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1.
ABSTRACT

This article explores the strategies think tanks (TTs) from Brussels, London, Paris and Ljubljana use to exert influence on European Union (EU) policy-making. The paper argues that European TTs mobilise symbolic, political and network forms of capital built at the European level to enhance their legitimacy, credibility and visibility in the Brussels policy-making scene. The paper examines how TTs convert these forms of capital using the examples of the symbolic value of the ‘TT’ label, the role of expert providers, the strategic ‘presence’ in Brussels, and their membership in TT networks, and states the particular importance of symbolic and network capital in the EU policy context, which contribute to the legitimacy of the EU policy-making itself.  相似文献   

2.
ABSTRACT

Educational researchers have invested much in isolating the specific ‘drivers’ that influence school change and teacher professional development. In this vein, this article draws attention to necessarily situated understandings of practice development through research into the nature of ‘middle leading’ for site based education development in one primary school district in regional Australia. Drawing on practice theory, the analysis reveals how developing and sustaining change in schools is contingent on middle leaders’ insider knowledge, shared responsibility and capacity to sustain and ‘drive’ teachers’ learning. The article argues more situated understandings of middle leading practices are essential for sustainable educational reform.  相似文献   

3.
This paper introduces a serendipitous special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, focusing on the rise of large-scale international testing and performance data in school system accountability and the effects that such changes have produced in education policy and research. These developments are theorised in terms of the reworking of the State and networked modes of governance, including the increased involvement of edu-businesses in education policy-making and enactment, and the emergence of new topological spatialities and connectivities associated with globalisation. We contend that the prevalence of international large-scale assessments has greatly enhanced the mutual ‘visibility’ between participating national (and subnational) schooling systems within a commensurate space of measurement, which in turn makes possible new ways of acting in light of ‘evidence-informed’ policy-making. This analysing and theorising serves to both contextualise and introduce the papers included in this special issue. The paper closes by considering the implications of such developments on education policy and research, and how this necessitates the development for a new approach for researchers engaged in policy analysis, now and into the future.  相似文献   

4.
Abstract

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty’s critique of the ‘what works’ agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for ‘what works’ agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of ‘standing outside’ them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity.  相似文献   

5.
Editor's preface     
While ‘paradigm wars’ have raged internationally during the past decade in particular, the research community, qua community in the Irish context has been largely silent on these important issues. This paper provides a synthesis of key aspects of these international discourses against a brief historical backdrop of the field of educational research. Thereafter, this theoretical lens is used to interrogate the more than 200 papers published in Irish Educational Studies (IES) over a period of 10 years: 1996–2006. This analysis seeks to establish the relative health and quality of educational research in the Irish context, and in the third section of the paper, this analysis is the basis for discussion of lessons that may be learned from insights and understandings gained. The paper concludes that a more systematic and comprehensive review of educational research funding in the Irish context would be particularly apposite and timely, while also advocating the necessity for a comprehensive educational research policy and the creation of a national educational research council. In the absence of such endeavours, research is likely to remain fragmented, small scale and easily dismissed by policy-makers, thus enabling advocacy rather than evidence and research generated elsewhere to overly-influence educational reform, while failing to enhance and extend a comprehensive ‘native’ research literature, a vibrant research culture, while funding and systematically supporting and developing the next generation of educational researchers. In the absence of policy and funding, quality and capacity will continue to falter in a more complex, sophisticated interdependent world.  相似文献   

6.
This article draws upon the work of two researchers who facilitated practitioner research with school professionals in Liverpool. The researchers themselves had not been involved in practitioner research before. In this account, the researchers reflect critically upon their own experience. The discussion presents the learning curve that the researchers underwent as well as what they discovered about the relationship between practitioners and researchers when engaged in school‐based research. Crucially the issue of practitioners’ understandings of what constituted ‘good’ research emerged as a significant issue. In particular, positivist notions of research that drew from popular scientific understandings, as well as the culture of numerical targeting in the schools system, seemed to shape these practitioners’ sense of what was expected of them as practitioner‐researchers. The article finishes by reflecting upon the possible lessons that this work presents for education managers considering practitioner research approaches for continuing professional development (CPD).  相似文献   

7.
This paper contributes to the debate about conceptualising policy research by considering Howell's (1990) call that researchers reveal the ‘principle of choice’ which guides the selection of topics, strategies and resources in research. Specifically, it addresses the question of what information must be made available to other researchers so that there can be productive continuing conversations’ (Ball 1994:174) about policy research and its conceptualisation. An examination of the policy sociology literature indicates that the specification of the ‘principle of choice’ requires discussion of the intellectual resources deployed in the research and a consideration of the processes of intellectual work which render these resources meaningful. This specification is then applied in relation to my current research, the ‘Social Organisation of Education Practice’ (soep) project to investigate the changing relationship between education and training in Australia. The products and processes of intellectual work that have constituted the principle of choice in my own research are outlined and justified. The way this principle of choice has shaped the conceptualisation of the soep project is discussed and attention drawn to the practical limits of explicit conceptualisation and justification in research. The paper concludes by affirming the importance of making the principle of choice explicit but queries how this can be done in shorthand.  相似文献   

8.
This paper argues that recent English education policy has been influenced by external, economic and political factors, rather than founded on a valid understanding of how children's learning actually takes place. I will argue that the ‘performance’ model of education that has dominated the 1990s is inadequate in terms of its implied model of learning. I will review socio-cultural theory and propose it as a more valid conceptualisation. At some point in the future, I believe that the performance model will begin to collapse. An important task for researchers and practitioners is therefore to prepare a more secure alternative.  相似文献   

9.
This article discusses ‘minor key research’ and doing this kind of research as ‘response-ability’. We explore the possibilities that education policy enactment research might hold for theorising and doing research, not just for work on ‘how schools do policy’, but also for how researchers do policy research with schools. A methodological question is raised here by us with respect to what researchers might ‘do’ in schools and other policy locations (such as when working with bureaucrats or politicians). We also discuss our researcher responsibility with respect to such work, and we have attempted to respond to the questions: ‘Is there an alternative for the current regime of accountability? Are there ways to resist and intervene in the current culture of accountability?’ In the first section, we focus on minor key research, and in the second section we discuss doing minor key research as ‘response-ability’.  相似文献   

10.
This article highlights the complexity of participatory action research (PAR) in that the study outlined was carried out with and by, as opposed to on, participants. The project was contextualised in two prior-to-school settings in Australia, with the early childhood professionals and, to some extent, the preschoolers involved in this PAR project seen as co-researchers. This article explores the author’s journey to PAR, which she considered a socially just mode of inquiry. However, it is not without its complexities and challenges. This article makes transparent these complexities and explores issues of ‘power’, identity and influence in collaborative research. Questions often reflected upon by researchers are re-visited in this article: What theoretical underpinnings align with the investigation? Why undertake such a demanding research design as PAR? What does this research design involve? Where does the university researcher fit? How does a PAR team ‘work’ when there are so many different personalities involved? What are the challenges that are faced by participatory action researchers and how might these be overcome? While these challenges are not new to PAR researchers, the solutions and discussion put forward in this article may generate further reflection and debate.  相似文献   

11.
While it is generally acknowledged that being ‘historically informed’ lies at the heart of critical accounts of education policy-making, the use of historically focused retrospective research methods within the field is rare. This paper makes the case for retrospective research at a time when some of the most significant episodes of post-war educational policy-making are fast passing into the realms of not-so-recent history. In particular, it is argued that current policy scholars now have an opportunity to revisit the issues and concerns regarding the formation of the ‘New Right’ education policy reforms 30?years ago. Drawing on the experiences of a recently completed study of educational policy-making during the 1979–1983 Thatcher administration, it is argued that retrospective methods offer a surprisingly rich opportunity to collect primary data from the policy elites of the 1980s. It is concluded that the time is right for the production of a useful addendum to the founding studies of educational policy sociology that were conducted at the time.  相似文献   

12.
This article aims to deconstruct the underpinning tenets of the term ‘newer researcher into higher education’. In recognition of the ambiguities of the term, we begin by questioning the nature of the field(s) of research into higher education (HE). Secondly, we critique the policy discourses associated with the term ‘newer researcher’. Then, with a view to illustrating the over-linear assumptions of such discourses, the article articulates the biographies of practising researchers in this field through narrative reconstructions of the five authors’ own routes as researchers into HE, openly acknowledging their temporalities and serendipitous conditionalities. Finally, we consider the nature of a career in the context of the professionalisation of routes into HE research. Our concluding remarks return us to the question of the status of HE research and to suggestions of positive ways to embrace the dilemmas we face.  相似文献   

13.
ABSTRACT

Action research is a methodology that has been increasing in educational studies in recent years. Previous studies have revealed that action research affects practitioners more than traditional methods, since the practitioners are not only participants but also researchers themselves. One branch of action research is collaborative action research (CAR), whereby practitioners and the researcher collaborate through the action research process. This study builds on material from CAR in one Icelandic preschool that lasted over 24 months. The focus of this article is on the role of the researcher in the action research project and how it was constructed through the process. The research material consists of the researcher’s self-narratives, practitioners’ diaries, interviews, and recordings from meetings. The findings show that the researcher’s role was constructed in a so-called third space where the researcher and practitioners collaborated. The researcher went through an emotional landscape while constructing her role and her position was something in between an insider and an outsider. Finally, she faced different kinds of tension concerning her role as a researcher in the CAR. The study contributes to the limited number of studies on the researcher’s role in CAR and how it is constructed during the process.  相似文献   

14.
Abstract

This article discusses an analysis of abstracts of Brazilian theses and dissertations on environmental education from a database organised and maintained by a group of researchers in the EArt Project (www.earte.net). In presenting extracts of key trends in this dataset, our aim is to provide a snapshot of the many possible approaches to, and histories of, Brazilian environmental education research. The data also allow us to raise some questions that explore possible ‘blank spots’, ‘blind spots’ and ‘bald spots’ in Brazilian research on environmental education. Given the temporal development of the research field since the 1980s, we illustrate these ‘spots’ by exploring data related to epistemological and methodological diversity, from the viewpoint of knowledge areas as well as the graduate programmes that have been developing research on environmental education. Finally, we draw a picture of the methodological trends that have been privileged by Brazilian researchers, and pose questions as to what is needed in shaping an agenda for research on environmental education in Brazil into the future.  相似文献   

15.
The aim of this article is to emphasise physicality and embodiment in child-centred research, fieldwork and intellectual activity. It will argue that research is not a separate form of action, placing the researcher in a position of epistemological privilege, but an embodied capacity developed through practical activity. This will be explored through an examination of the ‘least-adult’ positionality. Drawing from a large ethnographic study of primary schools in Dublin, Ireland, this article contends that the body must be put at the centre of the research process. I introduce the conceptualisation of the ‘passive’ and ‘active’ body, as key components for the relational context of fieldwork. Moreover, through an engagement with phenomenology, it is argued here that knowledge production is an embodied capacity developed through a sensuous relationship with the field.  相似文献   

16.
Background and purpose: The purpose of this article is to shed light on how the research projects of 140 PhD candidates in the National Research School for Teacher Education in Norway (NAFOL) respond to the challenges faced by Norwegian teacher education regarding the demand for higher competence and a stronger research base. The concept of NAFOL is of interest from an international perspective because of its focus on facilitating teacher educators to achieve a PhD. Since 2001, Norwegian educational policy has had a strong focus on strengthening teacher education and making it more research-based than before. From 2017, all new teachers in Norway are expected to take a master’s degree. In order to accomplish this, there is a need for many new supervisors with a PhD in teacher education institutions. NAFOL is a unique project: a consortium of 23 participating network institutions within teacher education. The research school includes 140 research fellows, all of whom wish to achieve a PhD suitable for work in teacher education. The research school is funded by the Norwegian Research Council, originally for a project period from 2010 to 2016. The research school has had a positive external midway evaluation, and the project period has been extended with four cohorts of students to the end of 2021. However, this study is the first one looking into the research projects of this young generation of teacher education researchers. The research question posed in this article is: how do the research projects of the NAFOL PhD candidates contribute to the research base in teacher education? Main argument: The main argument in this article is that the potential impact of this research school is dependent on the quality of the large number of PhD projects connected to teacher education and education in general developed within the research school. The quality is likely to be good because, among other reasons, these projects are scrutinised by the research school community. The challenges these research projects face, located as they are between solidarity regarding grants from the funds financing the PhD candidates, solidarity with the aims of education, and the wish to contribute to innovation, might prove to be able to be met. These research projects have the potential to create innovation in teacher education research through ‘border crossing’ between different educational discourses, as well as through creating new knowledge in meta-studies based on the results from several projects. Sources of evidence and method: In this article, project abstracts from 140 PhD candidates participating in NAFOL are analysed in terms of their theme and problem formulation. The analysis is inspired by discourse analytical thinking – namely that in a certain situation, several conditions for action exist. In this study, these conditions for action are made apparent in the choice of theme and problem formulation in the research projects. The content analysis is focused on ‘signal words’, because these words might signal positioning in different educational discourses. Results: In the study, three main discourses can be seen as influencing the choice of topic and the problem formulation in the projects: a goal-oriented educational discourse, a ‘Bildung’ (i.e. character formation, or personal growth – ‘danning’ in Norwegian) and democracy discourse, and a critical knowledge-producing discourse. These discourses are constituted when the PhD candidates start their research projects but the conditions for action are ever-changing and, hence, the findings in this study cannot, of course, be considered as ‘final’. The development of these discourses within the research community of NAFOL is one way of scrutinising the research projects in order to make a contribution to qualified teacher education research. Conclusion: ‘Border crossing’ between discourses in research projects concerned with what might be, and what can make a difference in a knowledge society could be a key way of enhancing the future for a young generation of researchers in teacher education. The research projects carried out by the PhD candidates in NAFOL have the potential to develop both new knowledge and new discourses of importance for Norwegian teacher education, as well as for a broader international context regarding professional development in teacher education and education in general. The view of the teacher education profession – and on what a teacher educator can be – could become more fully informed than before the candidates’ participation in the research school.  相似文献   

17.
This article provides an evaluative account of its authors’ involvement in three major national improvement initiatives. Set in the context of three of the countries that make up the UK, these developments were focused in particular on the promotion of educational equity. Unusually, the analysis provided compares evidence collected from an insider perspective with data generated through independent evaluations. In so doing, it considers how research and researchers can contribute to system change by using research evidence to influence policy-makers and practitioners at all levels of the system. The article argues that this requires the coming together of different perspectives in a process of social learning and knowledge creation within particular settings. This means that researchers have to overcome a number of barriers related to social, cultural and political factors. They therefore have to develop skills in creating collaborative partnerships that span boundaries between actors who have different types of professional experience. It is argued that researchers also need to mobilise support in dealing with the pressures that this involves. The article concludes with the presentation of a strategic framework that can be used to think about how school systems can be helped to make better use of research knowledge.  相似文献   

18.
The ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is expected to produce knowledge of high social scientific quality and practical pedagogic value. It faces, in a particularly acute form, the issue of how confidence in its conclusions can be built. This article begins with some conceptual clarification of the notion of a ‘warrant’ for research findings and distinguishes between warrants in social research and warrants for educational policy and practice. It then, in the specific context of research on learning outcomes, proposes an integrated model that recognizes the importance of, and relationships among, criteria associated with research design and empirical work, theoretical coherence, relationship with other research, and user affirmation. It concludes by emphasizing the need for continuing debate about, and development of, the roles and relationships of ‘researchers’ and ‘users’.  相似文献   

19.
The present paper discusses three types of research perspective on the insider–outsider continuum: outsider research, (insider's) outsider research, and insider research. It examines the essential features of the insider–outsider distinction with reference to categories such as researcher, students, classroom context, contribution, control of condition, quality criteria, disclosure of information, and example of research. The paper concludes that the insider–outsider perspective can serve as a means of building a strong theoretical base in language teaching research that will help language teacher practitioner–researchers to situate their work within a wide variety of research types.  相似文献   

20.
ABSTRACT

Photovoice is a child-friendly method used in Participatory Health Research (PHR) to put children in a subject position to drive the research and social change. Little is known about the actual experiences of doing photovoice related to health issues in a primary school context regulated by adults. The purpose of this article is to explore how children’s voices can be genuinely taken into account in research and social change, and what the potentials and tensions are when using photovoice in schools. We present a case example of a PHR with primary school children using photovoice, and will focus on the lessons learned. Participating children were eager to tell their photostories, proud of their achievements, and felt ‘seen’ by adults, expressed in the phrase ‘Are we famous or something?’ Playful activities and concrete instructions helped children to create their own narrative. For the development of the children’s critical consciousness reflexive participatory actions and photo-elicitation were crucial. Their visuals prompted discussion and led to actions and plans taking into account their perspectives. Tensions included the struggle to find a right balance between guidance and control, protection and respect for autonomy and preset system requirements. Reflexivity and creativity are required to handle such tensions.  相似文献   

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