This book explores changing practice in history classrooms from the autonomy of the 1980s through the introduction of GCSEs and the National Curriculum to the prescription of the National Strategies and the pervasive influence of league tables in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It uses individual narratives from history teachers to shed light on a changing profession. Showcasing research that is crucial reading for leaders in education, it uses oral accounts from 13 experienced teachers to provide a rich testimony of the constraints and affordances acting on history teachers. The book offers a unique perspective to show how teachers experienced steady but substantial changes in policy and autonomy and how this affected their practice; this detail enhances an analysis of policy and curricular documents across three decades. The findings are crucial for educational settings today, facing crises of teacher recruitment and teacher retention. This book will be of great interest to academics and higher degree research students in history education, history of education and education policy. It will also be of interest to beginning history teachers and senior school leaders responsible for teacher development and curriculum.
This book explores changing practice in history classrooms from the autonomy of the 1980s through the introduction of GCSEs and the National Curriculum to the prescription of the National Strategies and the pervasive influence of league tables in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It uses individual narratives from history teachers to shed light on a changing profession. Showcasing research that is crucial reading for leaders in education, it uses oral accounts from 13 experienced teachers to provide a rich testimony of the constraints and affordances acting on history teachers. The book offers a unique perspective to show how teachers experienced steady but substantial changes in policy and autonomy and how this affected their practice; this detail enhances an analysis of policy and curricular documents across three decades. The findings are crucial for educational settings today, facing crises of teacher recruitment and teacher retention. This book will be of great interest to academics and higher degree research students in history education, history of education and education policy. It will also be of interest to beginning history teachers and senior school leaders responsible for teacher development and curriculum.
In some hands, history can be an inspirational and rewarding subject, yet in others it can seem dry and of little relevance. Learning to Teach History in the Secondary School, now in its fifth edition and established as one of the leading texts for all history student teachers, enables you to learn to teach history in a way that pupils will find interesting, enjoyable and purposeful. It incorporates a wide range of ideas about the teaching of history with practical suggestions for classroom practice. The fifth edition has been thoroughly updated in the light of recent developments in the field of history education. The book contains chapters on: • Purposes and benefits of school history • Planning strategies • Teaching approaches and methods • Developing pupils’ historical understanding • Ensuring inclusion • New technologies in the history classroom • Assessment and examinations • Your own continuing professional development Each chapter includes suggestions for further reading, weblinks to useful resources and a range of tasks enabling you to put learning into practice in the classroom. Written by experts in the field, Learning to Teach History in the Secondary School offers all training and newly qualified teachers comprehensive and accessible guidance to support the journey towards becoming an inspirational and engaging history teacher.
This book questions what ‘educating the whole child’ means in the context of our current neoliberal education system. In analysing the impact of how education policy is enacted and understood, it examines how this ‘neoliberalisation’ has shaped the personal and ethical relations of education. The book is unique in raising questions about the way in which a common and universally held truth about the importance and value of educating the whole child is conceptualised and articulated in education policy. Employing Foucault’s concepts of bio power, governmentality, the dispositif and subjectivities, this book explores the importance of psy-scientific knowledge, systems of education governance and classroom practices in constructing a neoliberal whole child. It examines how government policy structures the relationship between the child, school and government and claims that current policy and practice operate as forms of bio power that extends neoliberal governance to the emotional and moral life of the child. Educating the Neoliberal Whole Child will be of great interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of education policy, sociology of education and critical pedagogy. It is also a valuable addition to studies of Foucault and education.
This book provides a critical analysis of the neoliberal reform agenda of the economic governance of schools. Focusing on the role of the United States in this process, it explores the transformation of schools in this agenda from educational establishments to enterprises in a competitive education market. The study uses Bourdieu to apply a field-theoretical framework to a detailed empirical analysis of the current changes of school government. Chapters explore education bureaucracy, reform and the effect of outside organizations on pedagogy and testing. The book reveals how far the promises of corporate education reform are from reality and concludes with a plea for a realistic view of school’s capabilities. It goes beyond the state of the art with its focus on how the governance of education, school and instruction is changing with the replacement of educracy by an education-industrial complex. The book will be of great interest for academics, postgraduate students, administrators and politicians in the field of education policy, the governance of school systems and schools. The book also has an international appeal as it studies a global transformation of the field of education.
The discourse of neo-liberal school reform is centered on the push for accountability measures and the emphasis on schools of choice (Ravitch, 2013). Accountability measures have resulted in standardized testing, curriculum and teacher practice. Standardization and standard practice come to regulate the field of education by becoming invisible and taken for granted (Lampland & Star, 2009). Charter schools have become prevalent as a school of choice, which appeal to those who wish for privatization and those who desire an alternative choice for students previously underserved by traditional schooling sites (Mehta, 2012). Teach for America and its alumni have had a strong hand in the management and vision of many of these charter schools, based in business model discourse and competitive practices (Kretchmar, 2014; Lahan & Reagan, 2011, Veltri, 2008). With an avowed discourse of change theory, leaders in this organization have set out to make extensive changes to the structure of education (Knopp, 2008). This narrative inquiry and sociological exposition focuses on the experience that a new-to-the field teacher has in her experience in schools of choice, both charter and public. It utilizes James C. Scott’s sociological theories of how states traditionally have enacted reform measures on populations as a device to analyze these experiences (1998, 2013). Teacher forms of resistance are also analyzed in this way using Scott’s understanding of weapons of the weak (1985, 1990). This teacher’s stories are laid along side the sociological texts, viewed as stories (Brochner, 2012), in order to provide new insights into the way that changes of reform are felt and enacted in the everyday lives and experiences of a teacher (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, Pushor & Orr, 2007). The resonance (Conle, 2000) between the research texts and stories are used as guideposts to shed illumination upon the relationship between teacher’s experience and the context of the reform movement. By looking at the teacher professional knowledge landscape broadly, outside the classroom, where teachers “meet all the other aspects of the educational enterprise such as the philosophies, the techniques, the materials, and the expectations” (Craig, 1995), this work aims to show how an individual teacher uncovers the functionality of the discourse of the reform movement in her own environment (Foucault, 1984). This uncovering, through the stories themselves can become a newly contested space where sites of resistance can be imagined (Scott, 2013). “Where teachers can engage with and resist the compelling and conditioning forces, to open fields where the options can multiply, where unanticipated possibilities open each day” (Greene, 1988, p. 115). Selected References Brochner, A. P. (2012). On first person narrative scholarship: Autoethnography as acts of meaning. Narrative Inuqiry 22 (1), 155–164. Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D.J., Pushor, D. & Orr, A.M. (2007). Navigating sites for narrative inquiry. Journal of teacher education. 58(1), 21–35. Conle, C. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Research tool and medium for professional development. European Journal of Teacher Education, 23(1), 49–63. Craig, C. (1995). Dilemmas in crossing the boundaries on the professional knowledge landscape. In D.J. Clandinin and F. M. Connelly (Eds.) Teacher professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 16–24). New York: Teachers College Press. Foucault, M. (1984). Nietzche, Geneaology, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.). The Foucault reader. (pp. 76–100). New York: Pantheon Books. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New York: Teachers college Press. Knopp, W. (2008). Building the movement to end educational inequity. The Phi Delta Kappan 89(10), 734-736. Kretchmar, K., Sondel, B. & Ferrare, J.J. (2014). Mapping the terrain: Teach for America, charter school reform and corporate sponsorship. Journal of Education Policy. doi:10.1080/02680939.2014.880812 Lahann, R. & Reagan, E. M. (2011). Teach for America and the politics of progressive neoliberalism. Teacher Education Quarterly 38(1), 7–27. Lampland, M., & Star S.L. eds. (2009) Standards and their stories: how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life. Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press. Mehta, J. (2012). The allure of order: High hopes, dashed expectations, and the troubled quest to remake American schooling. NY: Oxford. Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Books. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (2013). Decoding subaltern politics: Ideology, disguise and resistance in agrarian politics. New York: Routledge. Veltri, B. T. (2008). Teaching or service? The site-based realities of Teach for America teachers in poor, urban schools. Education and Urban Society. 40(5), 511–542.
The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package. Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.
This work attempts a comparative description and analysis, focusing on the US, the UK, and Australia on the topic of the Right, educational policy, and schooling. It adopts as its underlying theme the burning fuse in tracing the topic back to Joseph de Maistre a Rightist who fled revolutionary France to seek safety in the company of Tsar Alexander I’s Russian Empire. Here, he had much to say about school education, not for all, but rather the “deserving” social elite. During the past three or four decades in the US, the UK, and Australia, the Right has been remarkably successful in amassing political power. And in doing so, the right of politics in these countries has reshaped school educational policy and practice, a necessary step in securing the future of the Right as a political force. Moreover, even during the years the Right has been on the opposition benches in these countries, such has been the strength of their political force that governments of the Left have acquiesced to much of their school educational policy. A pioneering effort, this book asserts that to understand school educational policy in the third decade of the 21st century, we need to comprehend the politics of the Right. This book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students interested in Education Studies, Theory and Policy, and International and Comparative Education.
Education, Liberal Democracy and Populism: Arguments from Plato, Locke, Rousseau and Mill provides a lucid and critical guide shedding light on the continuing relevance of earlier thinkers to the debates between populists and liberals about the nature of education in democratic societies. The book discusses the relationship Rousseau and Plato posited between education and society, and contrasts their work with the development of liberal thinking about education from John Locke, and John Stuart Mill’s arguments for the importance of education to representative democracy. It explores some of the roots of populism and offer a broader perspective from which to assess the questions which populists pose and the answers which liberals offer. The book makes a substantial contribution to the current debate about democracy, by emphasising the central importance of education to political thought and practice, and suggests that only an education system based on liberal democratic principles can offer the possibility of a genuinely free society. This book is ideal reading for researchers and post-graduate students in education, politics, philosophy and history. It will also be of great interest to Educational practitioners and policy makers.
What do we actually do when we research education policy and governance? Why do we tame the messy hinterland of research into smooth accounts and what do we lose in the process? In this volume, distinguished scholars in education policy and governance research discuss how the practice of methods is messy, subjective, and provisional. They approach methodology as riddled with tensions, doubts, troubles, and mundane decisions. Scholarship in this book shifts from recording the methodological hinterland to putting it to productive use as resources for thinking about the researched world and about research itself. This methodological openness helps to examine how research reproduces scholars’ metaphysics, how research is a deeply embodied process encompassing all senses, how scholars’ concerns interfere in the worlds they study, but also how these equally interfere with researchers. By challenging smooth methodological accounts which conceal the complex and provisional nature of research, this book offers new approaches in education policy and governance research that are more generative, insightful, and sincere. Offering new ways of thinking about research methodologies, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education research and education theory, as well as social scientists interested in research methodologies more broadly.
