1,721,022 research outputs found
Teaching about Grenfell: recommendations from the community
Full text linkThe Grenfell Tower fire disaster occurred on June 14, 2017, in North Kensington, London, and was one of the most tragic events in recent British history. Investigations revealed significant failures in social housing policy, fire safety regulations, and building materials, with the state, emergency responders, cladding manufacturers, and testing and certification bodies bearing substantial responsibility for creating and perpetuating these social injustices.The Grenfell Curriculum project is a community-based participatory project that looked at how we can redress such injustices and help build a safe and just society through education. Educational researchers from the Universities of Southampton and Oxford worked with the Grenfell community and teachers to co-create educational visions and recommendations based on the lessons of Grenfell.These recommendations can guide how Grenfell is remembered and taught, forexample in- education in schools, colleges and universities- training of teachers in relevant subjects- training of students and professionals in construction, fire safety, and business management- design of memorials, museums and other out-of-school learning environments.<br/
Argumentation and interdisciplinarity: Reflections from the Oxford Argumentation in Religion and Science Project
Full text linkArgumentation has emerged as a key area of research and development in science education in recent years. Simply defined, argumentation is about the justification of knowledge claims with evidence and reasons. Although there is now a vast amount of work in argumentation, much research remains to be pursued. Given the interdisciplinary nature of argumentation, the dialogue between science education and other relevant domains can produce many constructive research agendas that could profit argumentation research and lead to practical applications. Following an overview of the relevant interdisciplinary investigations that can be pursued in science education, the paper subsequently focuses on the interphase of science and religion. Although science education research has witnessed considerable debate about particular issues related to science and religion such as the teaching and learning of
evolution and creationism, the role of argumentation remains an uncharted territory. Hence, the paper focuses on how argumentation may be explored in science and religion in comparison. Some preliminary observations from the Oxford Argumentation in Religion and Science(OARS) Project are reported including a comparative analysis of curricula and teachers’ views. Implications for interdisciplinarity in the context of argumentation in science education are discussed
"Workhorses": exploring how internal medicine residents learn efficiency
Full text linkIntroduction: In high volume training programs like internal medicine, inefficiency is the primary reason that residents are sent for remediation. Remediation, aimed at correcting competency struggles, is costly and emotionally distressing for trainees. Despite its importance, the meaning of efficiency in medicine and how it is learned are not well understood. The purpose of this study was to explore efficiency in the context of internal medicine and to examine how residents learn to become efficient, with the goal of developing strategies to promote efficiency and reduce the need for remediation. My research questions were, “What constitutes efficiency in the context of internal medicine residency?” and “How do internal medicine residents learn to be efficient in clinical practice?”
Methods: A qualitative interpretivist approach was employed. First- and second-year internal medicine residents at a Canadian university participated in semi-structured individual interviews to explore their learning of efficiency. Data were analyzed using inductive reflexive thematic analysis.
Findings: Nine residents participated. Efficiency was a multifaceted skill involving a combination of clinical knowledge, mental organization, social skills, and an unwavering focus on maximizing patient safety and care. Efficiency also functioned as a cultural value that shaped residents’ identities. Learning efficiency required residents to foster other-centeredness, focusing on actions that would help their team succeed in advancing patient care. Experience and effective feedback were essential for the development of efficiency
How can swimming teacher/educator competencies be developed?
Full text linkThis research proposed to explore the professional development of swimming teachers. This inquiry aimed to evaluate the implementation of an international Continuing Professional Development (CPD) pilot programme to train and equip swimming teachers in obtaining higher qualifications. The curriculum was designed for the teachers to work with the swimmers. There was a focus on using an integrated curriculum method for the delivery of conducting sessions and improving the quality of swimming teaching.
Literature on sports coaching and swimming teaching points to low standards, owing to little CPD training being considered and conducted beyond initial training. One proposed solution was to conduct professional development and enable recipients to apply their learning to the workplace. Further relevant teaching and pedagogical research provided further insights, suggesting that the current training curriculum does not fully explore and extend a teacher's knowledge and skills in general pedagogical education practice.
The current intervention focuses on the teacher's knowledge development and the practical application of pedagogy, mentoring, and reflection skills. The collaboration involved swimming teachers and CPD educators collaborating to shape the new CPD curriculum. The curriculum consisted of six modules over eight weeks, utilising a blended learning approach.
The research heavily utilised qualitative methods, including observation of learners’ teaching skills and semi-structured interviews with learners about their experience within the programme. Other forms of evidence, such as online learning activities included social media conversations and the learner’s planning, assessment, and evaluation activities were also utilised to triangulate the analysis.
Findings indicated that improving teacher practices relied on strengthening teachers’ efficacy. The CPD curriculum necessitated a flexible, personalised approach adapted to the work setting. Candidate teachers required time to consolidate their learning between sessions. Further implications included the quality of candidate assessments for unit requirements. The quality of swimming teaching was also found to be variable, including the teaching, learning, and assessment processes, enabling the pilot programme. Further implications for educators involve the training approach and qualification delivery
Educators’ interactions with refugee pupils: knowledge, attitudes, and practices
Full text linkThe value of school for refugee and asylum seeking children is well established, in terms of their right to education under international law, their socio-emotional well-being, and their adaptation to living in a new country and culture. Yet there is a critical gap in our understanding of refugee education from the perspectives of educators – the people who interact with young refugees on a daily basis and influence the quality of their educational experiences. This mixed-methods study employs a survey (n=295), interviews, and participant observation to investigate how educators’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices interact when working with refugee and asylum seeking pupils at schools in one county in England. It explores: 1) the knowledge educators have about refugee pupils and how they acquire this knowledge, 2) the attitudes educators have towards refugees and refugee pupils and how these attitudes are formed, and 3) the practices educators employ when teaching refugee pupils and how these practices are shaped. Throughout, it considers the ways in which educators’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices interact – that is, how they affect each other in multi-faceted and multi-directional ways.
Educators with more previous experience of refugees – or pupils with similar characteristics – had a range of relevant knowledge and felt better prepared to teach refugee pupils. Formal training played a role in educator knowledge acquisition; however, educators emphasised previous experience and interactions with experienced colleagues as more important sources of information. Educators’ attitudes towards refugee pupils were complex, reflecting the heterogeneity of the pupil population, but overall tended strongly towards the positive. Across the study, previous experience teaching refugees was associated with more positive attitudes towards refugee pupils. At the case study schools, educators displayed a range of holistic practices related to refugee pupils’ academic and non-academic well-being. These practices were influenced by educators’ knowledge and attitudes, as well as by their school environments and larger, structural factors. Based on these findings, a novel conceptual framework – the Integrated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices framework or IKAP – is introduced.
Overall, the thesis builds on literature showcasing positive practices with refugee pupils, adding the less-studied perspectives of mainstream educators alongside specialists. The study also contributes to literature showing that educators with more experience of refugee pupils have better knowledge about teaching refugee pupils and more positive attitudes towards refugee pupils. Finally, the study adds to knowledge by considering how educators’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices are formed and how they influence each other, via the KAP and IKAP frameworks. The findings have key implications for policy and practice, at the level of the individual, school, and education system
How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging?
Full text linkThe voices of adults who have been in care as a child and were also excluded from school are almost absent in the academic literature about care, education and exclusion. More than that, children who are excluded from their home, in whatever way that has come about, and are also excluded from school face a double challenge in relation to making sense of the fundamental need to belong, that is, to feel safe, to feel accepted, to be connected and to have access to relational wealth. This research seeks to fill that gap in the literature and carve out further opportunities for research on the intersection of school exclusion and being in care as a child, from the lens of the adult that the child became. The research explores this group of adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences of exclusion, of what supported and hindered growth from these experiences, and of their sense of belonging. It also considers what it means to be asking these research questions while having shared lived experiences with the participants, and intends to support those working with children to use and engage with the knowledge of those who have lived through these experiences.
The methodological approach takes the view that knowledge acquired through lived experiences should be considered as more than simply ‘data’ and chooses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to build an understanding of what it is like to be an adult with both care and school exclusion experiences. IPA provides a clear framework for gathering knowledge from participants regarding their lived experiences and sense of belonging, and for a narrative, idiographic interpretation of participants’ sense-making of significant experiences, and of convergence and divergence in participants’ accounts. The ten participants self-identified as care-experienced and also as having been permanently excluded from an education setting. They were invited to take part in this research through contact made with two organisations, one working with adults who are care experienced, and the other working with care-experienced adults within and on the edge of the criminal justice system, alongside a request made via the author’s Twitter account. Ten participants submitted a biographical writing task and took part in individual semi-structured interviews.
The methodological rigour is demonstrated by close listening and attention to participants’ unfolding individual narratives (Personal Experiential Themes), a thorough analysis and interpretation with idiographic depth, and through attending to convergence and divergence across the different Personal Experiential Themes in order to build a coherent experiential account of the knowledge gathered across the group, as Group Experiential Themes.
Through the analysis of the knowledge shared by the participants, nine themes were identified: Movement, Trauma, Power, Stigma, Survival & Resilience, Relationships, Rejection of Stigma, Searching for Belonging, and Finding Belonging. The research findings call attention to the interrelationship between Movement, Trauma, Power and Stigma at the intersection of the experience of care and the experience of school exclusion. Then Survival & Resilience, Relationships and the Rejection of Stigma form the basis by which overcoming disadvantage is explored. Finally, Searching for Belonging and Finding Belonging demonstrate the strategies the participants employed in order to find belonging, regardless of how successful or not those strategies were.
Conclusions suggest that understanding our need to belong, and how belonging is cultivated, needs centralising into practice in education settings and in settings where children in care live. Challenging professional and societal stigmatisation of the experiences of being in care and of being excluded from school also needs active attention in order to reduce the self-stigma that can be carried into adulthood. Finally, strategies employed to find belonging often result in more abuses of power, further stigmatisation and often, system trauma. A deeper understanding of the lengths undertaken by those searching for belonging having experienced being in care and school exclusion could result in more compassionate responses to distress and a desire for settings, services and systems to work in ways that understand the impact of movement and then centralise the need to belong into practice, policy and legislation
Teachers’ perspectives on bullying in schools: a comparative mixed methods study in England and the United States
Full text linkTeachers play a critical role in responding to, reporting, and preventing bullying. This study focuses on teachers’ perceptions of various types of bullying: physical, verbal, relational, and especially the more recent phenomenon of cyberbullying. It compares English and US teachers’ perspectives of the seriousness of these different types of bullying, thereby investigating how and why teachers have different views of how to address bullying and the different reasons they give as to why they would or would not respond to different bullying scenarios. This can possibly contribute to potential strategies to combat bullying.
The research is based on a sequential explanatory mixed methods design. In the first quantitative phase, the researcher developed two questionnaires, asking teachers for their perceptions of different hypothetical bullying scenarios, drawing on Expectancy Theory and Social Cognitive Theory. Questionnaires were adapted from those previously developed in a series of American studies (Bauman and Del Rio 2006; Yoon and Kerber 2003; Stauffer et al. 2012). They were administered to a purposive sample of teachers in both England and the US in order to provide a comparative element in two English-speaking country contexts. The questionnaires were analysed to establish whether there are differences between the perceptions and the reasons for responses for new and experienced teachers across the two different country contexts. The analyses also explored teacher perceptions of more long-term strategies to deal with cyberbullying. In the second qualitative phase, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with small sub samples of teachers in both England and the US to provide additional qualitative evidence about teachers’ understandings and experiences of bullying. The interviews explored a number of topics emerging from the quantitative findings pertaining to bullying and cyberbullying, allowing teachers to comment on the survey findings and share their experiences. In addition, the analysis of the qualitative interviews offered the opportunity to provide richer descriptions and insights, building explanations and enhancing understandings. This process enables the research to investigate the degree of similarity between the quantitative and qualitative findings. The combination and integration of findings from both phases of the mixed methods study adds to the ability to triangulate findings and to explore and clarify the reasons for differences in perspectives between English and US teachers.
In the mixed sequential explanatory strategy, quantitative findings reveal general trends from the data that are later expanded and investigated further within the qualitative phase. The discussion then explores the nature of the similarities and differences between these findings. The quantitative findings suggest that three main variables predicted both US and English teachers’ responses to cyberbullying scenarios: the perceived seriousness of the situation, the confidence in one’s ability, and the location (home having less of a response than school scenarios). The qualitative findings suggest that teachers’ perceptions of severity could be shaped by current policies and the relationships teachers developed with their students; the perceived confidence in one’s self could be mediated by one’s interpretation of the school culture and the trust established with others on staff; responding to a home cyberbullying situation could depend on one’s understanding of pastoral responsibilities and the current parental involvement.
This research provides new findings that can inform policy makers and practitioners in designing and implementing anti-bullying programs that are relevant to different contexts. Knowledge of teacher perceptions could prove useful as a starting point for developing a teacher education program. An understanding of the different types of bullying and cyberbullying that need attention could enable anti-bullying programs to present new and relevant material
Self-formation and societal contribution: The case of Turkish international higher education graduates
Full text linkMore and more international students are studying abroad. According to the latest UNESCO data, 5.3 million students crossed borders to pursue a higher education degree in 2017. This number is significantly higher compared to recent decades. Regardless of international students' increasing significance, most existing scholarly work positioned them in deficit models, neglecting their agency. Self-formation theory, by contrast, provided a novel perspective by positioning international students as strong agents and focusing on their holistic development in international higher education. Building on self-formation theory, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the self-formation of international higher education graduates and their societal contributions resulting from such formation experience.
The present study drew on case study approaches and focussed on a specific group: Turkish international higher education graduates. The selected group was treated as a case of international students. Qualitative interviewing was the primary data collection method, and participant-drawn, life-timeline forms supported it. The study included 50 recent Turkish international higher education graduates who were selected purposively through both maximum variation and snowball methods. The participants varied in terms of their host country, field of study, return status, and gender. The four purposefully selected countries were Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Germany, and the UK. Interviews either took place in these countries or in Turkey, for returnee graduates.
The findings contribute to the conceptual advancement of self-formation theory and indicate that self-formation in international higher education has three broad domains: the educational domain, the social domain, and the civic domain. The study also proposes an ecological approach to understanding self-formation in international higher education, which allows the contextual and temporal dimensions to be incorporated into the analysis. The findings demonstrate the pertinence of the ecological approach, especially for international comparative studies. Further, the study provides a new perspective regarding societal contribution by incorporating it as the continuation of self-formation in the flow from the self-forming individual to society
Accommodating a vision of diversity in different school contexts: "Unity-in-Diversity" in Indonesia
Full text linkThis thesis explores the ways in which schools accommodate the national vision of a multicultural society, specifically focusing on Indonesia’s national vision of “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity-in-Diversity). Employing a multiple-case-study research approach, it examines the ways head teachers, teachers, students, and parents from six state and private schools with different mixes of student ethnicity and religiosity promote this national vision in terms of educational practice. The research considers the perspectives of education stakeholders on the meanings of Unity-in-Diversity and their responses in promoting Unity-in-Diversity in schools and classrooms in contemporary Indonesia, drawing data from observations, interviews, photos, and documentary analysis.
Using multicultural education as a conceptual lens, this research finds that promoting religious diversity is key to achieving Unity-in-Diversity in religious and democratic Indonesia, and schools generally have demonstrated some commitment to promoting inter-religious harmony as mandated. Yet, it argues that the discourses of diversity, particularly of religious diversity, continue to be spaces of complex interpretation, rather than settled policy positions. In schools, this process of interpretation is manifested in the school policies, school cultures, and teaching across subjects in classrooms. The strong narratives of religiosity and piety in the current education system, which are found to privilege the dominant religious culture(s), have ramifications in the accommodation of Unity-in-Diversity in practice. In response to the different schools’ demographies, the nuanced accounts regarding the implementation of Unity-in-Diversity suggest the importance of considering identity and power dynamics, positionality, and contextuality in the school accommodation of the vision of diversity.
In light of this research, this thesis also presents the usefulness and challenges of applying a theory of multicultural education, which has focused mainly on ethnic and racial diversity, in researching the issue of religious diversity. Based in the largest Muslim country in the world, this thesis offers a critical insight into the complex role of education in the development of an inclusive, religious society
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