Traveller children fare poorly in school in Ireland, as elsewhere, according to all the usual markers of participation and achievement. The application of a Foucauldian lens to the issue of Traveller education in this research study produced an innovative take on a matter of critical relevance to social justice and to educational practice. The thesis describes the response of teachers in 15 primary schools across Ireland to a research intervention which asked them to assess 43 Traveller pupils as always-already acceptable and resourceful. Their description of the pupils in the form of pen portraits and their feedback on the intervention gathered through group interviews provided access to the discursive practices they were using in their work and produced a rich vein for investigation using a Foucauldian discourse analytic. The foci of interest were on how the teachers were construing their role, the implications of this for the subjectivities of their Traveller pupils, the relationship between the teachers' work and the wider operation of government and the effects on the teachers themselves of structuring their professional practice in this way. The outcomes of the analysis provided evidence to support an interpretation of primary education as normalising and regulatory and of teachers as committed to the task of educating all their pupils, both Traveller and "settled" alike. Travellers are an interesting case because of how they actively resist incorporation into mainstream society and construct themselves, as they are constructed by others, as different. This withholding from the settled population, together with their primary identification as members of an extended family rather than as autonomous individuals, is a direct challenge to modem forms of government that seek to regulate people's conduct in both totalising and individualising ways. Current commitments to an inclusive and intercultural educational agenda represent a more pastoral and less punitive, but no less powerful, attempt to assimilate Travellers. However, education is also productive and, furthermore, is central to forms of resistance that refuse subjectification. The implications of the research outcomes for educational psychology theory and practice are considered.

This thesis is an ethnographic case study empirical investigation of a group of Muslim schoolgirls and their PE teachers at two schools in the West Midlands. It examines the issues surrounding their religious and ethnic identity and how this may conflict with participation in school-based PE . The issues raised in the introductory literature on ethnic identity, gender and cultural issues in PE give rise to the over-riding purposes and key aims of the present study. The four main aims are:- 1. To investigate the identity of Muslim schoolgirls. 2. To investigate whether the Muslim female identity impacts upon participation in school-based PE 3. To investigate PE teachers‟ perception of the Muslim female identity and how they meet the needs of female Muslim pupils in PE and school sport 4. To investigate whether the PE teachers use inclusive practices in their lessons. Social Identity Theory underpinned the study focusing the research analysis and interpretation and aims to explicate the PE experiences by employing a qualitative methodology and in the process generate theory grounded in the data. The empirical data were gathered over a period of twenty months, mainly by in-depth interviewing of the two sets of respondents, using semi-structured interview schedules. Through forms of triangulation, the research illuminates the same issues from two different perspectives: the pupils and their teachers. The social categories of ethnicity and religion play a key part in shaping the identity of Muslims schoolgirls. The girls have supportive families whose values are moulded to a large extent by an Islamic ethos. However, the teachers, by-and-large, misunderstand various religious and cultural mores of these pupils‘ and their families. The girls perceive PE as a subject, which allows for freedoms not found elsewhere in the curriculum and they recognise the importance of physical activity. Nevertheless, the study confirms the findings of previous research, which found that issues of kit, fasting during Ramadan and extra-curricular activities posed problems for Muslim pupils; 4 these are features, which are especially compounded when teachers are not aware of the issues. The findings exposed the inadequacies of teacher training and the exclusionary nature of traditional physical education settings. It was apparent that although teachers were committed to inclusive practice, in reality the experiences of pupils were more reliant upon the quality of individual teachers. Teachers are effective where they have been trained to teach in multi-ethnic schools and are, therefore, sensitive to the issues involved. Multi-cultural and racism-awareness courses appear to be indispensable for a better understanding of the pupils and making them available to all teachers, regardless of their hierarchical standing, can be advantageous.

No description available.

No description available.

Based on empirical research in Nagaon, India, this study offers a post-colonial feminist analysis of subjectivities available to Muslim girls in contemporary Assam and the ways in which these girls inhabit and negotiate these subjectivities. To understand the subjectivities made available to Muslim girls, I first investigate how government policies for education authorize certain types of subjective possibilities for Muslim girls. I then analyze the narratives of teachers and parents to understand how gender, class, ethnicity and religion intersect in different ways to confer certain subjectivities as well as to challenge and reinforce the conferred subjectivities. Finally, I discuss Muslim girls’ reconstructions of self through a combination of resistance and conformity to the conferred subjectivities. The study begins by locating this research in the context of the wider sociological literature highlighting Muslim women’s overall invisibility, key gaps in understandings of contemporary Muslim girlhoods and the limitation of the liberal feminist conception of agency as resistance. Methodologically, the study combines an analysis of educational equality policies, data from interviews with Muslim girls, their teachers, and parents, and focus group discussions across five different types of schools in Nagaon. The conceptual framework has been drawn from the scholarships of Nancy Fraser’s perspectival dualism and Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural authorization, as appropriated by feminist scholars. Fraser’s perspectival dualism approach and the distinction between affirmative and transformative justice provide tools to understand various types of injustices at different levels (inter and intragroup) in the lives of school going Muslim girls. Feminist appropriations of Bourdieu help to think through discourses about class, gender, religion and ethnicity through which subjectivities are conferred upon Muslim girls. The Muslim girls’ responses to these conferred subjectivities are understood using the concepts of reflexivity, and agency conceptualized as resilience. The thesis concludes that the equal opportunity policy framework constitutes and normalizes the subjectivities of Muslim girls as economically subordinate and as culturally different. These abstract policy pronouncements are made real in the schools through teachers’ perception of deficit in culture, morality, merit, and language. Muslim parents challenge the teachers’ and policy perspectives through their investment in the idea of good girlhood that serves as a marker for ‘good families’, symbolically authorizing them as middle-class. Muslim girls resist and conform to the subjectivities conferred in the policies, by teachers and parents using their reflexive abilities. Mostly these negotiations are based on ad-hoc individual gains, rather than a transformative, collective feminist politics. They enable these girls to disrupt and negotiate the narratives ‘about’ them. Overall this thesis offers an alternative to identitarian politics or cultural explanations of Muslim women’s educational ‘backwardness’ in India, by applying insights from Fraser and Bourdieu to Muslim women’s intersectional educational disadvantage. The thesis also directs focus upon Muslim girls’ agency as encompassing their ‘reflexive’ articulation of suffering, conformity, and resistance to the subjectivities conferred upon them. This study offers an original contribution to the study of gendered minorities, institutions and relationships in the post-colonial contexts.

The language of schooling, a register closely linked to academic success, poses challenges for young pupils. These challenges are greater for immigrant and dialectal pupils who are expected to encode the register in question in a second language (L2) and a second dialect (D2) respectively. While the linguistic challenges facing immigrant and dialectal pupils have been extensively researched, those facing learners lying at the intersection of immigrant and dialectal pupils have not as yet received attention. The latter are immigrant pupils immersed in bidialectal communities, that is, communities where communication is performed through a standard and a non-standard variety of language. These pupils are confronted with the comparatively greater challenge of operating in the second dialect of a second language (L2:D2). Addressing a gap in research, this study sought to examine the school-based linguistic challenges facing L2:D2 learners, specifically as these manifest themselves in writing. To this end, a mixed-methods design was employed. One hundred immigrant and 76 non-immigrant pupils participated in the study, all in their final year of primary school. The latter served as a reference group. Data were collected mainly via writing and editing tasks. Interviews with pupils and teachers, together with a small questionnaire, provided supplementary information. Cyprus, a bidialectal country currently hosting an increasing immigrant population, provided the setting for this study. The texts produced by immigrant pupils contained unconventional forms and structures relating to register learning, L2 learning and D2 learning. Traces of L2:D2 learning were also detected. It was found that immigrant pupils - including the very early-arrived ones - underperformed in comparison with their Cypriot counterparts, not only in the language-specific aspects of the register (e.g. immigrants used more dialectal forms in their texts than Cypriots), but also in the non-language-specific ones (e.g. more immigrants than Cypriots assumed common ground with the reader). This performance gap cast light on a number of 'hidden' extralinguistic factors undermining immigrants' school-based written production: pupils' sociocultural circumstances, their 'outsiderness' in relation to the dominant community and the prevailing national ideology. These extralinguistic factors shift the attention away from L2 learning, a linguistic factor often portrayed as the primary source of immigrant pupils' language underperformance. This study contributed to the understanding of the construct 'immigrant pupil' by exposing its multifaceted and context-specific nature. Also, it illuminated an unexplored area, namely, the interplay between second language acquisition and second dialect acquisition, while informing educational policy and practice.

This thesis reports on a research study aimed at examining the impact of informal and formal assessment on the self-esteem of pupils with borderline difficulties and language deficiencies learning in mixed ability English language classes. The thesis adopted a qualitative ethnographic methodology with triangulated methods to enquire into macro and micro views of the main concepts in this study. Thus, data were collected by participant observation within English classes, informal and formal interviews with pupils and teachers at the research site and semi-structured interviews at home with parents and pupils. Questionnaires for 6 teachers, pupils and parents [total n=31] were administered 22 pupils were observed over a period of nine months, spanning 5th September 2005 to May 2006 and 3 parents interviewed due to availability of willing pupils and their parents. This was followed by structured and semi-structured questionnaire administration and interviews with six teachers and pupils [n=22]. The experiences of pupils deemed to be struggling with learning, yet not certificated as having learning difficulties were analyzed utilizing the methodology outlined by [Lincoln and Guba 1985; Creswell 1998; Richards 2005; and Bryman 2004] among others, and the data provided rich ground for a potential development of a substantive theory of learning and self-esteem. The questions focused on the evidence of classroom, and on verbal and non-verbal teacher treatment of the focus group. It also focused on the perceptions and expectations of teachers and students regarding assessment [formal and informal] and how it impacts on pupils’ self esteem. Some themes that emerged in the study included the following: resistance to learning and to authority, ridicule and racism, treats and intimidations, student-teacher infatuation, racial and bullying, counter- school culture, and unfair teaching practices. Findings from this research study are a mixed bag. The evidence suggests that, self-esteem is dynamic and has an inherent executive capacity based particularly on individual competence, beliefs, thinking and feeling components. Furthermore, there was no evidence to suggest that pupils performing poorly suffered low self-esteem.

Έχει παρατηρηθεί ότι η θρησκευτική ταυτότητα είναι στοιχείο του κοινωνικο-πολιτισμικού πλαισίου. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι το κοινωνικό περιβάλλον επηρεάζεται και επηρεάζει τις θρησκευτικές πεποιθήσεις των ατόμων και κυρίως των Αλλοδαπών στην χώρα εισαγωγής, οι οποίοι προσπαθώντας να προσαρμοστούν και να γίνουν αποδεκτοί από αυτό μπορεί να αλλάζουν την θρησκευτική τους ταυτότητα, ή γίνονται αποδεκτοί με τη συγκεκριμένη τους ταυτότητα. Στη συγκεκριμένη εργασία ερευνάται η θρησκεία και ο ρόλος της σε Έλληνες και Αλλοδαπούς μαθητές της ΣΤ΄ Δημοτικού. Συγκεκριμένα αναφέρονται η θρησκεία και οι θρησκευτικές πεποιθήσεις αυτών των μαθητών και πως αυτές οι πεποιθήσεις επηρεάζουν την καθημερινή τους ζωή. Κατ’ επέκταση γίνεται προσπάθεια να ερευνηθεί ποια είναι η θρησκευτική ταυτότητα των Ελλήνων και των Αλλοδαπών μαθητών, μέσα από τα θρησκευτικά τους πιστεύω, και πως αυτή τους η ταυτότητα επηρεάζει τις καθημερινές τους ενέργειες, τις καθημερινές τους συνήθειες, τις σχέσεις μεταξύ τους , την ευκολία ή δυσκολία προσαρμογής των Αλλοδαπών μαθητών στη χώρα υποδοχής, καθώς επίσης ερευνάται και το πώς η θρησκευτική ταυτότητα των δύο παραπάνω ομάδων, αλλά κυρίως των Αλλοδαπών μαθητών, επηρεάζεται από τις σχέσεις τους με τους συνομίληκούς τους και γενικότερα από τις θρησκευτικές πεποιθήσεις της χώρας υποδοχής, δηλαδή της Ελλάδας. Επομένως μοιράστηκαν ερωτηματολόγια σε 59 μαθητές του Δημοτικού, της ΣΤ΄ Δημοτικού σχετικά με τις θρησκευτικές τους πεποιθήσεις, τις καθημερινές τους ενέργειες που σχετίζονται με την θρησκεία τους, καθώς και πως οι θρησκευτικές τους πεποιθήσεις επηρεάζονται και επηρεάζουν τις σχέσεις μεταξύ τους. Αναφορικά με το θεωρητικό μέρος, αυτό χωρίζεται σε τέσσερα κεφάλαια. Στο πρώτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται αποσαφήνιση των όρων θρησκεία, πίστη, θρησκευτική πεποίθηση, θεολογία, ταυτότητα, πολιτισμός. Στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο δίνονται τα κύρια χαρακτηριστικά των μεγαλύτερων πληθυσμιακά θρησκειών, δηλαδή του Χριστιανισμού, του Ισλαμισμού, του Ιουδαϊσμού και του Βουδισμού. Στο τρίτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται μια εκτενέστερη ανάλυση του όρου «ταυτότητα» μέσα από τις θεωρίες της κοινωνικής ψυχολογίας και αναλύονται οι έννοιες της προσωπικής, της κοινωνικής, της συνειδητής και μη συνειδητής και της πολιτισμικής ταυτότητας, καθώς, επίσης και ο ρόλος και οι μεταβολές της θρησκευτικής ταυτότητας. Στο τελευταίο κεφάλαιο αναφέρονται ορισμένα πολιτισμικά στοιχεία που συνδέονται με την θρησκεία, όπως είναι το φύλο και η εθνικότητα. Στη συνέχεια ακολουθούν οι υποθέσεις, η μεθοδολογία, ο γενικός σκοπός της έρευνας, η ανάλυση και ο σχολιασμός των ερευνητικών δεδομένων μέσα από πίνακες και γραφήματα και τέλος τα συμπεράσματα που προκύπτουν από τη συγκεκριμένη έρευνα και εργασία. / -