Natasha Macnab

Missing: Children and Young People with SEBD.

Abstract This article explores the issue of missing from and missing out on education. It argues that too little is known with regard to the characteristics of children and young people missing from schooling. It postulates that many of these pupils will have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties which are largely unrecognized and thus not provided for. The number of missing children and young people is estimated at 100,000 and evidence is provided to support this. Literature is drawn upon which illustrates ways in which it is possible to go missing despite recent attempts by agencies to tighten recording systems. The cost to society from having pupils missing from education is briefly explored. The article concludes that the notion of a ‘knot worker’ is one that should be pursued if the number of missing pupils is to be effectively reduced.

Learning in and for cross‐school working

In this study we report some of the outcomes of a study of professional learning that took place in cross school partnerships as they worked towards promoting creativity in schools. The methodology developed by Engeström and his colleagues at The Centre for Developmental Work Research in Helsinki was adopted. This form of intervention involves the preparation and facilitation of workshops in which the underlying structural contradictions that are in play in emergent activities are highlighted and articulated in such a way that participants may engage with what may otherwise remain hidden and unexamined tensions. This approach is based on the writings of the early 20th‐century Russian school of social scientists—Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. A principal claim is that the development of creativity requires tools and contexts for such innovatory forms of practice. This study suggests that this claim is a partial representation of the development of creative activity.

Quality in research and the significance of community assessment and peer review: education’s idiosyncrasy

Calls for the quality of educational research to be monitored more carefully are examined in the context of the most widely used and trusted form of quality screening, namely, that afforded by peer review. The serious limitations of peer review for this purpose, especially in education, are outlined before discussing the place of peer review publication in the construction of a vigorously critical community of researchers and scholars. It is concluded that quality is both constructed and checked by this community and that there are indications that the scholarly community in education may be less instinctively critical than that in other academic domains. Recommendations for the improvement of quality in educational research centre on placing less emphasis on criteria for the assessment of individual pieces of research and more on the forms of discourse operating in the peer review publication community.

Making connections between the appraisal, performance management and professional development of dentists and teachers: ‘right, what are the problems we’ve got and how could we sort this out?’

Evaluating the connections between the appraisal, or performance management, of different professional groups, and their subsequent uptake of continuing professional development (CPD), is valuable for both employees and managers. The linking of appraisal systems with professional/personal development plans amongst health professionals is now fairly commonplace, although less so amongst dental practitioners. Within teaching, shifts away from appraisal towards performance management have changed the ways in which teachers now regard their professional development. This paper focuses on the introduction of a pilot appraisal scheme for general dental practitioners (GDPs) (n = 20) in a West Midlands Primary Care Trust, comparing findings with existing practices of professional review amongst teachers (n = 28) in the same region. It is apparent that for many professional groups the outcomes of appraisal/performance management meetings now have significant implications, not least through their connection to CPD and subsequent career progression. GDPs experience CPD as a formal component of their ongoing professional regulation and revalidation, whilst teachers (as yet) do not. The voluntary nature of participation in the GDP appraisals reported here encouraged appraisers and appraisees to form cooperative pairings. However, there was cautiousness amongst both GDPs and teachers about the gathering and use of appraisal information, particularly when it was assumed that this would be for managerial purposes. By pursuing a comparative analysis of these professional groups, the connections between appraisal and CPD become clearer – particularly when situated within a theoretical framework that helps to identify the controlling influence of CPD content and mode.

Photography as an Agent of Transformation: Education, Community and Documentary Photography in Post-War Britain.

Radical political activism in the 1970s and 1980s had a huge impact on documentary photography in Britain. Community organisations and photography collectives emerged and endeavoured to democratise the arts for those who would not otherwise have come into contact with them. Community photography used the technology to break down the barriers between artist and audience. It involved participation in the production of ideas and meanings, the active transference of skills and the acquisition of technical and aesthetic skills within communities in the hope that arts techniques/activity would become an integral part of everyday lives. For many of the projects the central objective was about learning – enabling an understanding of how events, ideas, and social relations are made meaningful through the promotion of visual literacy. This paper will document the emergence of the community photography movement in 1970s and ’80s Britain, the learning strategies developed and the arguments around the fragmenting of alternative photographic practice in the 1980s with the movement away from putting cameras into people’s hands towards greater engagement with cultural theory and the politics of representation.

The Dynamic and Changing Development of EERA Networks

In this article the authors use two EERA networks as a case for a discussion on the development of research networks within the European Educational Research Association (EERA). They contend that EERA networks through their way of working create a European research space. As their case shows, the development of networks is diverse. The emergence of networks and the current group of thirty-one networks do not display a coherent and unified system. Thus they argue that EERA networks have to be studied as an open complex system in order to comprehend the multiplicity and creative and innovative space that these networks represent. They create a space for knowledge production in a European context, enabling educational researchers to see and experience their research in a more diverse setting.

Moving frontiers of empire: production, travel and transformation through technologies of display

Over the past two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of “transnational history”. This work has focused in general on understanding the “movement, ebb and circulation” of ideas across borders and in particular on the introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation of ideas through the process of cultural transfer. This interest in the transnational and cultural transfer at the same time has been paralleled by an increasing use of spatialised approaches to understand the making and maintenance of knowledge and the influence in particular of geographies of texts, talk and testimony. Historians in recent years, whether operating within a “transnational” or a “spatial” paradigm, have given increasing attention to the role of exhibitions in the circulation of ideas and practices and to the power of the visual in carrying knowledge across borders. This article is an attempt to engage with methodological questions associated with adopting a transnational or spatial approach by exploring two case studies involving texts, travel and translation. The first case study, from the late nineteenth century to the period up to the Second World War, considers the transmission role of annual reports of a charitable institution dedicated to projects of social reform which linked England, Canada and Australia. In particular, attention will be focused on the construction, function and reception of photographic evidence “displayed” in the reports.

'Seeing through touch': the material world of visually impaired children

This article examines the changing material world of the visually impaired child and the ways in which this has been viewed and understood by scholars, philosophers, educators and other commentators over time. It describes and analyses tactile encounters as they have been planned for by educators, museum curators and others, from the Age of the Enlightenment until the present day. It takes as its starting point a recent blog that appeared online in 2011, which posted images from handling sessions for the visually impaired child, organized by John Alfred Charlton Deas from Sunderland Museum, England, between 1913-1926. It traces the provenance and development of ideas around ‘seeing through touch’, from the embossed books and maps and the printing machines for systems such as Braille in the nineteenth century to the theoretical and pedagogical developments which began to occur at the start of the twentieth century.