to the ways in which education has engaged with the social change that is inherent within regeneration efforts and considers ways in which a more active engagement might be promulgated. In doing so an appreciation is offered of: the difficulties that are inherent in this active engagement; the importance of context in the sustainability of changes in practice; and the need to develop an understanding of ‘place’ within educational discourse. This understanding of practice is built around a timeline of empirical investigations which began in 2009 when a Q methodological study focused on the perceptions of likely legacy held by a group of educational stakeholders drawn from East London. It concluded in 2013 when key informant interviews elicited perceptions on legacy momentum in the post-event phase as well as reflecting, in a deliberative manner, on the perceptions of the educational stakeholders. The thesis engaged with the methodological elicitation of habitus through the use of Q methodology and empirically considered the implications of the perceptions of legacy which were held by six distinct factors that emerged from the exploration that was undertaken. The conclusion indicates that Q methodology complements and enhances community engagement with, and involvement in, shaping the legacies achieved by harnessing megaevents to the process of regeneration.

Kyoto University (京都大学) / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 教育学博士 / 甲第646号 / 教博第3号 / 新制||教||3(附属図書館) / UT51-43-C1 / 京都大学大学院教育学研究科教育方法学専攻 / (主査)教授 倉石 精一, 教授 相良 惟一 , 教授 佐藤 幸治 / 学位規則第5条第1項該当