Monthly Archives: May 2017

3 months abroad and how the UK changed my mind

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One year ago, the idea of going abroad to a Research Internship was just a wish. Now, I have had an experience working with Pam Woolner, at CfLaT in Newcastle University, that helped me grow as a person and researcher.

My first school visit while in Newcastle was to Churchill Community College, accompanied by Alan Strachan and later helped by Wayne Daley, who were keen to make sure I got all the information I needed for my study. The school was built in the 1960s and renovated about 12 years ago, and visiting it opened my eyes to what the British curriculum has to offer with all the department-division and subjects they have, including music and dance (which have their own space).

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The second visit, to Whitburn Academy and its 6th Form building, rebuilt in 2009 and 2015 respectively, confirmed the first impression of education in the UK. Walking around the school along with the solicitous and attentive head teacher, Alan Hardie, and my mentor Pam Woolner, confirmed what I, deep down, already knew: the UK presents a different reality from Brazil, with its different relation regarding school facilities and maintenance and treatment regarding pupils and teaching staff.

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In my third visit, to Prudhoe High School (a 2016 building),alongside Pam Woolner, Ulrike Thomas and Karen Laing, the point was understand how CfLaT’s research methods are applied to staff and pupils, besides making a tour around the facilities. One more time, I was dazzled by the possibilities the school offers, with media studios, well-equipped art and science labs and the concern of trying to include the building in the community dynamics.

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These schools are, in many respects, traditionally-designed ones, with their own reasons. Churchill more because of the time it was first built and then due to willingness to follow the former architectural style, Whitburn because of the former head teacher ideas and beliefs and Prudhoe due to the governmental programme under which it was built (PSBP). However, they do present, as my investigation pointed out, some innovations in terms of school Design Patterns, which are spread around the buildings – even if still shyly –, noticed and cherished by the users.
Therefore, going to the UK taught me a meaningful lesson that has changed my way of seeing things. Traditional facilities can be well-designed and they do have their value. “Updating” thoughts and attitudes to contemporary ones does not mean tearing down buildings when they do not have the new Design Patterns I advocate schools must have today. These changes and diversities can be added in smaller steps [as long as they really are added], as their importance is felt and their good impact on supporting different ways to teach and learn is noticed more and more.

My name is Larissa Negris, I’m Brazilian and I am an Architect and Urban Designer. Investigating School Architecture has been my passion only quite recently, since I am as yet a second-year Master student at UNICAMP, but has got stronger after broadening my views in the UK. I got a glimpse of what education and its infrastructure can be.

Extended Induction Workshops: Reflections of a Student Researcher

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“Staff in Education value diversity, excellence and education. We aspire to national and international recognition as a centre of excellence in research, teaching and engagement, and we believe that these facets of our work are interdependent”.

ECLS Education in 2020: Developing an inclusive sense of diversity

Inclusion of students and staff from different backgrounds can be, and is, a synonym of quality in education. During the 2016-17 academic year, I have been involved in a Newcastle University Learning Teaching and Student Experience funded project, whose purpose was to promote internationalization, diversity and academic excellence through an extended induction programme focussing on expectations, inclusion, assessment and academic writing.

Dr Anna Reid and Newcastle Work Experience arranged my involvement in the project as a student researcher. To this end, I worked with Dr Reid to co-ordinate the data collection, analysis and findings from four different workshops, and prepare a poster for the Newcastle University Learning and Teaching conference in March 2017. Extended induction workshops were designed and delivered to students on the MA (Education) International Perspectives programme from October to December 2016.

In this blog post, I will reflect upon my learning experiences and how they have contributed to the development of the graduate skills expected as part of my doctorate in Education: Newcastle University Graduate Skills Framework (2017), Degree Programme Handbook of the Doctorate in Education (2015/16), Framework for Higher Education Qualification (FHEQ) (2014).

One set of skills that can be placed together, are those related to research per se. In the development of the workshops, one of my responsibilities was to take field notes as part of the data collection process. Understanding the adequacy of the data collection instruments for this research is in line with the training I received in research methodologies modules at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. Working as a student researcher shifted the focus from merely presenting those methodologies, to critically addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each one, providing me with an excellent set of skills for future research.

Through the analysis and synthesis of the data, I had the opportunity to investigate the different threads that ran through the development of the project, enabling a more precise view on the impact of the research. The analysis allowed me to critically review the data collected through the different instruments, leading to the production of reasoned and logical arguments, which conveyed the understanding of the topic at hand, enabling me to disseminate the research clearly. For me, the Learning and Teaching conference at Newcastle University was good opportunity to develop communication skills where research and ideas were clearly and effectively shared amongst an academic and practitioner audience.

It seems easy to point out the obvious skills gained through this project, but there were other opportunities. There are skills such as innovation and creativity, initiative, goal setting and action planning that can be acquired in many situations. Instead, in this singular project, there was one aspect I developed through the observation and implication of the project leader. Sometimes it is not about the student’s will to learn, but about the will of the educator to teach. In this case, the project leader reacted to students’ feedback and my own feedback from the notes taken in the workshops. In terms of gaining skills for a future career in the academic world, one of the most valuable lessons I have learnt is to listen. The mentoring of this project made me aware of the importance of personal skills.

In relation to my own research, I will ensure that the language used is appropriate for my audience.  This implies that the audience must be identified beforehand in order to ensure my text is fit for purpose. Secondly, I have witnessed the positive impact that comes from using quantitative data collection combined with qualitative methods, especially if the latter aims are explaining and corroborating the former. Finally, I have learned the importance of oral communication, especially when there are time restrictions and visual aids are limited. This bodes well for my viva examination!

Noelia Cacheiro Quintas is preparing her doctorate in Education (EdD) here at Newcastle. In this blog post, she discusses different aspects of her role as researcher on an ULTSEC funded project designed to extend the induction period for full-time postgraduate international students.

Discourses of Ability We Live By

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In some of my work I’ve argued that unless we engage more with progressive conceptualisations of academic ability overall, the concept will, by default, continue to be overly-determined by a narrowly-conceived measure of particular cognitive skills (https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/a-new-direction-for-gifted-education-studies). To this end, I presented a paper recently at the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) Annual Life History and Biography Network Conference, entitled ‘Differing Discourses of Ability We Live By’. This drew on life history narratives to better understand the long-term impact, over the lifecourse, of having failed the 11+ examination taken by some adults in the last year of their primary schooling in England.

Part of my paper, utilising Foucault, focused on how psychological measures such as this and related discourses carry huge authority. The power invested in these discourses then leads to the shaping of academic identities in ways that are surely not warranted by the measures themselves (not to mention issues of socio-cultural bias, unfair access to preparation for tests and yearly variants in cut-off levels for grammar schools determined by fluctuations in the birth cohort). I was interested both in the impact of these dominant discourses of high ability, but also in what might be the potential counter-discourses that individuals draw on. In some of the life histories the 11+ was indeed a momentous event, for some both an ending – of a hoped for education and family aspirations – as much as a beginning of what was then to follow. For all it was a significant turning point in life, but a further interpretation of the life histories is that such failure can set up an ongoing present – one participant speaking about how they were ‘still failing the 11+’ much later in life when something did not work out.

An apparent counter-discourse was that of ‘emotional intelligence’. Recourse to discourses of affect to counter discourses based on cognitive aspects of ability alone were welcome, especially in the form of ‘EQ’, which so closely resembles the altogether more troubling, if largely discredited, ‘IQ’. Life history work itself enabled participants to explore multiple understandings of ability beyond the one dominant discourse and in this sense gave voice to frustrations. However, not withstanding this, there was much evidence of the onerous lifelong impact that resulted from having failed this one examination at such a young age. By not focusing attention on those that fail, and instead talking up the opportunities afforded to the few disadvantaged pupils who pass, we refuse to adequately acknowledge and reflect on such debilitating lifelong ramifications.

The Life History and Biography Network (LHBN) of ESREA is a space and community of researchers that I have for some years now drawn much from – in terms of both the affective and the cognitive dimensions. It is a celebration of European research in this field, with scholars hailing from all parts of the continent and beyond. My paper was presented in a session with colleagues from Italy, who (having presented both in English and French) commented that in Italy such testing and sorting of children so young would be unthinkable and simply not countenanced. It is always sobering to reflect on our own educational values and practices in a cross-cultural light and be reminded that what may at times appear inevitable is in fact highly contingent on a host of specific historical and cultural conditions.

I have argued elsewhere that we need an enriched, varied set of discourses about ability and perhaps even a more nuanced language. In this paper however, it was not necessary to follow this logic as what was being argued – and what appeared so obvious to my European colleagues – was simply that in seeking and hearing the life histories of those failed by this national test at the age of 11, we ourselves cannot fail but to apprehend the ongoing danger inherent in using narrow measures of ability to do far more work than they should ever have been called on to do. Our collective failure to provide challenging, engaging, relevant schooling for all, is turned into the personal failing of a proportion of eleven year old children. Given what we now know about the lack of impact on social mobility, the bias towards those who are coached and the harsh justice of any arbitrary cut-off score, the fact that a new round of grammar schools is once more on the horizon is testament to what happens in education when we divorce affect from cognition, and facts from values.

Dr Laura Mazzoli Smith is Research Excellence Academy Fellow in the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching, School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. She was previously Senior Research Fellow at the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, University of Warwick. Her research is mainly situated within the sociology of education and she works in a social justice and education cluster.  She is author of a book entitled Families, Education and Giftedness: Case Studies in the Construction of High Achievement (with Professor Jim Campbell). Previous conference presentations at ESREA have resulted in book chapters for Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change (Eds. Reid, H. and West, L., Routledge) and Stories that Make a Difference (Eds. Formenti, L. and West, L., Pensa Multimedia), available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laura_Mazzoli_Smith/publications

The Politics of the Canon: An exploration of the factors influencing teachers’ text choices for the new GCSE specification in English Literature

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As English teachers in England are aware, the new GCSE specifications which will be examined for the first time in Summer 2017 mark a significant departure from previous practice in terms of curriculum and assessment.  Terminal, closed book examinations, the removal of controlled assessment and an increased emphasis on 19th Century writing, combined with changes to accountability measures, make for a challenging set of circumstances for English teachers.  I had long been interested in the debate about whether or not the canon of literature we teach is contingent upon societal, economic and political values, or whether it arises simply because of a texts’ aesthetic qualities.  When this debate is placed within the highly charged current educational context of Conservative reforms and austerity, interesting questions are raised about how teachers’ behaviours, values, priorities and decisions about what to teach are affected by these challenging circumstances.

In order to investigate these decisions during my Masters dissertation, I surveyed over 130 English teachers about their text choices for the new GCSE Literature Specification, as well as interviewing local Heads of Department.  Whilst the question of which texts we teach may be seen primarily as one about the academic and cultural value of one text over another, pragmatic challenges faced by schools mean that the curriculum may be devised more as a result of practical factors such as the availability of texts, logistical expediency, budgetary demands and time constraints as well as finding texts which are seen as engaging and relevant to our students.  All of these factors emerged as significant for teachers when making curricular and pedagogic decisions, but what was arguably more interesting were tropes in the language which teachers used to describe their decision making in light of curricular reform.

A particularly rich seam was the assumption of mutual exclusivity.  I noticed how often teachers couched the choices which they were faced with as an “either/or” decision.  In addition to this, I noticed that this choice was couched between what can be broadly aligned with the debate between teaching knowledge and teaching skills.  Terms such as “remembering” and “rote learning” are pitted against phrases like “exploring” “enjoying” and “engaging with” texts.

Another theme to emerge from my analysis of teachers responses was that of teachers’ beliefs about representation.  I was interested in the ways these beliefs corresponded with academic and epistemological debate about the canon particularly in light of ideas about social justice.  Many teachers decried the new specifications as “pale, male and stale”, simultaneously lamenting the more traditional literary content which would not necessarily “engage students”.  Paradoxically however, despite lamenting the more traditional nature of the choices available, the most popular text choices tended to be those mainstays of the traditional canon, with more diverse choices remaining less popular.

Is it easier to teach students when they are reading texts which are ‘relevant’ to their lives?

Furthermore, the question of relevance became a pertinent one in my data.  Was it the case that teachers believe that texts ought to be relevant to students’ lives as a matter of principle, or did relevance function as a more pragmatic criteria?  Is it easier to teach students when they are reading texts which are ‘relevant’ to their lives?   And should the criteria of relevant and engaging apply to content and curriculum, or to the pedagogical methods employed to deliver this content?  There were also, some would argue, pernicious assumptions, that certain literary knowledge was not necessary for particular cohorts of students who might require “more functional language”.

As a classroom teacher myself, I am sympathetic to the challenges teachers face in preparing students for these new examinations.  However, these demands must be balanced against the laudable aim of allowing all students access to powerful literary knowledge, which English teachers know to be transformative and liberating.  The problem is that pragmatic factors often mean that teachers are forced to act in a way which does not correspond with their beliefs, (what Ball terms “values schizophrenia”) and that teachers currently work within a performative culture in which they feel that they face a mutually exclusive choice between knowledge and skills, rather than an optimistic belief that students can be taught powerful literary knowledge which they can then explore, engage with and enjoy.  If these barriers of performativity and pragmatic constraints were reduced then teachers could find a way through this new and challenging territory.

Taken from the BERA blogs.

References:

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), pp.215-228.

Young, M., Lambert, D., Roberts, C. and Roberts, M. (2014). Knowledge and the future school. London:  Bloomsbury.

 

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Anne Clough studied English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a First Class Honours degree in 2006.  She then trained as a secondary English teacher and has taught for 9 years in the North East of England. She is now Head of English at St Mary’s Catholic School in Newcastle.  She recently graduated from her MEd in Practitioner Enquiry from the University of Newcastle, where she was the winner of the 2016 Marie Butterworth Prize for Excellence for her Masters Dissertation.  Her interests are epistemology and the relationship between curriculum and assessment.