As part of an extensive education reform programme, Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) is currently introducing a Dual Language Policy (DLP) in which English, maths and science are to be taught fully through the medium of English while other subjects are taught through Arabic with the goal of producing biliterate school graduates. The DLP has already been implemented in Grades 1-6 and it is hoped that it will be migrated into secondary schools by 2015. The success of any major educational policy innovation is dependent on professional support at many levels, including that of teachers. For this reason it is important to explore teachers' perspectives of the policy and how the policy might be in alignment or conflict with their professional identities. This study has adopted a discursive understanding of identity and a post structural theoretical framework. Using semi-structured interviews, observations and documentary analysis, this study sought firstly to explore the primary discourses which shape Emirati female secondary school maths teachers' professional identities. It then identified their perspectives on the DLP before exploring how their identities explained these perspectives. The research found that the importance of childhood experiences in education, gendered roles, Islam, professional roles, relationships with students and their perspectives of society's view of them as secondary maths teachers were key aspects of participants' professional identities. It also found that teachers had fragmented identities resulting in mixed perspectives on the DLP. In some regard, this resulted in positivity towards the policy although simultaneously they felt their identities were threatened by it, causing them to view its implementation with caution. These threats were clustered around three main areas relating to pedagogic beliefs, their work ethic and linguistic and nationalistic discourses. A significant finding of this study was that the participants held differing views regarding the principles behind the DLP. Some teachers had accepted the policy ideologically, having adopted a position which assumed the neutrality of English, while others expressed strong views against the encroachment of English in education and society more generally. Nevertheless, there was agreement across the participants that while English was necessary in 21st century Abu Dhabi, it must remain a second language. While this is the stated intention of the DLP, teachers expressed limited awareness of how Arabic is being protected and promoted by ADEC, causing further animosity towards the policy. By adopting a post structural position, this research demonstrates the complexity of the situation as teachers find themselves caught in the intersection of multiple, and often conflicting, discourses. It shows that contrary to the prevailing belief, teachers are neither powerless nor passive but are exercising their power, at the micro level, through acts of negotiation, resistance and subversion. By drawing attention to these teachers' discursive positionings, ‘framing discourses', such as those related to patriarchy, Islam and linguistic imperialism, are highlighted. These are shown to both shut down and open up possibilities of being (Keddie, 2011), emphasizing the limited space these subjects have to manoeuvre in. By exploring the construct of teacher identities in the Emirati context and relating it to the practical aspect of policy implementation, this study aims to highlight its relevance to education reform and contribute to a gap in the field. It is hoped that through this, teacher identity will become a more significant part of the educational discourse in this region, disrupting the continued epistemic privilege of Western-informed views of education.

This case study was conducted in Ghana to explore the arenas available for student participation in decision making in public senior high schools. In Ghana, students are considered stakeholders and collaborators in decision-making alongside parents, teachers, and community members. This role is of particular importance since their participation equips them with the attributes and skills needed for active citizenship. Student Representative Councils (SRCs) are established in all public senior high schools in Ghana and their representatives serve on committees and present students‟ views to school authorities. Their role as representatives is therefore very significant in promoting the student voice. The objective of this study was therefore to explore the key arenas available for student participation in decision making in four senior high schools in Ghana and the levels of their participation within them. In Ghana, no specific policy is provided for student participation in decision making even though the SRC is mandatorily established in each public senior high school. Literature on student participation in decision making in senior high schools is also scarce when compared to other African countries such as South Africa. The international literature on student participation in decision making stresses that participation is a right and that it must be given serious consideration. However, the perception some people have about students‟ participation in decision making is that students in senior high schools are not mature enough to participate fully in decision-making forums in schools. Consequently, opportunities provided for student participation tend to be limited to roles of supervision over student peers and fundraising activities. Arnstein‟s (1969) theory of citizen‟s participation which portrays a striking representation of power structures in society forms the theoretical basis of the study. Relating the theory to the school context, the study is conceptualized on Hart‟s (1992) ladder of student‟s participation and Backman and Trafford‟s (2006) Democratic Schools concept. Backman and Trafford (2006) assert that a school can be democratic in spite of its bureaucratic structures. Given that senior high schools in Ghana are hierarchically structured, with students at the bottom of the structure, these two theories provide an appropriate conceptual framework for exploring students‟ participation in democratic decision making. The study was conducted in four senior high schools in Ghana. The research participants included Student Representative Council (SRC) executives, non-SRC executives, staff members and heads of schools, purposively selected according to their roles in relation to decision making arenas in schools. The study was conducted in the interpretivist paradigm, adopting a qualitative approach, using interviews and focus group discussions. These methods were employed in order to gain in-depth insights into the interactions and perspectives of key stakeholders on students‟ participation in decision making in the case study schools. The findings of the study suggested that the forums provided for student participation were similar in the four selected schools. These decision-making forums included feeding, discipline, students‟ accessibility to school heads, school durbars and SRC general forums. The study however focused on decision-making forums of feeding and discipline as these were the areas participants mostly stressed on in their feedback. The study found that participation in the forums studied varied across the schools, with some schools providing more opportunities for students‟ participation than others did. In all but one school, students‟ participation in decision making appeared to be episodic, restricted and largely initiated by the school authorities. Furthermore, interactions between school leadership and staff were affected by power relations which also affected the level of students‟ participation in decision making. As contribution to knowledge the study notes among others that the interpretation and application of children‟s democratic rights is culturally determined and therefore vary across culture.

The argument put forward in this thesis is that as a consequence of the pedagogic and professional restrictions created by managerialism, as reflected in the highly regulated field of current state educational provision dominated by the school effectiveness paradigm, it is essential for the furthering of liberal critical democratic education that freer, but no less legitimate, pedagogic and learning spaces are recognized, established and embedded in mainstream practice. According to this premise, a critical theory position explores both empirically and theoretically how critical democratic pedagogic legitimation, can be made possible in the context of English A Level teaching and learning ractice in a sixth form college. This thesis begins by contextualizing the debate for the need for this possibility in the context of New Labour Policy development during 1999-2003. It then identifies and explores the politico-pedagogic nature of an open learning initiative derived from a voluntary, interdisciplinary English Masterclass. This empirical site is then analysed in the context of a ‘critical' case study research design, based on the theoretical model of Jurgen Habermas, especially his ideological, political and pedagogic theorization of the concept and politics of a self-generated emancipated ‘lifeworld' that attempts to re-negotiate alternative practice and identify through self-created and self-legitimized pedagogic method and social relations. This site of research has necessarily involved my research into an exploration and critique of much wider debates. In particular it engages with the nature and role of liberal democratic political theory and ideology and its influence on A Level curriculum modelling, learning experience and constructions of learner identity and teacher professionalism. What has also emerged from this wider study is an exploration of the nature and extent to which learning and teaching within the formal, official A Level curriculum model (Curriculum 2000), based on the learning dichotomy and dual learning sites of ‘modularity' and ‘synopticity', has produced not only a learning imbalance of democratic earning experiences and learning identities but also an uncritical learning and professional conformity and passivity inherent in the social construction of consumer-based studentship, professionalism and liberal democratic citizenship. It also engages with debates regarding the extent to which the social construction of consumer learning and professional identity and learning citizenship has been achieved at the expense of the full development and maturity of pluralistic and more active forms of critical studentship, critical citizenship and critical professionalism. As a consequence, this thesis both theoretically argues and demonstrates empirically how the official A Level curriculum and teacher professionalism is a product of the social and political reproduction systems of New Labour's ‘middle way' political product and practice which I argue became increasingly more authoritarian and statist owing to its integration of neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism as a redemptive ‘theological-educational' project. I attempt a more detailed analysis of this redemptive educational project through an exploration of the concept of learning ‘space wars' as set in the wider context of official learning principles and practices of globalisation. In attempting to theorize this emerging politicization of an empirical aspect of my own professional practice, l have also explored the nature and extent of the influence of the then new initiative of Student Voice and Student Voice work and the ‘Building Bridges' policy that together offered the potential to encourage, facilitate and legitimate lternative principles and practices and outcomes of more radical open learning spaces. Finally, my argument for attempting to diversify the democratization of official A Level learning is ultimately, therefore, derived from a belief that we need to re-base democratic schooling in general on classical notions of discursive democratic morality, identity and practice. This, I argue, in the context of a developing, liberal democratic state under advanced corporate capitalism, would open up genuine and legitimate curricula, pedagogic and professional spaces for wider opportunities for the cultivation of rational, critical debate of important ethical and political questions relating to what makes a good citizen and what makes a good society, rather than asking more mundane utilitarian questions relating to what makes learning more standardized, efficient, productive and more predictable.

The idea that the emerging global society is also the age of the “pictorial turn” (Jenks, 1998; Mitchell, 2005; Mirzoeff, 2015) is one in which the use of visual historical sources in the teaching and learning of History in English secondary schools is situated. Yet there has been little research conducted into the ways such sources are experienced by teachers and students in the classroom, and the ways these are mediated by political, cultural and social forces. Despite this dearth of research, the need for further investigation is highlighted by a number of theorists who believe how working with visual images has the potential to develop visual ways of thinking both historically and about the world that are complicated (Schama, 2015), requiring what some see as quite specific “thinking dispositions” (Perkins, 1994). This investigation explores the ways in which visual historical sources are experienced by teachers, students and education professionals. Three lessons in an English comprehensive school using visual sources were observed, pre and post-lesson interviews were conducted with teachers, as well as three student focus groups to add a student description of their experience with visual sources. A perspective external to schools is added through interviews with three professional educators working with visual sources with students in gallery and museum spaces as opposed to school spaces. This study identifies, analyses and compares different experiences of visual historical sources, and considers the implications these have for teacher pedagogy. As such, the key research question in this investigation is “How do students, teachers and education professionals experience visual sources in the teaching and learning of history?” This qualitative study draws upon a form of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2008, 2011, 2014) that moves from the positivist idea of data being ‘discovered' to one which acknowledges that as researchers we are part of the world we study, and where data collection is seen as not being a neutral process. As such, it seeks to understand the constructs teachers, students, and education professionals use to understand their experiences with visual sources (Gibson & Hartman, 2014). In analysing the data through thematic analysis, a variety of theoretical positions are used to help conceptualise the perceptions described and observed in the research. From notions of “thinking conjuncturally,” (Massey, 2005) to the hybridity of visual sources (Hall, 1990) and of the idea visual sources as “regimes of truth,” (Foucault, 1972), this study draws on theoretical positions from a variety of disciplines to understand the ways experiences with visual historical sources operate. The findings illustrate how descriptions that emerge around the use of visual sources coalesce around seven main themes; access and engagement, acts of seeing, how images work, truth-claims, historical interpretation, intertextuality and pedagogical praxis. Within these, a number of axes can be used to describe positions that may at times seem paradoxical, such as descriptions of visual sources as being both transparent and opaque. In considering the implications of the use of visual historical sources for teacher pedagogy, it is claimed that they have the capacity to be rich interpretive tools for the construction of History, and can be seen as distinct spatial puzzles and representations that need to be understood as working in the specific context of their medium.

This study is justified by a renewed interest in citizenship in both the international and the Chilean education context. Throughout history, it has often been difficult to conceptualise citizenship, but there is a consensus that it is a desirable status and condition, and that education plays a crucial role in the development of citizenship. Approaches from which to understand and implement citizenship education are also diverse. Research on civics and citizenship education has been conducted worldwide and in Chile, especially in the last decades. These studies and the revived importance of citizenship, the globalised scenario and the new context of democracy after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), have prompted governments to review citizenship education in Chile, design curriculum reforms to make it more relevant to students, and help them to develop the competences needed to practise their citizenship. However, there is still a lack of research that explores citizenship education in Chile and takes students' views as a priority, particularly in secondary schools. This study provides insights into what secondary school students understand by citizenship and citizenship education in Chile, and how the education system through the curriculum and particular types of school, influences those understandings. A qualitative case study was conducted in one city in southern Chile over five months in 2013, with grade 12 students (aged 17-18), their head teachers, teachers of the subject History, Geography and Social Sciences, and their parents. Two secondary schools, one public-secular and one private faith-based, were chosen as they portrayed the current situation of citizenship education in provinces in Chile and helped to compare different types of schools regarding the delivery of citizenship education. Study findings show that students' understandings of citizenship and citizenship education are influenced by the intended and implemented curriculum. Even when several reforms on education have been carried out, the discourses, ideologies and objectives embedded in official government education policy documents have not significantly changed in the last two decades. One explanation is that the policy-makers involved in the enactment of reforms are influenced by ideologies of groups that seek to maintain unequal relations of power. What students understand by citizenship and citizenship education align with the official discourses in the curriculum and textbooks, but those understandings and the sense of citizenship they have developed are not connected to what has been delivered in citizenship education. Regarding students' experiences of citizenship, these might be either helped or hindered by their families, the school ethos and local community. Regarding the contribution to knowledge, this thesis has addressed the limited research on what students in Chile understand by citizenship and citizenship education, and the link between their understandings and the school curriculum. It also adds knowledge to the existing literature on discourses and ideologies in education, different types of curriculum and school ethos. This study contributes to informing decisions of policymakers to improve the education system, the curriculum and particularly, citizenship education, considering the need for better training of teachers, an updated understanding of citizenship education and the diverse types of schools, a review of the discourses embedded in education policy, and overall, the need to hear students' voice and include their views in the enactment of education documents.

This is a year-long, action-research project investigating how to develop pupils' exploratory talk and higher-cognitive thinking in secondary English classes. Four teachers, their Year 8 classes (110 pupils) in Sussex and an ITE educator collaborated to investigate whether the quality of pupils' exploratory talk could be improved by a structured, pedagogical approach, and to explore contextual factors and other conditions for its development. The approach included making the skills of this formal, oral discourse explicit to pupils, using pupils' ground-rules, teacher modelling and structured tasks; regular practice and critical reflection on talk. It also involved cross-school collaboration, for example, classes evaluated each other‟s developing talk on video; and teachers met throughout the project to reflect on individual and collective issues and to review data and emerging findings. The data include qualitative analysis of pupil discourse taken from throughout the project, supported by associated observations and interviews with teachers and pupils. The study concludes that a rich, apprenticeship model inducting students in how to use exploratory, dialogic talk, including student critical reflection on this, contributes to the development both of this discourse and its associated higher-cognitive processes, especially in relation to the reading of texts. However, these appear to be necessary, but insufficient conditions for such development. The transformation in students‟ discourse depends on a more significant transformation in their identities, which is contingent on a similar shift in the range of teacher identities being performed. Practising exploratory talk gives students experience of a wider range of identities, especially for those who are unconfident, low-achieving and/or from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in particular boys, but also girls, enabling them to gain a 'voice' in school precluded by the discourses and identities generally adopted. This, thus, enables students to develop ways of talking and thinking essential for achievement across the curriculum, moving from silence at the margins to speech at the centre. Teachers need to appreciate the extent to which discourse exceeds language structures, encoding ways of behaving, valuing and 'being' and therefore being related to both the relationships and teacher/pupil identities generated in the classroom. Furthermore, the study concludes that there is a highly significant relationship between pupils practising dialogic, exploratory talk in groups and developing sophisticated reading comprehension skills: critical literacy, a key aim for all English teachers. The study defines a particular type of exploratory discourse that emerges in English lessons, when pupils are reading and collaborating in groups: 'tentative talk about text'. This is characterised by its speculative, tentative and analytical nature; its openness to plural interpretations of texts and its coconstruction of meanings.

This research is about the challenging behaviour of pupils in secondary schools and how this behaviour is perceived and experienced by their teachers. The impetus for the research came from my work as a teacher with pupils who had been excluded from school. The spur was the significant rise in permanent exclusions from maintained schools in England and Wales in the decade following the implementation of the 1988 Education Reform Act. The research began in 2000. It is a piece of small-scale educational research, which had a two stage research design. The perspective taken was phenomenological within a naturalistic paradigm. In the first stage of the research design questionnaires were distributed to all the teachers and teaching assistants in two secondary schools in an area of social deprivation in a suburb of London. These questionnaires were intended to elicit information about teacher perspectives regarding challenging behaviour. In stage two of the research design in-depth interviews were held with five teachers from one of the two schools. These teachers were interviewed up to six times each over a period of several months as I attempted to track their interactions and experiences with a pupil whom they had identified as having challenging behaviour. The data from the questionnaires revealed that a significant majority of the teacher respondents believed that incidences of challenging behaviour were increasing. The second stage of the research explored what these teachers meant by challenging behaviour and what challenging behaviour meant for them. The analysis of the data from these interviews revealed that for this group of teachers challenging behaviour predominantly meant disruption to their lessons. A key issue to emerge from the project was that of teacher resilience in relation to managing challenging behaviour. The main findings of the thesis explore issues around the relationships between teachers and pupils with challenging behaviour. A model is proposed which illustrates levels of persistence on the part of the teachers when they are engaged with pupils with challenging behaviour. The model explores differing responses from teachers when managing what they perceived as challenging behaviour. It illustrates how and whether they disengage with the process of actively trying to make the pupils conform to classroom expectations in order to achieve learning outcomes. The model illustrates the inter-relationship of characteristics of teacher resilience and demonstrates how resilience plays a part in determining whether teachers are able to manage disruptive behaviour in the classroom in order to achieve learning outcomes.

This thesis provides an in-depth interpretation of the actual learning process that occurred on a Post Professional Development programme (PPD) in Educational Leadership and Management in order to establish what constituted an effective learning environment for secondary school leaders and managers. The participants’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their learning and the impact this had on their social reality were scrutinised in detail as it is their understanding of the learning that created the social reality that the research sought to uncover. The research was based in the constructivist paradigm and so was approached from the perspective that individuals construct their own reality so there can be multiple interpretations of the same event. An in-depth longitudinal case study approach was used that incorporated qualitative analysis techniques which included semi-structured interviews with eight participants and four line managers, forty-nine anonymous unit evaluation documents and a reflexive research journal. These methods of data generation uncovered the perceptions of the participants as social constructions. The datasets, each representing an alternative interpretive angle, had presented positive perceptions of the learning experience and showed agreement between the participants and the line managers on the key role that the learning environment had played in the successful learning. In line with the constructivist position this effective learning environment was seen to have provided the necessary conditions for the participants to engage in both individual and collective meaning-making. The environment had been seen as an authentic leadership experience, characterised by pressure and support mechanisms that had operated simultaneously on both the macro-level (the programme environment) and the micro-level (the learning strategies). It had been the interplay between the 3 mechanisms on more than one level that was seen to result in the authenticity which had enacted the dynamics of leadership for the participants. This productive mix had led to the learning journey being viewed as a collaborative pursuit where meanings had been continually negotiated, individually and collectively, which had resulted in feelings of affinity and shared endeavour. This process had generated a shared bank of resources (experiences and materials) that had led the cohort to experience a sense of belonging to each other and the environment. A design had been provided for the cohort to develop into a learning community characterised by a critically reflective, collaborative culture. The creation of a learning community was viewed as an important support mechanism which provided the necessary space for the participants to engage in various forms of discourse and critical reflection (Mezirow, 2003; Hodge, 2014). The necessary conditions had been fostered to allow the cohort to engage in transformative learning and experience a changed perspective (Mezirow, 1996). The authenticity of the experience had, in this case, led to the participants’ revised leadership practice being applied habitually regardless of context which is seen to be indicative of the depth of personal and professional transformation (Hoggan, 2014). Their transformed perspective was demonstrated by a commitment to create collaborative, critically reflective cultures in their own workplaces and beyond. Therefore, this research provides a more precise interpretation of the positive role that pressure and support mechanisms can play in the creation of an effective learning environment for secondary teachers with leadership responsibilities.

The origins and developments of pre-vocational education are traditionally traced back to Prime Minister James Callaghan’s speech on 18th October 1976 at Ruskin College, near Oxford. An assertion of this study is that this is a fallacy, with evidence of the existence of pre-vocational education dating back many years before this date. Further it is contended that Callaghan’s speech was not the catalyst for change in aspects of secondary education that many have suggested. The speech was neither a deliberate attempt by Callaghan to challenge the accepted modus operandi of the educational establishment nor an effort to raise standards. On the contrary, this study will argue that Callaghan’s intervention in education was a conscious attempt to distract the attention of commentators away from the worsening social and economic conditions within the U.K, which Callaghan had inherited from Harold Wilson. The above will be argued primarily through placing the emphasis on an aspect of secondary education which has attracted very few words of analysis or explanation namely, pre-vocational education. A definition of pre-vocational education will be constructed in order to help raise the status of pre-vocational education by means of establishing a greater understanding and awareness. The emphasis on PVE will also allow for a direct comparison to be made between the content of Callaghan’s words of 18th October 1976 with the content of the Tomlinson Report published on 18th October 2004 helping to establish that Callaghan was neither a catalyst for change or making particularly original claims. The study will use the resources of the City of Birmingham as well as the local and national press to help substantiate many of the assertions, thus mimicking a practice used by the authoritative education historian Professor Roy Lowe (1988).

The aim of this study was to identify effective support strategies used to promote social inclusion and academic progress of key stage three and four Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) pupils in a mainstream secondary school. The study used an interpretivist approach, incorporating an embedded single case study with several participant groups, namely GRT pupils, GRT parents, school staff and supporting professionals. Data was collected using interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. It was analysed using pattern matching and explanation building. The research design, data collection and data analysis were guided by theoretical propositions developed from the existing research. The findings of this study identified that focused staff support from a GRT teaching assistant and class teachers had the most significant influence on the promotion of both social inclusion and academic progress. In addition, social inclusion was promoted through a positive inclusion school ethos, providing clear and consistent links to the GRT community and receiving input from a range of supporting professionals. Academic progress was encouraged through the use of: appropriate teaching and learning strategies which included incorporating GRT culture into the curriculum; having clear leadership from the Senior Management Team; school policies; and additional support to access the school.