1. The inspirited nature of mindful curricular enactment’s community (re)making

Author: Margaret Macintyre Latta, Leyton Schnellert, Kim Ondrik & Murray Sasges

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (20 Dec 2016): 255-272

Abstract:

Intertwining case study with practitioner inquiry, a research team seeks language for the conduct of mindful curricular enactment in an alternative public middle school. The school is committed to valuing students’ narratives of experience, the resources all bring to the school, and the given particularities of contexts, subject matter, and situations, as the makings comprising learning within and through community. A collaborative approach to inquiry that involves all team partners in the research process and engages the unique strengths that each brings focuses on how this alternative school provides a case for accessing how and why mindful curricular enactment orients accordingly. It is the makings forming this curricular movement, and the room found within these makings to reorganize and reconstruct thinking, that primary attention is oriented towards. Deweyan ‘roominess’ negotiated through such curricular enactment is documented as mindful attention to curriculum-making that fosters the needed room—the conditions and supports sustaining an individual/collective movement of thinking. Such movement is revealed as necessarily receptive, inciting community (re)making. Its inspirited nature is revealed through participatory modes of being and associated habits embracing knowledge-making as generative, elemental to being human, in need of other(s), assuming temporal/spatial agency, and interdependent with imagination, instilling embodied understandings.

 

2. Teaching in the age of accountability: restrained by school culture?

Author: Turid Skarre Aasebø, Jorunn H. Midtsundstad & Ilmi Willbergh

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (26 Aug 2015): 273-290

Abstract:

In this paper, we explore how ‘teaching communication’ in the classroom is connected to school culture. In the age of accountability, the outcome focus force to the forefront, a ‘blame game’ which either blames students’ achievements on the teachers and teacher education, or the students and their socio-economic background. We argue that to succeed with teaching and learning is dependent on the school culture more than the single teacher or the students’ backgrounds. School culture is understood as attitudes, communication, student focus and engagement. Teaching communication in this paper is studied as teachers’ and students’ talk about subject matter in whole-class teaching. We explore how different school cultures give students different opportunities to experience meaning from teaching communication. The perspective on meaning is derived from Bildung-centred didactics. By using qualitative comparative case method in Norwegian Lower Secondary schools, we find three different types of ‘teaching communication’ typical for different school cultures: ‘Dialogic teaching communication’, ‘storytelling teaching communication’ and ‘reproducing teaching communication’. The school culture with the ‘dialogic’ variant is characterized by trust and reciprocity, making students’ experiencing meaning a possibility.

 

3. Exercising a bounded autonomy: novice and experienced teachers’ adaptations to curriculum materials in an age of accountability

Author: Mary A. Burkhauser & Nonie K. Lesaux

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (15 Oct 2015): 291-312

Abstract:

This study explores teachers’ first enactments of a set of theory-based curriculum materials designed to support academic language instruction. Specifically, this multiple case study looks at how six middle school English teachers in three US schools adapted the materials; each case includes a pair of teachers, one novice and one more experienced. All schools were located in the same district where a school performance measurement system was being used to publicly rank schools’ academic performance and growth. Multiple measures were used to look for evidence of adaptations and why teachers made adaptations. We found that all teachers adapted the curriculum, most often in response to either perceived student needs or district reform pressures. In two cases, patterns of adaptation differed by teacher experience; experienced teachers appeared better able to adapt curriculum materials to meet instructional goals. This pattern did not hold up at the third school, where teachers faced greater reform pressures. Taken together, these findings suggest that researchers should pay more attention to the role of school and district policy on teachers’ enactments of theory-based reforms. We conclude with guidance to researchers, instructional leaders and others interested in the potential of theory-based curricula as a lever for improving classroom instruction.

 

4. Coherent teacher education programmes: taking a student perspective

Author: Esther T. Canrinus, Ole Kristian Bergem, Kirsti Klette & Karen Hammerness

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (27 Dec 2015): 313-333

Abstract:

This study draws upon survey data of 486 student teachers from five different programmes based in five different countries (one programme in each country), and programmes that have varied in their efforts to become more coherent. We explore students’ perceptions of the coherence within their teacher education programmes and across the five programmes to investigate whether teachers in these programmes actually experience their teacher education programmes to be coherent. Descriptive analyses and analysis of variance were used for this purpose. Students in a programme which has explicitly made efforts to connect theory and practice over a period of 15 years do report more coherence. Students from a programme that has been constantly working on improvements but not a major redesign conceptualized around coherence, report experiencing less coherence. Based on students’ reports across all programmes, we conclude that the relationship between courses and field placements is in need of tighter links. Investing in collaboration across settings, i.e. field placement settings and university, remains a challenge for all teacher education programmes, even those engaged in substantial change efforts. Investigating how teacher educators might create closer links to school sites is a promising means of developing our understanding of teacher education programme coherence.

 

5. Connecting feedback, classroom research and Didaktik perspectivesv

Author:  &
Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (06 Feb 2016): 334-351

Abstract:

Feedback is frequently highlighted as a key contributor to students’ learning. This literature study argues that the focus of some of the feedback literature appears too narrow to understand what is going on in a classroom. Parts of the feedback literature show the relationship between feedback and learning approximate to a process-product model that predicts learning outcomes. The authors claim that feedback has to be studied in a classroom context and as a part of the teaching process to become more useful for teachers and pupils. Feedback research is thus discussed in light of other research traditions: Didaktik theory and classroom research in the last three decades. The article is based on a critical reading of feedback literature from a Didaktik perspective in order to enhance the complexity of the feedback concept. Our North-Continental Didaktik perspective focuses the importance of subject matter, the difference between subject matter and meaning, and the relative autonomy of teaching and learning activities. Classroom research from guided reading is employed as an example of how classroom research may contribute to explore classroom reality subject matter-based feedback in a school context.

 

6. Developing a university contribution to teacher education: creating an analytical space for learning narratives 

Author: Chris Hanley & Tony Brown

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (05 Feb 2016): 352-368

Abstract:

What might a distinct university contribution to teacher education look like? This paper tracks a group of prospective teachers making the transition from undergraduate to teacher on a one-year school-based postgraduate course. The study employs a practitioner research methodological framework where teacher learning is understood as a process of developing and evaluating self-representations. Students persistently revised a story of ‘Who I am becoming’, referenced to evolving notions of pedagogic subject knowledge. University sessions provided a platform for students to share and discuss their experiences in schools and reflect upon the research process as it occurred. Our findings suggest this approach enables student teachers to account for their learning in more nuanced and sophisticated ways where time for university-based reflection is restricted. The theoretical perspective draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Subjectivity is conceptualized not as fixed but persistently re-produced in an increasingly analytical developmental perspective. Data comprise reflective and analytical material produced by students at successive stages of the course, where this material provides temporal reference points for them in tracking and asserting their own development. The paper provides a methodological framework for teacher education informed by critically reflective constructions of the process through which individuals become teachers.

 

7. The affordances of case-based teaching for the professional learning of student-teachers 

Author: Sarah Gravett, Josef de Beer, Rika Odendaal-Kroon & Katherine K. Merseth

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (24 Feb 2016): 369-390

Abstract:

This paper reports on a qualitative enquiry into the affordances of case-based teaching for the professional learning of student-teachers. The context is a first-year foundational course in a four-year undergraduate teacher education programme, offered by an urban university in Johannesburg, South Africa, with a student enrolment of close to 700 students (divided into two groups of 350 students). Data sources used for this study were focus group interviews with student-teachers, individual interviews with teacher educators, video footage of classroom interaction, first-person reports by student-teachers in the form of reflective essays, student-teachers’ discussions on blackboard and examination scripts. The research showed that case-based teaching elicits engaged learning; assists with developing understanding of the complexities of teaching and enables student-teachers to relate theory-based ideas to predicaments of practice. Furthermore, the research revealed how case-based teaching can provide insights into student-teachers’ preconceptions of teaching. In this study, case-based teaching was used with large class groups. The findings suggest that case-based teaching, as used in the course reported on, could serve as an antidote for some of the issues that plague large course teaching.

 

8. Governing teachers by professional development: state programmes for continuing professional development in Sweden since 1991 

Author: Nils Kirsten & Wieland Wermke 

Source: Journal of Curriculum Studies (02 Mar 2016): 391-411

Abstract:

The purpose of this article was to analyse how teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) contributes to the government of the teaching profession. This is done by examining the CPD initiatives organized by two Swedish national educational agencies since 1991 involving the school subjects of Swedish (standard language education) and mathematics. Four programmes of professional development are identified in the investigated material, each motivated by specific conceptions of teachers and professional development. One important trend is that agency engagement in teachers’ CPD and school development has increased over time and that CPD programmes have become more prescriptive and elaborate in their use of evaluations. While this may result in a more standardized and centrally governed teaching profession, centrally governed initiatives could also provide teachers with professional arenas for developing ideas without being influenced by local school management.