Pat Sikes

‘A doctorate in a tight compartment’: why do students choose a professional doctorate and what impact does it have on their personal and professional lives?

Relatively few studies have explored the motivations of students in pursuing a professional doctorate. The study reported in this article is based on data from 29 students pursuing professional doctorates. The findings indicate a diverse range of motivations for taking this route: a ‘need’ for theory, deeper insight into practice for some but frustration with practice for others, the influence of ‘critical incidents’ in the past, the attraction of a challenge, and a variety of extrinsic factors. The authors present and discuss these data, drawing on previous work and attempting to move the debate further. They contend that the variety and diversity of doctoral students following the ‘professional’ route has important implications for the curriculum, the pedagogy and the assessment of professional doctorates for the future.

Working in a ‘new’ university: in the shadow of the Research Assessment Exercise?

What it is like to be an academic working in a ‘new’ university in the 2000s depends upon specific contexts and individual biographies. Even so, it is the case that change, contingent upon local and national policy initiatives, is endemic in the higher education sector and has had some impact upon most people working there. This article explores some of the work‐related perceptions and experiences of a group of staff working in a School of Education at a ‘new’ university with a view to gaining a sense of their understanding of what being an academic means to them. These people, who had, initially, been hired essentially as lecturers, were facing increased demands to become ‘research active’. Not only did these demands lead to increased workloads, they also had implications for professional and personal identities, and, consequently, for how people felt about, and undertook, their work.

Ethical research, academic freedom and the role of ethics committees and review procedures in educational research

Our aim is to re‐present and reflect educational researchers’ lived experiences of ethical review committees and procedures. We decided to put together this collection as a result of what happened ...

Seeking stories: reflections on a narrative approach to researching understandings of inclusion

This paper draws on research which took an auto/biographical and narrative approach in order to investigate mainstream teachers’ and teaching assistants’ experiences and understandings of inclusion. Throughout the 2003/04 academic year, three researchers made three visits to one primary and one secondary school to talk with individuals and groups. The research involved the stories collected as ‘data’ and our stories as researchers. This paper draws on both sets of stories and considers the researchers’ experiences of ‘doing’ and being involved in narrative research, as well as affording some glimpses into the stories of inclusion that they collected.

Adopting a postmodern approach to research

The intention in this paper is to consider a discourse of “research as narrative” and to offer an example of how personal experience can shape and influence research. In doing this, a particular notion of experience is offered experience depicted as problematizing the world and acting as the catalyst for further research.

Scandalous Stories and Dangerous Liaisons: When Female Pupils and Male Teachers Fall in Love.

The Sexual Offences Act, 2003 criminalised all sexual activity in England and Wales between teachers and pupils under 18, irrespective of the fact that the general age of consent is 16, and even if the parties concerned were in a consensual relationship. Accounts of pupil–teacher romantic and sexual relationships are usually presented, in the media, through a discourse of scandal and exploitation. This paper draws on accounts of heterosexual attraction and consensual sexual relationships between female secondary school pupils and their male teachers as stories that have been told, by the people involved, in a positive fashion. The paper considers the ways in which sexual activity and identity are controlled and regulated through discursive practices and invites questioning of orthodoxies and norms.

True Stories: A Case Study in the Use of Life History in Initial Teacher Education.

Abstract In February 1989, Kenneth Baker, then UK Secretary of State for Education, insisted that the Government wanted ‘trainee teachers to concentrate less on the history and sociology of education and more on how to cope with a classroom of 14 year‐olds’. In contrast to this and other calls for the dismemberment of initial teacher education (ITE) courses, as they are presently constituted, we argue for the introduction of life history methods as a strategy for facilitating the transition from pupil to teacher. The article is a case study of our experiences of using this strategy with a group of 34 first year students on an ITE course. The students’ responses to the strategy suggest, provisionally at this stage, how ITE courses might be geared towards the development of teachers who might reflect critically on taken‐for‐granted assumptions and who can articulate reasons for contesting some of the conventional wisdoms about the abilities, interests and attitudes of their pupils.

At the Eye of the Storm: An Academic('s) Experience of Moral Panic.

The climate of moral panic that pertains around child abuse is such that any research that touches on children and sex is almost seen in itself to be abusive, with identity and career consequences for those who engage in it. In November 2005, an article that I had written some years earlier, Scandalous Stories and Dangerous Liaisons: When Female Pupils and Male Teachers Fall in Love, was misreported and misrepresented in the press and, during a period of 5 days, I became the focus of media attention throughout the world but particularly in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This article deals with my experiences of being at the heart of a moral panic and raises questions about research ethics and about academic freedom and voice.

“Nature Took Its Course”? Student Teachers & Gender Awareness

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the importance of helping student teachers to become consciously aware of the educational experiences of girls and boys and of any gender stereotypes they may hold as a result of their biographies. Such an awareness is essential if, when they become teachers, they are to be in a position to recognise and work to combat the differentiation, discrimination and bias which are characteristic of schools. Empirical data, drawn from a biographical approach, is used to demonstrate why gender and sexual politics must be explicitly addressed in initial teacher education and why, with reference to gender and the wider social context, intending teachers should be provided ‘with the requisite analytical skills and conceptual tools to critically reflect and inquire about their own and the broader experiences of home and society’ (Ginsberg, 1988, p. 211). The paper also considers the need to examine initial teacher education courses to ensure that they do not reinforce sex role stereotyping.

Storying schools: issues around attempts to create a sense of feel and place in narrative research writing

Narrative research writing often seeks to create a sense of feel and place. The aim is to convince an audience that the researcher has ‘been there’ and that they could have been there too. This article presents a story about a visit to a secondary special school for boys judged to have emotional and behavioural difficulties, and then goes on to discuss issues around ‘othering’ experienced by the author when writing it. The problems of first visits and the way in which personal identities influence perceptions of research settings are considered with reference to othering. The article concludes with the suggestion that, when the intention has been to work ‘ againstOthering, forsocial justice’ (Fine, 1994: 81), maybe one has to recognize that some concerns can probably not be relieved, and to ‘simply attempt to do the best [I] can’ (Smith and Deemer, 2000: 891).