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1.
Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature   总被引：7，自引：0，他引：7  
International evidence suggests that educational reform’s progress depends on teachers’ individual and collective capacity and its link with school-wide capacity for promoting pupils’ learning. Building capacity is therefore critical. Capacity is a complex blend of motivation, skill, positive learning, organisational conditions and culture, and infrastructure of support. Put together, it gives individuals, groups, whole school communities and school systems the power to get involved in and sustain learning over time. Developing professional learning communities appears to hold considerable promise for capacity building for sustainable improvement. As such, it has become a ‘hot topic’ in many countries.  相似文献   

2.
Educational research has been criticised by governments and practitioners. For some politicians and policy makers, there is a tendency to look for direct links between research and successful, effective and efficient practice. Research is needed to inform their evidence-based practice as policy makers, and to provide the kind of research teachers need to base their practice on the best available evidence for doing ‘x rather than y’ (Hargreaves 1996) or predicting the ‘size of the effect of A on B’ (Blunkett 2000). There is no doubt that both teachers and policy makers do make decisions on a daily basis based on some form of evidence. This paper explores Hargreaves’ notion of evidence-based practice, providing a range of criticisms. It also examines Carr’s historical account of ‘praxis’ and ‘poiesis’ to suggest a notion of evidence-based praxis based partly on the historical notion of ‘phronesis’ — practical wisdom. The basis for this is the argument that wise and practical ethical and moral judgements are central to an understanding of teachers’ daily work. What to do in a specific educational situation cannot be determined solely by theoretical beliefs or by ‘techne’. However the ethical dimension is not the only consideration. The paper suggests that evidence-based praxis use Stenhouse’s notion of ‘actionable evidence’, which includes the ethical dimension, but also Thomson’s concept of ‘thisness’, which describes the unique contextual characteristics of a school. If disadvantaged schools can make some sort of difference to learning opportunities for students, it is argued that teachers might engage in evidence-based praxis which involves them in reflecting on, and theorising what is happening in classrooms, schools and neighbourhoods. This ‘praxis’ also involves them in modifying their theories, critically analysing ‘what works’, questioning how they know and developing ideas about how things might be done differently. There will be an element of developing knowledge about teaching and learning strategies (Hargreaves’ ‘body of knowledge’), but it will be in the context of the ethical and moral dilemmas associated with education. It will take up the question of local differences as well as a realistic approach to what constitutes actual school improvement. Evidence-based praxis is also essentially a collective activity not an individual approach. Future development of the notion of evidence-based praxis might also include involving students in a more reciprocal and open learning process like that highlighted by researchers who focus on student participation linked to school reform.  相似文献   

3.
Claudia Buchmann 《Prospects》1999,29(4):503-515
Conclusion In the last two decades of the twentieth century, many Africans have experienced decline or stagnation in the quality of their lives. The continued high rates of poverty and declining educational enrolments in the region are outcomes of multiple factors, including escalating debt and declining development assistance on the global level and fiscal mismanagement, weak governance and continued population growth within African countries. One realization that has come from the experiences of recent decades is that poverty is both a cause and an outcome of low educational enrolments. Breaking the cycle requires great effort on two fronts simultaneously: (a) a targeted attack on poverty through policies that promote sustainable and equitable development; and (b) an unwavering long-term investment in basic education (Psacharopoulos, 1995). The question remains whether international organizations, African governments and local communities will heed the lessons learned from past missteps and apply them to future educational initiatives. Both the international community's renewed awareness of the importance of basic education and the recent educational efforts of African-based NGOs suggest that the answer to this question is a tentative ‘yes’. Perhaps the first decade of the new millennium will bring a more definitive answer. Original language: English Claudia Buchmann (United States of America) Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. Her research interests include educational inequality in the international context with a special focus on educational problems and prospects in Africa. Her recent publications include ‘The debt crisis, structural adjustment and women's education: implications for status and social development’ (1996,International journal of comparative sociology) and ‘The State and schooling in Kenya: historical developments and current challenges’ (1999,Africa today).  相似文献   

4.
Gordon Porter 《Prospects》1995,25(2):299-309
Conclusion Michael Fullan, Dean of Education at the University of Toronto and an acknowledged expert on educational change, reform and improvement, has noted that reform in special education ‘represents just about all the issues involved in bringing about educational reform.’ complexity and leadership are particularly difficult challenges. Fullan has noted that, ‘the solutions to inclusion are not easily achieved. It is complex both in the nature and degree of change required to identify and implement solutions that work. Given what change requires—persistence, coordination, follow-up, conflict resolution, and the like—leadership at all levels is required...’ (Fullan, 1991b). Organizational support for inclusive education must be in place at the provincial/state level, the regional/school district level, and at the school level. These structures, programmes and policies must deliver the support needed by classroom teachers and their students. We have set out specific ways that this can be done, consistent with an inclusive policy framework. The commitment to equity, as well as access and quality, requires continuing development by building on these approaches. In so doing, we can achieve better results for students with special needs while simultaneously creating more effective schools for all students. A former teacher and school principal, Gordon Porter is now director of student services for the public schools in Woodstock, New Brunswick. A well-known advocate for integrated education, he has been instrumental in developing inclusionary programmes for all students in the schools in the Woodstock area, and throughout the province of New Brunswick. Dr. Porter has conducted training in many parts of Canada as well as the United States. He is currently vice-chair of the Committee on Integrated Education of the International League of Societies for the Mentally Handicapped.  相似文献   

5.
Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing something essential in their inattention to considerable support among Black urban women for market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational left has engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly negative impact of educational marketization on the disenfranchised, not enough attention has been paid to the crucial role the educationally dispossessed have actually played in building these otherwise conservative reforms. Engaging with Michael Apple’s arguments concerning processes of identity formation within conservative movement-making, we can begin to conceptualize the importance of subaltern groups in market-based educational reforms. Yet ethnographic work conducted with Black voucher mothers, school officials, and community leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shows that this subaltern process of conservative formation does not always occur in the manner theorized by Apple and his colleague Anita Oliver, in which ideologically relatively unformed parents and families are “pushed” to the Right by an intransigent state. Although the conceptual tools they provide are the foundation of our ability to imagine a more compelling theorization of dynamics and social actors in Milwaukee, significant conceptual—not to mention empirical—work remains to be done. In this essay I renovate Apple and Oliver’s arguments concerning conservative modernization in order to make them more resonant with the processes of race, gender, subaltern identity formation and agency evident in my ethnographic field research with low-income African-American women choosing vouchers for their families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Aided by critical, feminist, and post-structural theorists both within and outside educational disciplines I assess the utility and limitations of Apple and Oliver’s framework in explaining the mobilization around ‘parental choice’ and vouchers in Milwaukee. Based on my conceptual and empirical findings, I retheorize pro-voucher African-American politicians, community leaders, and poor and working class women (and their families) as representative of a subaltern ‘third force’ in conservative formation. Their tactical investments in fleeting conservative alliances and subject positions, I argue, are likely to play an increasingly significant role in educational and social reform both in the United States and elsewhere. Thomas C. Pedroni is an assistant professor of secondary social studies methods, educational foundations, curriculum theory, and qualitative research methodology at Utah State University. His recent research has centered on issues of identity formation and subaltern agency among urban low-income predominantly African-American and Latino parents within otherwise largely conservative coalitions for publicly financed private school vouchers. His research interests also include the development of composite critical and post-structural approaches in educational theory and research, the identification of persistent exclusionary power/knowledge regimes in state-level educational reforms, and the analysis of the increasing colonization of the global educational sphere by neo-liberal and managerial forms.  相似文献   

6.
This article focuses on educational enterprises outside the formal sector, such as museums, botanical gardens and interactive science centres. International research is drawn on to illuminate how design, culture, educational strategies and settings combine to affect the way in which young people respond to experiences on offer, leading to analysis of the impact of such settings in promoting learning, and the likely implications for those who staff such venues. Aikenhead’s concept of the educator as ‘culture broker’ is developed to suggest ways in which learning might be best supported. It envisages a shift from ‘delivery’ strategies targeted at large groups towards approaches which focus on what learners choose to know about using dialogue between children and ‘known and trusted people’. Analysis of observed responses in various settings is undertaken from a sociocultural perspective using the notion of communities of practice. Implications for the roles of education managers and their staff in further research are developed.  相似文献   

7.
How can we speak about radical education in these seemingly unpropitious times? I explore this question first by examining aspects of our radical heritage (self-directed learning, facilitation, democratic pedagogy, learning in hegemonic struggle, learning in social action, critical pedagogy) and then by discussing what radical learning and education mean now, in an era of capitalist triumphalism. I outline a method which helps practitioners to investigae and act on what people are actuallly learning and teaching each other in different sites—educational instititions, workplace families, communities, the mass media and social movements. Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start. (Williams, 1958a)  相似文献   

8.
This paper reports on the work of a small group of Education academics to build a professional learning community in a regional university in the north of England. Their efforts form part of a ‘Leading Learning’ school–university partnership serving schools in disadvantaged communities in inner city Leeds. This is designed to support teachers’ professional learning and development and reclaim their sense of collaborative professionalism in a new era of austerity Britain. The account given here is about the new partnerships being created between and among academic colleagues, who are learning to work effectively with each other and their schooling colleagues on their collective professional learning and to build their collaborative sense of professionalism. The complexities of this task—of working in a professional learning community within Faculty in order to model and support a city-wide professional learning community with teacher partners, school communities, and civil servants in the local Authority—are framed in terms of knowledge-building for the improvement of educational provision for disadvantaged students in local schools and the university.  相似文献   

9.
Since 1994 when the General Law of Education was issued, educational authorities have been claiming that Colombia has embarked on an educational revolution [‘La revolución educativa’ (n.d.). From the Colombian Ministry of Education website: . Retrieved 23 Nov 2004] where schools have curricular autonomy, and are to improve the quality of education by attending to the needs of the communities they serve. Teachers are urged to engage in a continuous process of constructing the curriculum which is to be anchored in the fundamental aim of educating critical citizens. The findings of this study carried out with the participation of 13 mathematics teachers with a range of teaching experiences and from different schools in Bogotá, show a totally different picture. Instead, for the teaching of school algebra, teachers emphasised the purpose of training pupils in the manipulation of symbolic expressions, as the prerequisite knowledge for the next school mathematics level and ultimately for the External Examination. I offer explanations for the identified gap and argue for the crucial need to create conditions for change at the education systemic level and for the actual empowerment of teachers.  相似文献   

10.
This paper takes up the question of the way in which ‘the problem with educational Research’ is represented. It takes as its point of departure two recent views on ‘the Problem’ — one expressed by an educational journalist and one presented by the Australian Council of Deans of Education. It locates these within a larger frame of international debate about educational research and its problems and considers how these arise out of particular dispositions towards educational research and, by extension towards, education itself.  相似文献   

11.
This paper investigates the ways in which corporate ideas are impacting on Australian education, with a particular emphasis on secondary schools. We note the growing importance of a culture of enterprise in changing the practices of schooling, indicating how a performative organisational culture is producing different identities and relationships in educational work. The paper begins by considering the imperative for schools and individuals to be enterprising. It then moves on to examine more closely the impact of this discursive shift on teachers, students and school communities as they engage in enterprising practices. We draw on our research of over 50 state and private schools mainly in south-east Queensland to demonstrate how the newly emergent corporate ‘curriculum’ is producing a changing set of imperatives, responsibilities and outcomes for leadership in ‘enterprising’ schools.  相似文献   

12.
Michael Fullan in 1991 made the comment that little was known about how students viewed educational change, as no one had thought to ask them. There is a small but growing literature seeking the views of students on a range of issues associated with schooling. This paper reports the findings of a study of students’ perceptions of top–down educational change, involving school amalgamations, closures and creation of middle schools. The policy process was purportedly to involve consultation with students. The study interviewed students to explore the nature and extent of their participation in the policy enactment and their views about the changes. Several meta level themes emerged from the students’ ‘voices,’ including issues associated with disempowerment, and competing social justice and economic discourses. The findings foreground the often messy and contradictory tensions evident in policy processes. The study found that despite the policy intent to include students, they continued to be the ‘objects’ of policy initiatives, submerged in what Freire labelled a ‘culture of silence.’ It was the macro level policy elite who exerted the most influence, using their power, privilege and status to propagate particular versions of schooling. The paper concludes that students are deeply impacted by educational change and they want to participate in restructuring agendas. Therefore policy makers at all levels need to make spaces for the active engagement of students in policy processes.  相似文献   

13.
The South African obsession with performance-based pedagogies, as I have shown, has negative implications for resolving equity problems in educational reforms; it threatens to negate a political debate about ‘goals’ in favour of a technician’s debate about ‘ends’; and it fragments knowledge into meaningless tasks that assign value to external behaviours rather than the multiplicity of ways in which learning and valuing can be experienced (if not always expressed). The real danger to building a strong democratic culture through education is that what should be vibrant debates about ‘what’s worth knowing’ could be effectively silenced in a performance assessment system that only values, through a complex assessment system, that which is worth doing. Such an understanding of education is, unfortunately, entrenched in a global network of economic and technological processes that make such pursuits appear both normal and inevitable.  相似文献   

14.
The ‘Balance of Nature’ metaphor is a pervasive idea in ecology. However, the scientific community acknowledged during the last decades that equilibrium conditions are rare, while disturbance events are not uncommon. We suggest that the exclusive teaching of the ‘Balance of Nature’ metaphor produces cultural, scientific and learning misconceptions about the structure and function of nature. We outline an exemplary educational intervention for high school students to exhibit that the use of computer simulations could serve important educational goals in ecology and environmental education, such as the liberation of the concept of ‘balance’ of its metaphysic burden, the comprehension of the dynamics and the systemic nature of ecological processes and the appreciation of the mutual relation between society and nature.  相似文献   

15.
Schools in England have been required to adopt and adapt an ongoing series of policy initiatives: some however are offered on an ‘opt-in’ basis. This paper examines one such ‘offer,’ that of Creative Partnerships, a programme which provides schools in designated deprived areas the opportunity to work with creative practitioners in order to change both classroom practice and whole schools. We report here on the snapshot phase of a national study, using a corpus of multi-method qualitative data from 40 schools. We suggest that headteachers saw different opportunities in the CP offer but what actually happened in the school related to three interwoven strands: the situatedness of the school, the headteacher’s stance towards change, and the architecture of change management. Our analysis, which highlights the ways in which many of the schools were unable to ‘spread and embed’ the pedagogical changes supported through CP, suggests that the majority of heads could benefit from involvement in explicit discussion about ‘unofficial’—and more democratic—approaches to leading and managing change.  相似文献   

16.
Research lauds the benefits of parent involvement in the schools, yet many schools and communities have not achieved desired levels of involvement. Underlying expectations and methods soliciting parent involvement may be rooted in cultural misperceptions. This study, based on Epstein’s (1987) Overlapping Spheres of Influence model, explored the ways and extent that community members, school staff, and Samoan families interact regarding a public middle school. Qualitative research methods (interviews and observations) involved parents, teachers, administrators, and community agency members and officials in participatory action research. Findings displayed a base of cultural differences regarding parent involvement: Samoan parents were expected to participate in school events and assist children with homework, yet Samoan culture has historically divided the parents’ responsibilities from the teachers’ responsibilities. Parents identified their responsibilities for children’s spirituality and discipline and viewed academic matters as solely the responsibility of teachers. The school’s new activities, parents’ shifting focus, and community members’ diverse actions are demonstrating a start of change. This research supports the need for school personnel to understand the cultural roots of minority families’ parent involvement practices. Marianna F. Valdez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Community and Cultural Psychology. She completed her M.A. degree at the University of Hawaii and B.A. degree at Tulane University. Her research interests involve the development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally appropriate community programs, especially related to the public school setting. She is most interested in understanding and representing emic perspectives to drive action research, informed by culturalist approaches and mixed methods. Peter W. Dowrick is Professor of Disability Studies and affiliate graduate faculty in Psychology at the University of Hawaii. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland, ATCL at Trinity College London, M.Sc. at the University of Auckland, and B.Sc. at the Victoria University of Wellington. He has wide experience working with people marginalized by culture, disability, mental health, and other considerations. His consultation on prevention and intervention extends to 31 states and 21 countries. His overarching contribution has been in the concepts of feedforward and creating futures, applied in situations of personal safety, serious mental illness, social behavior, sports and recreation, daily living, literacy, academic skills, health, housing, management, and jobs, among others. Ashley E. Maynard is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and B.A. at the University of Virginia. She studies the interrelationships of culture, contexts of child development, and healthy cognitive and social development of children. Based on a socio-cultural paradigm, the theoretical question that lies at the heart of her research program is the ways in which a variety of culturally based activity settings influence adaptive pathways of development for children and families. She teaches courses in Developmental Psychology and Culture and Human Development.  相似文献   

17.
Compared with the problems one encounters when trying to use ‘graduate employability’ as a measure of the quality of higher education, recognising how the definitions of ‘employability’ are dependent on the type of the data used in analysing the phenomenon in question is a totally different matter. This article demonstrates how the understanding of graduate employability varies when the viewpoint of the analysis changes from cross-sectional to longitudinal. Indicators obtained from the educational and working careers of graduates with master’s degree in nine European countries are used to illustrate differences between the two views on employability. The article shows that longitudinal indicators are useful in displaying the limitations of the higher education system when trying to improve the employability of graduates.  相似文献   

18.
In spite of the widespread adoption of policies on mainstreaming, and more recently on inclusive education for children and young people with special educational needs, little is actually known about the relationship between what teachers think about such policies and the type of learning environments that they provide. In this study in New Zealand, a sample of regular primary school teachers (N= 63) were categorised according to ‘high’, ‘moderate’ or ‘low’ scores on a scale which measures their views on mainstreaming policies and practices. The pupils (N= 1729) of these teachers also completed a scale measuring perceptions of their classroom learning environments. Children taught by teachers who espoused highly positive attitudes towards mainstreaming were found to have significantly higher levels of classroom satisfaction and marginally lower levels of classroom friction than children taught by teachers with less positive attitudes. Implications of these findings are discussed for further research on the role of teacher attitudes in the successful inclusion of children and young people with special needs and for policies on the implementation of effective inclusive practice. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

19.
In higher education dual systems, graduates are qualified to apply for jobs in same professional fields along two separated educational routes. The research problem is whether the rival applicants for professional positions are treated equally in the labour market despite their different qualifications. From the graduates point of view, to be equal means to have an opportunity to be employed in accordance with one’s professional skill. Applying European survey data, the article tests to what extent the ‘distribution of work’ between university and non-university graduates seems to be based on educational qualifications or actual competence. Among 4,000 German, Dutch, Finnish, and Swiss graduates primarily in business and administration and engineering, only slight and occasional evidence of ‘status-based recruitment’ was found. All in all, the research suggests that from the view of graduate employment, the European dual HE systems work very much following the principle of ‘different but equal’.  相似文献   

20.
Reiko Yamada 《Prospects》1995,25(4):791-802
Conclusion The 1947 education reform and mass education after the period of high economic growth have greatly influenced women's higher education attainments. These changes are beginning to transform women's views towards education and more women with higher education attainment are entering the labour marker. However, as previously indicated, many obstacles to equal opportunity and results in the labour market still remain for women. Higher education for women has never had the same social impact as that for men. So far as the academic career of women is regarded as having ‘symbolic value’—it has a close relationship to marriage in Japanese society. Women's higher education is a social way of maintaining a sub-culture and traditional gender norms. Ph.D. in education (dissertation: ‘The gender roles of Japanese women’) from the University of California in 1993. At present affiliated to the PHP Research Institute (Japan) as a senior research associate. Areas of interest include comparative higher education, educational policy, and gender and education. Her most recently published works in English are ‘Higher education in partnership with industry: the necessity to employ off-the-job-training system’ in theInternational journal of lifelong education (vol. 12, no. 2, 1994) and ‘The gender roles of Japanese women: an assessment of gender roles of Japanese housewives in the United States’ inPHP research report (vol. 9, 1995).  相似文献   

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