International assessments are a growing educational phenomenon around the world, increasingly picking up in lower and middle income countries and entering the space of global educational governance (Fenwick et al. 2014). Following the success of the OECD’s first international assessments, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) set out in 2003 to develop the Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme (LAMP) to measure adult literacy levels across lower and middle income countries in a context-sensitive way. As international organizations rationalize international assessments as essential tools for policy (Rizvi and Lingard 2010) target lower and middle income countries, researching the rationales behind these countries’ participation becomes an urgent area of investigation. In this thesis I enquire into what drives lower-middle income countries to join international assessment programmes through case studies of LAMP in the Lao PDR and Mongolia. Setting my research in the emerging field I define as International Assessment Studies, I argue that Lao PDR and Mongolia join international assessments for reasons that go beyond the need to inform policy (as stated by the UIS and the OECD) and to access foreign aid (Lockheed 2013). Different, and often contradictory interests are being played out through heterogeneous alliances (Latour 1996) which include human and non-human actors (including standardized testing instruments). Through the application of Actor-Network Theory, the data generated in my fieldwork suggests countries are joining the recent phenomenon of international assessments as a global ritual of belonging, comparing the gap with reference societies, and ‘scandalizing’ and ‘glorifying’ (i.e. statistically eliminating problems) with international data. The thesis suggests that understandings of governmentality need to be revised in light of the international and comparative character of educational governance. My findings have implications for understanding the politics of reception of international assessments, but also for the upcoming Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Development which the OECD is in the process of developing – in a similar manner to LAMP – for lower and middle income countries.

There have been many complex and contradictory policy changes in further education colleges in the last twenty years. Whilst there has been a focus on the need for good leadership and management in the sector by Ofsted and government agencies little research exists on leadership development and in particular coaching and the impact it can have on improving leadership in the sector. This longitudinal single case (embedded) study explores the implementation of a leadership development programme based on coaching in a general FE college in the North of England. Embedded units of analysis (individual participants on the coaching programme) were studied over the length of the case and my role as participant, manager and researcher provided both opportunities and challenges to the research design and ethics of the study. Questionnaires, semi structured interviews and focus groups were used to gain the perceptions of senior and middle managers in the college over the duration of the coaching programme. The research showed the importance and impact of coaching in leadership development in the college case study. It was also evident that being very clear about the aims of the coaching programme and setting the right ecological conditions in the institution are crucial to ensure that personal development and organisational development do not become out of kilter. The research showed that models of continuing professional development involving coaching can provide challenge and opportunities for new thinking in colleges which can give institutions the capacity to make a strategic leap. My own experience of introducing coaching to support teaching and learning in my new college also supported the findings that this kind of continuing professional development can have a significant impact on the participants. In conclusion, the use of coaching to support leadership and teaching and learning development in FE is still evolving. Against a cultural backdrop of governmentality and performativity, college leadership and teaching and learning can be transformed if managers and teachers are challenged to break old habits and move away from an obsessive focus on targets and policy drivers. Individual and college approaches can be enhanced particularly if the planning of development and the ecology is right in the institution to support both developments.

This thesis has developed out of a longer term action research project relating to a work based programme of study for adult learners in the field of Estates and Facilities Management. Through an investigation of barriers to learning experienced by these students, evidence was emerging of an emotional dimension to the learning experience. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly aware of an emotional quality in my own experience as a teacher. This cohort study of 22 part-time, work-based, adult returners to education uses group and individual interviews, written reflections and logs to examine their emotional experiences during participation on a two-year undergraduate Certificate course. The study takes a diverse approach that links with traditions of action research, grounded theory and critical theory and an inductive approach to the analysis of qualitative data. Data are presented first as narrative biographies, telling the stories of four of the students, second, as thematic accounts, reflecting the experiences of all 22 students, and then finally as an account of my own experience as tutor over the same period of time. Four principal themes emerged from this data. These themes are based on two dimensions; first that of the individual and. second that of the context for learning; and then on the binary distinction between positive and negative aspects of the learning/teaching experience. The data offer some confirmation that work based and returning adult students suffer high levels of anxiety and that these students require concomitantly high levels of support to counter this anxiety. At the same time there is also a deep and positive sense of anticipation and excitement before and during their engagement in higher education. The thesis introduces the notion that student and tutor are linked symbiotically in a mutual learning experience whose essential foundation is trust. One implication for practice is how a student support infrastructure can be developed to build this trust over time.

Lifelong learning was adopted as the guiding principle of the educational reform that took place in Hong Kong in 2000. This important educational agenda interested the author not only because of its position in many global and local education policies, but also because of the personal insights that she has gained throughout her years as a lifelong learner. Debates on lifelong learning in Hong Kong are dominated by economic imperatives and so the author's interest was to explore the topic from a humanistic perspective, informed broadly by interpretivism. Narrative inquiry was employed to gather the experiences of lifelong learning of four Chinese people in Hong Kong. The analysis of the narratives, together with her own reflexivity, enabled the author to identify the precursors to learners' commitment to engage in lifelong learning, i.e. the intrinsic motivation to personal growth and a close relationship between their learning and their personal life. There is a paucity of knowledge from the humanistic perspective in our understanding of lifelong learning. This study addresses this and underlines the importance of the learner's voice as a way of reflecting the influence of Confucian heritage culture (CHC) in her/his conceptualisation of lifelong learning. Problematising lifelong learning as an educational concept that has developed and flourished in Western contexts, such as the UK and Scandinavia, and been transferred somewhat uncritically to Hong Kong, the author indicates, using creative techniques, such as fictionalisation, how the narratives gathered shed light on understanding how lifelong learning manifests itself in Confucian cultures.

Literacy, a contested socio-political phenomenon, determined by the powerful, can be appropriated by the 'not so powerless' to reconstruct personal and perceived public positionings. Grounded in the social theory of literacy (Street, 1984), revisionist ideas about 'critical literacy' (Freire, 1996; Freire & Macedo, 1987) and the 'critical ethnographer', as liberator (Carspecken, 1996), I set out in 2010, with Mary, a then 70-year-old Jamaican elder in England, on this ethnographic-style journey. In the ensuing four years, I used the metaphor of 'script' to explore the research question: How does someone who views their formal education with ambivalence, engage with dominant socio-political scripts about literacy? Evidence from data analysis indicated that Mary required 'mediators of literacies' (Baynham, 1993: 294) to affect her critical re-positionings. In a complementary turn, it also highlighted the different ways in which she was a mediator of literacies in her networks of literacies. Networks of literacies exist in every sphere of life. In this investigation, therefore, two broad clusters of networks of literacies: the 'established' and 'transitory' networks of literacies are identified. Each type was visible in the three places: Mary's home, church and social club, where access to collect data was gained. While the focus of the research was intentionally on Mary, four other elders, Olga, Sylvester, Marlene and Rob, brought to the fore, the realities of doing research using an ethnographic approach. My engagement with, and in different ways, their stories of literacies and the jarring of the investigative process, served to heighten the ethical complexities involved in working with adults in later life. In concluding the study, these ethical, and other methodological issues and ideas generated from my work with Mary lead me to assert not only how organic, or 'living', literacies are (Castleton, 2001), but also how through their uses, they create affordances for elders to disrupt a range of dominant scripts within their respective life-worlds.

This dissertation is concerned with understanding how adults learn - and resist learning from lived experience in dialogue with others. In particular it attempts to understand the phenomenon of resistance to transformative learning, which manifests itself in group contexts where the group itself is the focus-and locus-of the learning project. In seeking to understand this form of conscious and unconscious resistance to learning, the dissertation draws on the literature and insights of psychoanalysis in addition to that of transformative learning theory. It argues that only in this theoretical complementarity can an adequate explanation for personal and political transformation be found. The fieldwork for the dissertation is conducted in the real life setting of a module in Experiential Approaches to Group Dynamics conducted in a university over the course of an academic year. The dissertation adopts a narrative inquiry approach, arguing that this approach is best suited to the organic process of group formation and development. Narrative inquiry emerges as central to the module and influences the direction and process of the learning. It provides the group members with a means to reflect upon and explore deeply their experience of participating in the module and draws attention to the conscious and unconscious dynamics which can enable and/or frustrate learning. The fieldwork exposes and explores the challenges in adopting a non-directive and non authoritarian model of pedagogical leadership. It shows, however, that such an approach is essential in developing the group as a learning entity, committed to reflexive dialogue and democracy.The dissertation shows how a transformative learning process can be experienced as messy, disruptive and unknowable in its eventual destination and can also provoke a deep sense of unease at a personal level among learners and educators. The dissertation concludes that real learning must be attained rather than transmitted and that the group as a learning entity can provide the containing and holding for members to process internal and external emotional impacts of transformative learning.

Communication skills play a paramount role in the personal and professional life of every individual. They have thus increased in importance in today's technologically and knowledge-based world. The purpose of this study is to explore the attitudes of Further Education and Training (FET) students towards learning communication skills in a Further Education and Training Accreditation Certificate (FETAC) level 5 module. This study is the first of its kind to be carried out In an Irish FET context. It attempts to provide a better understanding of students' altitudes and the experiences of this module, which may illuminate strategies (or effective teaching and learning for students, tutors, curriculum developers and policy makers alike. To answer the research questions posed, a sequential mixed-methods designs was employed. Data was collected from students in one small FET college over the academic year 2012-2013. Rees, Sheard and Davls' (2002) communication skills attitude survey (CSAS) was adapted and used as an exploratory tool to help generate questions for the qualitative phase of the study. The rationale for using both quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (focus group) methods was to better understand the research problem; it allowed for convergence of the numeric data and the detail of the qualitative research. The complexity of this topic called for the application of two models which acted as the frameworks for this investigation. Derbyshire and colleagues' (2009) evolving model for adult literacy and Keller's (1987) ARCS (attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction) model for Instructional design. Two key labels emerged from the data: internal and environmental factors. The data showed that a number of challenges exist for students when learning communication skills. Students were slightly more negative in their attitude at the end of the module, which was consistent with the findings from other studies exploring the same topic (Rees and Sheard, 2003; Anvik et al., 2008; Fazel and Agamolael, 2011). This study may prove beneficial for tutors, curriculum developers and policy makers in the wider educational context on how to effectively tailor and promote the teaching and learning of communication skills to meet the ever-increasing needs of students in a Further Education and Training context.

No description available.

The thesis sets out to examine how systems of pastoral care in further education (FE) support personal tutors to meet the complex needs of students in an educational environment where performance management, compliance and accountability are priorities. The thesis is a single case study of an FE college in the North West of England, from now on to be called Buttercup college. In this study, Buttercup college is presented as a 'risk environment' (Kelly 2003) where systems of surveillance are 'designed in' (Rose 1999) and aligned to systems of care and emotional support in the management of 'vulnerable' and 'dangerous' students. The research was designed and conducted from a social constructivist perspective. A mixed method, triangulated design supported the concurrent collection of data between July 2008 and July 2010 involving 36 teaching staff and 96 students in FE. Beck's (1992) 'risk society' thesis and Foucault's (1977,1994) theories of power relations frame the study. The findings reveal that pastoral care in FE is a model of emotional support, risk management and social control situated in an educational environment where risk governance has become a dominant discourse. In the context of FE, discourses of care, risk and performativity are negotiated and interconnected to reconstruct pastoral care as a policy lever. This study presents three overarching themes, 'working to target', 'emotional support' and 'managing student need'. Through an extended ethic of pedagogical care and a high level of risk consciousness, the traditional role of the teacher/caregiver (McWilliam 2003) is changing. In Buttercup college, pastoral care is a key component in the college's risk governance framework. The student, in need of individual support, is reframed as 'at-risk' and subject to risk management which aligns the work of the personal tutor with that of a professional risk-manager.

This research resulted in a conceptual framework describing the actual learning components influencing the learning experience of informal, adult learners engaged in FutureLearn courses. The conceptual framework consists of five learning components: individual & social learning, context, technology and media elements, organising learning, and learner characteristics. These five learning components are driven by two enablers or inhibitors of learning: motivation and learning goals. For adult informal learners, motivation is mostly intrinsic, and learning goals are mostly personal. This research investigated the informal learning of 56 adult learners with prior online experience, engaging in individual and/or social self-directed learning using any device to follow a FutureLearn course. Literature from MOOCs, mobile and informal learning provides scientific support, in addition to literature clarifying the rationale for choosing self-directed learning compared to similar learning concepts (self-regulated, self-determined and self-managed learning). The participants of this study voluntarily followed one of three FutureLearn courses that were rolled out for the first time by the end of 2014. Data were collected at three different stages: an online survey (pre-course), self-reported learning logs (during the course), and semi-structured one-on-one interviews (post-course). The data were analysed using Charmaz’s (2014) method for constructing a grounded theory. The analysis included memo-writing, and involved open coding, line-by-line coding, and focused coding in order to construct a grounded theory that provided insights into the self-directed learning experiences of FutureLearn participants. By getting a better understanding of the self-directed learning in FutureLearn courses, additional insights are gained to enhance informal learning, instructional design, and to contextualize and personalise learning within FutureLearn courses to create an increasingly meaningful learning experience.