The South African classroom music curriculum has changed in the twenty years since the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994. The broad imperative for the main music education policy shifts is a political agenda of social transformation and reconciliation. Policy aims are to include many more learners in the music classroom by promoting the study of diverse musics that were previously marginalised and by providing a framework for music education that allows learners to progress at their own pace. This research study investigated to what extent music teachers are able and likely to fulfil the requirements of the new, post-apartheid curriculum, with particular reference to the National Curriculum Statement music policies (NCS). Specifically, it considered whether teachers have a particular allegiance to Western and/or African music. Twelve South African music teachers were interviewed for this purpose. The latest music curriculum revision in the form of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS, 2011) has modified knowledge content by streaming music into three distinct but parallel genres. In addition to Western music, the curriculum incorporates Indigenous African music and Jazz as representative of the diverse cultural interests of South Africans. An analysis of post-apartheid music policy documents draws on post-colonial thought to frame the affirmation of African music by giving it a prominent place in the curriculum. In order to appreciate the role different musics are expected to play in the curriculum, the work of prominent ethnomusicologists provides a means to conceptualise the range of emerging musics, including World Music, Global Music and Cosmopolitan Music, and their differences. For teachers to comply with the policy directive to teach different musics to diverse learners, they are required to expand their knowledge and adapt their teaching styles to achieve these aims. This study highlights a lack of resources and of structured teaching support through continuing professional development as well as a need for policy to give clearer direction in the way it instructs teachers to execute the changes demanded of them in the curriculum. An investigation of teachers’ own musical education and their views of the new curriculum reveals that they are willing to teach a variety of musics. Their perceptions of the differences between Western and African music illustrate a reflective understanding of the challenges they face in this undertaking.

Research pertaining to homophobic name-calling has largely focused on prevalence rates and the negative long-term effects on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (LGB) populations without considering the intention behind the use of the language, leading to an assumption the language used in these incidents is intentionally homophobic. This small-scale exploratory study focused on gathering the cross age and gender perspectives of male and female young people in years 7 (age 11-12) and 10 (age 14-15) from one secondary school, to illuminate whether they perceive name-calling, involving the word ‘gay’ to be bullying, harmful and intentionally homophobic. The study adopted a qualitative approach to research methodology to gain a richer understanding of young people’s perspectives, where single–sex focus groups were used to collect qualitative data, which were analysed through thematic analysis. Key findings from the study suggest there is agreement over age and between genders that using the word ‘gay’ is not intentionally homophobic or harmful. The study also highlights that the intent of the language is complex and dependent upon a number of factors including: the relationship between the user and receiver; whether they are friends or not and how the words are said. The language can be used as a form of joking, social bonding, expressing opinions and perceived as a common discourse amongst young people where there is no associated implication to sexuality. Further implications for anti-bullying and Educational Psychology practice are discussed, with a focus on developing an understanding of the use and intent of name-calling in schools at systemic and socio-cultural levels.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is part of everyday life. It is not different in the education field. However, its use has implications for what it means to teach and learn effectively in contemporary education. When ICT is used in the classroom, things happen through divergent forces, components, and mechanisms, according to different contexts, and evidencing a complex environment. The purpose of this study is to show how complex the use of ICT in education is by analysing different components and their productive forces. Assemblage ethnography is the methodology adopted and a range of data collection tools are used. The thesis explores five case studies generated from different settings: Primary, Secondary and Post-secondary education. The analysis offered shows how discourse, policy-making, budget, and CPD are not enough to account for all of the ICT-related situations that happen on a daily basis inside schools. ICT in education evidences a diverse and fragmented field of policy, money, and practice, pedagogy and many other elements. This study concludes that there are three main productive forces emerging from the education ICT assemblage which: evidenced unsolved issues of the schooling process, enhanced or made emotions emerge; opened possibilities for other subjectivities to happen.

The study was concerned with access to science and mathematics curricula by students with visual impairment (SVI) in South-Western Nigeria. The main study adopted an action research approach. Six initial stakeholder ‘search conferences’ were organised to understand the nature and extent of the problem. They revealed evidence of inadequate accessibility to science and mathematics education by SVI due to unavailable resources and personnel. This led to the development of teaching resources and approaches (‘STEM Kit’ and the use of ‘Talking LabQuest’) and the trialling of these approaches in two selected study schools. Data were collected through classroom observation and teacher and student interviews. Findings show that the approaches enabled access of SVI to science and mathematics at a comparable level with their sighted peers, which brought about immersion in, and engagement with learning. With the multisensory teaching resources, SVI and classroom sighted teachers learn and teach with reduced specialist teacher involvement. The intervention positively challenged local views and practice regarding curriculum access and SVI and offers examples for improved provision of relevant resources and training for staff to better support SVI independence and inclusion. This study showcases the uniqueness of action research in empowering all participants to bring about change.

Applicants to Medical School must be academically successful to secure a place at university. Despite their success in secondary education and the stringent entry criteria, a significant number of students fail summative assessments at the end of their First Year. This gives rises to the following question: “Why do previously high achieving students fail in the university system?” Existing models seek to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary withdrawal from university and to explain academic withdrawal in the context of an individual’s academic and social integration into a new educational environment, their commitment to the institution and their commitment to Medicine as a career. However, much of the existing literature on failure in the early years at Medical School has focused on pre-university academic ability, as demonstrated by grade achievement at the end of secondary education, and/or faculty’s perspectives of student failure. This dissertation adopts a qualitative approach to understanding success and failure in the first year at Medical School from the perspective of medical students themselves. Their perspectives are explored within the model of withdrawal and persistence proposed by Tinto (1975) and interpreted in the context of existing literature on failure in the early years of higher education in general and in Medicine in particular. These findings are further reframed within an analysis based upon Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. This analysis considers the students’ field of operation, the relative positions of agents within the field and the capitals which allow them to hold those positions, and the habitus of the agents and the institution itself. Through this analysis, factors that students believe may predispose to success and failure are identified and discussed. This in turn leads to a consideration of how my own understanding and professional practice have developed and might develop in the future.

In the United Kingdom and Europe, there are ongoing efforts to reform science education in order to provide students with an understanding that transcends the scientific knowledge itself and that is relevant to citizenship. This exploratory study investigated the opportunities and the constraints for teaching Evolutionary Biology (EB) in the context of Global Citizenship Education (GCE). The study focuses on secondary school education in Scotland, at the time of a major curricular reform. My specific interest in the educational system of Scotland stemmed from the fact that the Scottish National Curriculum, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), encourages integrated interdisciplinary approaches to citizenship education, where biology is one component of a holistic citizenship curriculum and biology teachers are required to consider citizenship issues within their subject teaching. Evolution, in biology, is the general framework for understanding life and, at its base, is about the common ancestry of living beings. Therefore, EB is substantially the theory of Phylogenetic Trees. In addition, EB with Population Thinking in taxonomy provides arguments against the typologist assumptions in human classification, underpinning the biologisation of cultural identities. Through a document analysis and an empirical phenomenographic study, I explored the patterns in the interplay between teaching EB and GCE, within the compulsory Scottish secondary school science curriculum. The document analysis, which consisted in the analysis of official science education documents and biology textbooks, revealed that only microevolutionary concepts play a major role in the documents and in the textbooks. Macroevolution, human evolution, phylogeny and population thinking are omitted by the compulsory science specifications of the CfE and textbooks. However, the texts illustrating the EB specifications are open texts, in Eco’s taxonomy. Open texts are incomplete texts that can be freely interpreted and cooperatively generated by the readers. Therefore, teachers, with their knowledge and interests, can complete the “unsaid” and interpret creatively the biology specification. The phenomenographic inquiry involved twenty-one biology teachers from thirteen different Local Authorities of Scotland who participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. From the phenomenographic analysis of the transcripts of the interviews, three different ways of thinking and reporting about the role of teaching biology for the purpose to educate for global citizenship emerged. The first conception relates the biology syllabus to issues of social justice, the second to environmental issues and the third focuses on the individual development of students. This body of work provides insights into some of the issues associated with the problematic teaching of evolutionary biology with the aim to promote cosmopolitan values, in secondary school. Moreover, it adds to the research in global citizenship education, by providing evidence from the conceptions of biology teachers involved in the implementation of curricular innovation.

Development appears to have gone through a paradigm shift, from top-down, state-led projects to bottom-up, participatory schemes which seek to take account of local knowledges. Tanzania is a country which, like many others in the ‘Global South’, faces a myriad of interlinked environmental and development problems, particularly as much of the population’s livelihood needs are deeply entwined with local environmental resources. Current environmental policies and conservation practise in Tanzania appear to reflect this new shift in development, and increasingly the Tanzanian state and a number of NGOs have aimed to increase the participation of local people in environmentally sustainable practices. Education about the environment, for both adults and young people, has become key to this approach in Tanzania since the 1990s. This thesis aims to explore the many practical and theoretical questions which remain about the suitability of participatory projects that utilise local knowledges, considering questions which are fundamentally at the heart of how development is and how it should be done, questions which are ultimately at the crux of development itself. Specifically, I aim to answer questions about how participants and communities can become ‘empowered’ through participatory initiatives, and to this end I investigate the important yet presently neglected role of young people. I further explore the nature of ‘local knowledge’, questioning its current use in development projects whilst seeking to re-conceptualise and re-orientate how ‘local knowledge’ is understood and employed. I utilise a qualitative and participatory methodology through three communities in Tanzania, each of which offers a contrasting picture of environmental issues throughout the country. I begin by exploring the current understandings of participation and local knowledges in development, and follow with an explanation of the methodological approach. The empirical chapters are then organised around three main themes: local knowledges, environmental education in Tanzania, and the role of participation in Tanzanian communities. The first of these chapters appraises the concept of ‘local knowledge’ critically by first comparing local and official discourses of the ‘environment’, assessing how far an attention to local knowledges has percolated into official environmental discourses in Tanzania. In light of local understandings of the environment encountered in these three communities, I consider how the current conceptual framework of local knowledge may be limiting our understanding of how these knowledges are constructed and communicated. The second empirical chapter examines environmental education projects in Tanzania, and from this I critically reflect on the role of NGOs and the state in local development. Through an analysis of environmental education, I consider how both local knowledge and participation agendas can be spatialised, in particular by understanding how formal and informal spaces of learning are constructed discursively in communities, and the implications this has for the outcomes of education projects. I go on to examine the notions of participation and community, exploring how participation and inclusion operate at different scales, including those beyond the local. I consider how the current conceptualisation of participation and community, derived from ‘Western’ ideals, can conflict with local understandings of responsibility, volunteerism, participation and community development. Through this, I question the ‘community’ as the necessary site of empowerment, and in particular here I draw attention to the role of young people and how their identities are reproduced at the community scale and beyond. Finally, I conclude by discussing the conceptual and practical application of local knowledge and participation in development in light of this critical appraisal. I consider the role of formal education more broadly in empowering young people, and I question the role of NGOs in the future of locally and nationally orientated development. I end with an examination of the ethics of the current development paradigm in light of the understandings of development uncovered by this study, many of which fundamentally challenge the way that participatory forms of development should be done.