Mark Rickinson

The differential impact of UK accredited teaching development programmes on academics’ approaches to teaching

This mixed methods study used a survey with programme completers from 32 UK higher education institutions, and interviews and focus groups with programme completers, programme leaders, heads of department and pro‐vice‐chancellors, to explore the perceived impact of UK‐accredited teaching development programmes upon participants and departments. The perceived relation between the programmes and institutional missions and strategies was also explored, as well as areas for further development and improvement of the programmes. It was found that participants perceived themselves to be significantly more student‐focused in their teaching after attending a programme, with those from newer institutions and health sciences disciplines experiencing the greatest conceptual change and rating the programmes most positively. There were some positive examples of departmental impacts, and the programmes were seen to align more closely with institutional teaching and learning strategies than mission statements. Areas for further development and improvement of the programmes are discussed in relation to reducing programme workload, and improving the balance between generic and discipline‐specific aspects.

Researching and Understanding Environmental Learning: Hopes for the Next 10 Years.

The tenth anniversary of Environmental Education Research comes at an interesting time. The next 10 years of the journal overlap with the United Nation’s Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, with the possibilities that this may (or may not) bring for those working at the intersections of education and sustainable development. The journal’s anniversary also comes at a time when educational research in many countries is seeking a constructive response to a period of sustained challenge and critique. To quote from a recent article about criticisms of educational research, the 1990s was a decade when ‘most educational journals and many handbooks of research methodology in the UK and abroad hosted extensive debates on the (questioned) quality of educational research’ (Oancea, 2005, p. 157). This vignette considers the question of researching and understanding environmental learning against the backdrop of these kinds of wider developments and debates within educational research. I argue that ‘learning as process and outcome’ is a theme that has been under-researched and under-theorized in the field of environmental education research over the last decade. In view of this, I put forward four hopes for the coming decade. These focus on a desire to see:

Working with users: some implications for educational research

In its emphasis in working with users of research throughout the processes of pedagogic research, the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) has reflected a current interest across disciplines in user engagement to enhance research. The scale of the TLRP and the range of research genres encompassed by it have meant that it has provided a useful site for considering in some detail what is meant by enhancing pedagogic research in this way. The authors draw on a TLRP‐funded seminar series which examined a variety of forms of user engagement, their purposes and their implications. The series attempted to understand the intertwined features of new education spaces where research and policy can meet; the negotiations with policy communities that occur there; and the implications for these negotiations and for research design in the production of pedagogic knowledge in partnership with practitioners. The lessons revealed included the following: user engagement strengthens the warrants of research with p...

People-environment Issues in the Geography Classroom: Towards an Understanding of Students' Experiences

This paper is concerned with a much neglected area of environmental and geographical education research- the student experience of environmental teaching and learning. Based in the context of an ongoing research project into the teaching and learning of people-environment issues in English secondary school geography classrooms, this paper explores the ways in which two students are experiencing the curriculum within one particular lesson and how their views of this lesson relate to those of their teacher. The scope of the paper is both methodological and substantive. Using the data from the projects first case study, it discusses the development of the analytical procedures undertaken so far, as well as considering the preliminary findings that have emerged from these in relation to the overall research questions. The issues raised by the reported work, it is argued, have important implications for geographical/environmental education research- in particular, the need for more work to be grounded in the ...

On Food, Farming and Land Management: Towards a research agenda to reconnect urban and rural lives

Science education has a key role to play in helping people to develop their understanding of the local and global dimensions of food, farming and land management. Based on a review of the literature on what is known about young people’s (3–19) views towards and learning about these topics, a research agenda is outlined for consideration by the science education research community.

What Is Environmental Learning

In this chapter we present a brief discussion of how the term ‘environmental learning’ has been defined and explained in the literature, and the complex range of activities, interests, contexts and purposes that it can encompass. We then detail what we mean and how we engage with the term, by discussing the who, what, where, how, and why of environmental learning. For each of these we illustrate how the focus of this book (which arises from the empirical contexts upon which it is based) in some ways reflects the diversity of environmental education (as with the areas of content addressed), but in others is quite narrowly focused on specific aspects (as with our emphasis on formal settings).

Supporting the education evidence portal via text mining.

The UK Education Evidence Portal (eep) provides a single, searchable, point of access to the contents of the websites of 33 organizations relating to education, with the aim of revolutionizing work practices for the education community. Use of the portal alleviates the need to spend time searching multiple resources to find relevant information. However, the combined content of the websites of interest is still very large (over 500 000 documents and growing). This means that searches using the portal can produce very large numbers of hits. As users often have limited time, they would benefit from enhanced methods of performing searches and viewing results, allowing them to drill down to information of interest more efficiently, without having to sift through potentially long lists of irrelevant documents. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded ASSIST project has produced a prototype web interface to demonstrate the applicability of integrating a number of text-mining tools and methods into the eep, to facilitate an enhanced searching, browsing and document-viewing experience. New features include automatic classification of documents according to a taxonomy, automatic clustering of search results according to similar document content, and automatic identification and highlighting of key terms within documents.

What on earth has research got to do with me

Abstract This article is about using research from a practitioner perspective. It tells the stories of four teachers and a researcher, who were part of a collaborative project focused on connecting research and practice in relation to Education for Sustainable Development. The project started with a small advertisement placed in a practitioner newsletter, and ended with a publication launch at the House of Commons. In this article, the authors look back at how they came to be involved in this venture, what the highs and lows were along the way, and what they now feel they got out of the experience. In sharing their experiences, they hope that they might encourage and inform others who are wondering what on earth research has got to do with them. To this end, the article concludes with some brief ‘take-away points’ for practitioners and researchers.

Environmental Education Research in the Classroom: a shared methodological reflection by the teacher and the researcher

SUMMARY This article constitutes an attempt by a teacher and a researcher to jointly present their dual perspectives on the experience of a pilot phase of school‐based research. The discussion focuses upon the methodological difficulties that we each experienced both before, and during, the period of the research. In light of these, the article discusses concrete ways in which the methodology of the broader study could be improved, and considers the deeper issues relating to teacher‐researcher interaction which have emerged through this shared methodological reflection. We see this article as contributing to the growth of collaborative writing by researchers and research participants, and furthering the ongoing methodological dialogue within environmental education research.

Sustainable schools programmes: what influence on schools and how do we know?

This paper focuses on our experience of researching the influence of ResourceSmart Schools, a sustainable schools programme in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on ideas from programme theory and realist synthesis, we illustrate and reflect upon our approach to conceptualising, investigating and generating evidence about the programme’s impacts and influence in participating schools. This distinction is deliberate: it helps distinguish between efforts to understand the impacts that a programme has within schools (programme impact), and efforts to understand what it is about a programme that is influential in bringing about those impacts (programme influence). Drawing on evidence from our work in this project and the wider literature, we argue for a more nuanced discussion and more sophisticated investigations into the complexities of programme influence, rather than impacts only. Our conclusions suggest key areas of development for our own work, the provision of environmental and sustainability education, and their evaluation and research more broadly.