Sophie Ward

Metalearning Capacity and Threshold Concept Engagement.

This study aims to further our understanding of metalearning activity through the analysis of qualitative data gathered from 370 first‐year microeconomics students in three UK universities. The students were asked to produce undirected reflective essays in response to a personal ‘learning profile’ generated before, and after, the teaching of a threshold concept. The purpose was to compare the capacity and/or inclination of students studying threshold concepts to write about their learning in a manner that conveys an understanding of the self, and sense of control, in the associated process. Findings are first, that as a posited benefit of the metalearning experience a majority of students demonstrate an increased level of control over their learning of threshold concepts, and second that the metalearning activity may provide the basis for study support intervention, tailored to the individual students needs as identified in their self‐reported learning profile and reflective essay.

Let them eat Shakespeare: prescribed authors and the National Curriculum

In this article, we examine the debate that surrounds prescribed reading lists in the English National Curriculum. In particular, we attempt to locate the role which ideas about heritage and social and moral values have played in constructing this debate. We begin by examining the English National Curriculums origin in the 1980s as a conservative exercise in stemming cultural crisis, and the discourse about literatures role in the curriculum which this helped construct. We then examine how this discourse has influenced, and continues to influence, the educational policy of prescribing a list of authors and consider the assumptions that are embedded in this policy. Finally, we reflect upon how the material conditions of the classroom provide a site of resistance, or difficulty, for the officially sanctioned discourse concerning literatures role in the curriculum.

School Leadership for Equity: Lessons from the Literature.

Responding to Thrupps [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 169] call for writers on school leadership to offer ‘analyses which provide more critical messages about social inequality and neoliberal and managerialist policies’ we use Foucaults [2000. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Power, edited by J. D. Faubion, 326–348. London: Penguin Books] theory of power to ask what lessons we might learn from the literature on school leadership for equity. We begin by offering a definition of neoliberalism; new managerialism; leadership and equity, with the aim of revealing the relationship between the macropolitical discourse of neoliberalism and the actions of school leaders in the micropolitical arena of schools. In so doing, we examine some of the literature on school leadership for equity that post-dates Thrupps [2003. “The School Leadership Literature in Managerialist Times: Exploring the Problem of Textual Apologism.” School Leadership & Management: Formerly School Organisation 23 (2): 149–172] analysis, seeking evidence of critical engagement with/resistance to neoliberal policy. We identify three approaches to leadership for equity that have been used to enhance equity in schools internationally: (i) critical reflection; (ii) the cultivation of a ‘common vision’ of equity and (iii) ‘transforming dialogue’. We consider if such initiatives avoid the hegemonic trap of neoliberalism, which captures and disarms would be opponents of new managerial policy. We conclude by arguing that, in spite of the dominance of neoliberalism, head teachers have the power to speak up, and speak out, against social injustice.

What is ‘policy’ and what is ‘policy response’? An illustrative study of the implementation of the Leadership Standards for Social Justice in Scotland

This article examines ‘policy’ and ‘policy response’ through documentary analysis and an illustrative study of policy implementation. Our approach is informed by Foucault’s (2009) theory that power relations in society are conditioned by a culturally generated set of ideas, and that these relations contain the space for both coercion and resistance. Our aim is to consider the potential for policy compliance and contestation by: (1) describing policy and policy response, drawing attention to the neoliberal hegemony that has come to dominate policy discourse globally; and (2) considering how social agents respond to a particular instance of policy. We provide documentary analysis of the interpolation of leadership into policy development in Scotland following the OECD (2007) report, and offer a small scale illustrative study of the implementation of the Leadership Standards for Social Justice in Scotland (GTCS, 2012). The head teachers in our study drew upon the discourse of marketization when describing their response to policy on social justice. We consider this finding in light of the argument that our interaction with policy has been conditioned through previous instances of neoliberal discourse formation (Ball, 2008). We conclude by considering the implications of the neoliberal hegemony for policy debate.

'The Enactment of Metalearning Capacity: Using drama to help raise students' awareness of the self as learner'

This paper reports on a study that investigated understanding of learning amongst a cohort of students entering higher education by engaging them, via drama-based activities, with the process of their own learning (metalearning). The study combined Meyer’s (2004) Reflections on Learning Inventory (RoLI) and Performance Based Research (PBR) in order to raise students’ awareness of the self as learner and encourage them to become researchers into their own learning. The aim was to discover how the cultivation of students’ understanding of their own learning might aid them in developing learning strategies suited to the demands of undergraduate study and to help formulate study support mechanisms to enhance students’ learning experience. Findings are: (1) that the metalearning activities stimulated students to interrogate and move beyond previously unconscious approaches to learning and (2) the metalearning activities enabled educators to understand how they might facilitate students’ development as independent learners.

Education and the ‘New Totalitarianism’: How Standards for Reporting on Empirical Studies of Education Limit the Scope of Academic Research and Communication

Advances in our understanding of human cognition highlight the utility of the arts to create an inter-subjective feeling of unity, which arises when our minds attune plastically to each other and jointly attend a single event (Brandt PA, Form and meaning in art. In: Turner M (ed) The artful mind: cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p 172, 2006), making the arts highly appropriate for empirical studies of the social impact of education. Although guidelines for empirical social science research published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA, Educ Res 35(6):33–40, 2006; AERA, Educ Res, 38(6):481–486, 2009) and the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF, Research excellence framework: workshops on the impacts of research in the practice-based creative and performing arts, the humanities and social sciences. Retrieved 8 Oct 2012. http://www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/background/impact/workshops_impact_research.pdf, 2010) make room for diverse methodological forms, they encourage educational researchers to follow the ‘logic of enquiry’ (AERA, Educ Res 35(6):33, 2006). Thus, in contrast to the artist’s intentional orientation of an audience towards a shared unique instant (Brandt, ibid), AERA (ibid, p. 35) suggests that evidence should be ‘described’, rather than experienced. These standards for reporting on empirical social science are modelled on forms of representation of other sciences, and are ostensibly motivated by the benign aim to provide guidance about essential information. This chapter argues that the proponents of scientific standards are in fact serving a socio-political agenda that seeks to atomise society by denying the possibility of collective human experience, e.g. the privileging of description over experience is bound up with the isolation of the learner as an autonomous economic unit in an education marketplace. It argues that efforts to identify standards in the reporting of educational research should be resisted as a manifestation of the ‘new totalitarianism’ in which oppositional discourses are silenced through the regulation of academic communication. Using the example of UK filmmaking, this chapter demonstrates how the development of the ‘new totalitarianism’ in academic research is part of wider social changes, and identifies the value of arts-based educational research as a means of resistance to the imposition of market values in education and society.

Book review: Mary M. Gergen and Kenneth J. Gergen, Playing with Purpose: Adventures in Performative Social ScienceGergenMary M.GergenKenneth J., Playing with Purpose: Adventures in Performative Social Science. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012. 248 pp. ISBN: 9781598745450 (hbk); 9781598745467 (pbk) £29.50.

into aspects of the self were not addressed. Metaphor analysis, discourse analysis, and content analysis are not addressed much either. I would have liked to see a more diverse set of approaches to research design and technique reviewed. Nevertheless, Researching Non-Heterosexual Sexualities will be an extremely important resource for social scientists across multiple disciplines who study identity, the body, gender, and sexualities.

Book review: P. LEAVY (ed.), Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. New York: The Guildford Press, 2009. 286 pp. ISBN 9781593858438

Increasingly, in part driven by a desire to culturally engage more fully with the sensuous array of sights, sounds and smells of twenty-first century living, a qualitative re-envisioning of research has emerged, resulting in a paradigmatic shift in the methodological landscape in which arts-based forms of seeing, knowing and telling are being articulated, practiced and portrayed. In publishing terms texts relating to these developments have been like London buses – a long time in the waiting then suddenly four come along at once. The focus of this review is a bus with Patricia Leavy in the editorial driving seat, and as buses go it is a nice shiny red one. Leavy defines arts-based research as a holistic approach to knowledge-building that enables the researcher tomerge an artist-scientist identity, and opens up new ways to see the social world (pp. 253–4). Her book is equally relevant to experienced researchers looking to synthesize their artistic and research interests, and students seeking to develop an understanding of innovative research practice. Of particular help for students is Leavy’s succinct account of the positivist and qualitative research paradigms, which she uses to contextualize arts-based research, and the ‘Checklist of Considerations’ and ‘Discussion Questions and Activities’ that feature in each chapter which ensure that the material, whilst academically challenging, is accessible to inexperienced researchers. Students and researchers alikewill no doubt benefit from the extensive lists of suggested books,websites and journals that accompany each chapter, and by creating individual chapters for narrative analysis, poetry, music, performance, dance and movement, and visual art, and by including within each chapter an exemplar of relevant published research, Leavy enables her readers to gain a sense of how a particular art form might suit their research needs and skills-set, whilst simultaneously validating each methodology and providing guidance over how specific research practice might be emulated. In spite of Leavy’s obvious enthusiasm for arts-based research, she does not sugar coat the methodology, and in fact makes an unsettling reference to an 273