Sue Cranmer

Enhancing graduate employability: best intentions and mixed outcomes

This article reports on a study for the Higher Education Funding Council for England on the impact of employability skills teaching and learning on graduate labour market prospects. The findings of the study cast doubt on the assumption that these skills can be effectively developed within classrooms. Detailed information gathered at university department level is drawn on to assess how academics perceive and engage in the teaching and learning of employability skills. It is argued that, despite the best intentions of academics to enhance graduates’ employability, the limitations inherent within the agenda will consistently produce mixed outcomes. Furthermore, it is argued that resources would be better utilised to increase employment‐based training and experience, and/or employer involvement in courses, which were found to positively affect immediate graduate prospects in the labour market and, therefore, support graduates in the transitional stage into employment.

Employability skills initiatives in higher education: what effects do they have on graduate labour market outcomes?

The present paper makes use of detailed information gathered at university department level, combined with graduate survey data, to assess the impact of different kinds of employability skills initiative on graduate labour market performance. We find that structured work experience and employer involvement in degree course design and delivery have clear positive effects on the ability of graduates to secure employment in ‘graduate‐level’ jobs. However, a measure of departmental involvement in explicit teaching and assessment of employability skills is not significantly related to labour market performance.

Children and Young People's Uses of the Internet for Homework.

This article extends current research by more closely examining children and young people’s uses of the Internet for homework support within the familial context. In particular, it examines how young people find and deploy resources, how levels and quality of access influence use and the participation of other family members in homework support. It argues that whilst families view the Internet as a useful resource for homework, there are pitfalls which centre on the relatively high cost of home access in the UK. In some families, these costs may impact negatively on the affordances of the Internet for supporting homework and learning the functional skills and competencies needed to use the Internet autonomously.

Listening to Excluded Young People's Experiences of e-Safety and Risk.

This article reports on excluded young peoples experiences with and management of e-safety and risk. It has importance in exploring these concerns given that excluded young peoples voices are very often absent in education and technology research and yet they are potentially more at risk when using Information and Communication Technologies than middle-class young people for whom the risks may be lower. The findings are drawn from an analysis of the in-depth qualitative interviews carried out with 13 permanently and temporarily excluded young people between the ages of 12–15 in a Pupil Referral Unit in South East England. The accounts given by this group of young people suggest that the strategies they deploy to manage their safety online are underdeveloped and inadequate. This points in turn to a need for further interventions to foster and develop these young peoples strategies to avoid online risk as part of more general initiatives to develop digital literacy.

Development of the Future Classroom Toolkit

Key to iTEC was the need to empower teachers to facilitate positive and sustainable innovative classroom practices enhanced by digital technologies. Initially it was envisaged that experts would create challenging yet feasible scenarios that would be refined by stakeholders. From these scenarios, Learning Activities would be developed that would lead to innovation either pedagogically or technologically. Nevertheless, the complexity of defining innovation and the challenge of innovating within different contexts had been somewhat underestimated. As the nature of the project work became better understood, it became clear that stakeholders—particularly teachers—needed to be responsible for scenario creation in order to be able to assimilate innovative approaches into current practice. This chapter explains the evolution of this process from the creation of scenarios to the development of the Future Classroom Toolkit. Within this, it focuses on the role of maturity models to enable stakeholders to assess their current context and practice in terms of the level of innovation. In addition, it shows how the Future Classroom Toolkit can support and encourage stakeholders to take ownership of and augment their own innovative practices using digital technologies for the benefit of learners.

Digital skills and competencies in schools

This paper will compare a range of recently developed frameworks, which identify digital skills and competencies drawn from the United Kingdom (UK), from across the wider European Union, and internationally to include Australia. It will also briefly explore who and what is driving this agenda. The models will be set within the context of recent evidence that highlight the deficits that exist in children and young people’s skills and competencies in order to emphasise the need for schools to address this issue. In order to consider the issue more practically, it will explore the digital skills and competencies of one young person who is currently in transition to explore how useful the frameworks are for the development of their skills. It will show the correspondence and divergence between the different frameworks and the composite headings which can be drawn from the content. Examples of these dimensions will be outlined to show how digital technologies, and particularly digital skills and competencies, can influence a specific transition from school to college.

What’s stopping us? Barriers to creativity and innovation in schooling across Europe

This comprehensive yet concise Handbook provides an overview of innovative approaches to, and new perspectives on, the study of creativity. In this timely work, creativity is not defined by an ideal, rather it encompasses a range of theories, functions, characteristics, processes, products and practices that are associated with the generation of novel and useful outcomes suited to particular social, cultural and political contexts. Chapters present original research by international scholars from a wide range of disciplines including history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, education, economics and interdisciplinary studies. Their research investigates creativity in diverse fields including art, creative industries, aesthetics, design, new media, music, arts education, science, engineering and technology. Containing cutting-edge research the Handbook of Research on Creativity will strongly appeal to academics and advanced students in cultural studies, creative industries, art history and theory, experimental music and performance studies, digital and new media studies, engineering, economics, sociology, psychology and social psychology, management studies, and education – particularly visual arts education and music education. Policy makers, managers and entrepreneurs will also find much to interest them in this fascinating work.

Developing digital pedagogy through learning design: An activity theory perspective: Developing digital pedagogy through learning design

Learning design is growing in importance but is not yet widely adopted by teachers. This paper describes the development of a scenario-led learning design process, divided into two stages, which was implemented with over 500 teachers altogether from 15 European countries. Activity theory is used to explore the contradictions that arose when such changes were introduced into the established activity system of lesson planning. Data were collected through interviews and questionnaires from a small sample of participants including national coordinators (stage 1: n = 8; stage 2: n = 13) and teachers (stage 1: n = 13; stage 2: n = 23). These participants perceived that the scenario-led learning design process, involving a wide range of stakeholders, was collaborative, supportive and innovative (compared to previous lesson planning practices). However, a number of contradictions were identifiable between: (1) the shift to collaborative learning design from teachers preparing their lessons alone; (2) the new tools and the existing rules of the national/regional education systems; (3) the time required to both understand and implement learning design, and the impact of competing demands. This paper discusses the challenges faced when attempting to scale-up European school teachers’ development of digital pedagogy. The structured (yet flexible) approach was welcomed and the tools promoted teacher reflection but, as commonly noted, the complexity and time-constraints were major issues.

iTEC: conceptualising, realising and recognising pedagogical and technological innovation in European classrooms

Abstract Innovation, a complex concept, underpinned a four-year pan-European research project designed to increase the effective use of technology in school classrooms. This article revisits evaluation data collected during the project and explores the challenges of conceptualising, realising and researching ‘innovation’. The authors describe how innovation was conceptualised, highlighting key issues, not all of which could be resolved in the project. The development of an approach to support teachers to change their practices facilitated the realisation of innovation in the classroom. This approach, through which researchers and national pedagogical coordinators worked with teachers to develop their teaching and learning practices with technology in potentially innovative ways, is outlined. Case study data are then used to exemplify how teachers and other stakeholders applied this approach and how they perceived innovation in practice within their own countries. Through a discussion of these cases, the article highlights the challenge of defining innovation in different country settings and, in turn, the complexity of identifying its occurrence. It concludes by proposing the next steps for similar research endeavours.

Networked Learning - Reflections and Challenges

The book is based on nine selected, peer-reviewed papers presented at the 10th biennial Networked Learning Conference (NLC) 2016 held in Lancaster. Informed by suggestions from delegates, the nine papers have been chosen by the editors (who were the Chairs of the Conference) as exemplars of cutting edge research on networked learning. Further reviews of all papers were conducted once they were revised as chapters for the book. The chapters are organized into two sections: 1) Situating Networked Learning: Looking Back - Moving Forward, 2) New Challenges: Designs for Networked Learning in the Public Arena. Further, we include an introduction which looks at the evolution of trends in Networked Learning through a semantic analysis of conference papers from the 10 conferences. A final chapter draws out perspectives from the chapters and discusses emerging issues. The book is the fifth in the Networked Learning Conference Series.