Ulrike Hohmann

Rights, expertise and negotiations in care and education

More young children and their families have access to early years services than ever before in Britain. Within these settings practitioners and parents need to work closely together for the benefit of the child. Yet the relationships within the childcare and education triangle (child, parent, practitioner) are highly complex and sometimes fraught with tension. Drawing on theories of care, the paper offers a structure for decisions about childcare and how a combination of expectations from parents and practitioners regarding everyday care practice can either be the basis of a trusting relationship between the adults involved in this caring triangle or a breeding‐ground for tensions. The study is mainly based on qualitative research from a study combining qualitative and quantitative methods with family day care providers in the north‐east of England and the north‐east of Germany.More young children and their families have access to early years services than ever before in Britain. Within these settings practitioners and parents need to work closely together for the benefit of the child. Yet the relationships within the childcare and education triangle (child, parent, practitioner) are highly complex and sometimes fraught with tension. Drawing on theories of care, the paper offers a structure for decisions about childcare and how a combination of expectations from parents and practitioners regarding everyday care practice can either be the basis of a trusting relationship between the adults involved in this caring triangle or a breeding‐ground for tensions. The study is mainly based on qualitative research from a study combining qualitative and quantitative methods with family day care providers in the north‐east of England and the north‐east of Germany.

Comparing teacher roles in Denmark and England

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of teaching in Denmark and England. Its broader aim is to help develop an approach for comparing pedagogy. Lesson observations and interviews identified the range of goals towards which teachers in each country worked and the actions these prompted. These were clustered using the lens of Bernstein’s pedagogic discourse to construct teacher roles, which provided a view of pedagogy. Through this approach we have begun to identify variations in pedagogy across two countries. All teachers in this study adopted a variety of roles. Of significance was the ease with which competent English teachers moved between roles. The English teachers observed adopted roles consistent with a wider techno-rationalist discourse. There was a greater subject emphasis by Danish teachers, whose work was set predominantly within a democratic humanist discourse, whilst the English teachers placed a greater emphasis on applied skills.

Comparing Pedagogy in Mathematics in Denmark and England

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of pedagogy in lower-secondary school mathematics in Denmark and England. Lesson observations and interviews identified the range of goals towards which teachers in each country worked and the actions these prompted. These were clustered using the lens of Bernsteins pedagogic discourse to construct mathematics teacher roles which provided a view of pedagogy. Comparison allowed variations in pedagogy across the two countries to be identified and implications drawn. Of particular interest were the differences in experience of lower-attaining pupils, and some of the advantages and disadvantages of mathematics pedagogy in each country for this group are indicated.

Found in translation: an analytical framework to explore national and regional Early Childhood Education and Care systems

Abstract This article explores the German discourse of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as it has emerged and changed over time. The conceptual elements of the triad of care, child raising and education (Betreuung, Erziehung und Bildung) are described and illustrated by salient points in the development of German ECEC services. Indicators for each of these concepts are discussed. This analytical framework reveals the reciprocal influences of path dependency and of underlying assumptions about the relationship between the state, parents and children. Here, I demonstrate how it renders visible details of the German system that are often lost in larger comparative studies. It provides a tool for policy-makers, researchers and practitioners to compare ECEC systems and learn from other countries. It also serves as a warning against crude attempts of policy borrowing from other countries and can aid insights on why some of these attempts encounter difficulties.

Making policy in the classroom

The concept of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980, 2010) examines the form and extent discretion takes in teachers’ and other public policy enactors’ work and how they negotiate their way through sometimes contradictory policy imperatives. It provides a framework for straddling top-down and bottom-up perspectives on policy making. In this article, I argue that comparative education research should take advantage of the analytical framework this perspective offers. It requires, first, mapping out policies resulting in the characteristics of teachers’ discretion in a particular national or local context and, second, to observe how teachers make use of this discretionary space in their daily work. Lipsky has shown strategies employed by street-level bureaucrats to alleviate workload pressures and how they make policy in this way. Applying street-level bureaucracy in comparative education research illuminates why straightforward policy transfer is problematic and how it can be employed to explore practices around inclusion and exclusion.