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Shifting power relations in innovative learning environments: implications for initial teacher education and practicum
Oxford Review of Education
... The exploration of PSETs' professional competence during their teaching practicum provides valuable insights into their growth and the challenges they face. The use of diverse teaching methods reveals a significant tension between innovative pedagogical strategies and traditional educational frameworks as acknowledged by Nelson and Charteris [65]. Additionally, despite being digital natives, many PSETs struggle to effectively leverage ICT in their teaching, highlighting the necessity for guidance in an increasingly tech-driven educational landscape [35]. ...
This study aims to perform a systematic review that centers on research on the teaching practicum of preservice English teachers amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. To ascertain the primary concerns and offer a current portrayal of the teaching practicum for preservice English teachers, this study searched the topic within Web of Science, Scopus, and the ERIC database. The articles were meticulously reviewed and subjected to analysis based on the following criteria: (i) annual publication, (ii) sample size, (iii) employed methodologies, (iv) research contexts, and (v) predominant emerging themes. The search identified 69 studies in international peer-reviewed journals between January 1st, 2020, and May 4th, 2023. Five themes of concern emerged: Challenges, benefits, and countermeasures of teaching practicum; preservice English teachers’ emotions in teaching practicum; preservice English teachers’ professional identity and beliefs; professional competence demonstrated or developed during the teaching practicum; models or techniques of implementing teaching practicums. This systematic review offers insightful considerations within preservice English teachers’ teaching practicum research, prompting the need for additional studies in this intricate domain.
The study aims to identify the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of higher education institutions (HEIs) practices as a basis for transformation trends in teaching and learning. Mixed methods are utilized through triangulation of Focus Group Discussion (FGD) in the process of the study. Likewise, convenience sampling is employed in gathering the population size of the study. The study comprised one hundred twenty-five (125) respondents only. Results show that transformation trends of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning in higher education institutions advance the soft skills, knowledge, and remote learning platform in the educational system, show that digital learning platforms define learning destination sites and learning management systems, show that powered learning environment personalized learning experience of AI contribution in education to meet the needs of students' learning styles show that adaptive learning integrates technique platforms such as progress of teaching and learning, assessment result, and interaction for the transformation trend in the educational system, show that automated assessment identifies and designs the best performance criteria for transformation trends in teaching and learning impact decision of AI, and show that wearable technology improves and provides increased productivity and punctuality for educational spheres and benefits of technology. Findings show that there is a significant
Innovative learning environments (ILE) with open flexible classroom spaces are designed to support collaboration and emphasise responsibility for self-regulated student learning as a partnership between students and teachers. Recent studies of ILE focus more on teachers than students’ experiences, and there is a gap in the theorising of student learning in ILE. Using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to reflect the complexity and dynamism of learning patterns and processes, this article presents and discusses a framework that illustrates ways in which students might orient to learning in ILE. The framework was developed by a team of researchers during collaborative analysis of data from three separate studies involving New Zealand ILE schools. The framework is illustrated using data snapshots from student interviews. Student orientation to learning provides a useful construct for thinking about whether and how ILE work for different learners and learning needs. The triarchic framework encapsulates the complex nature of the user-resourced space interface, including learning relationships, subject material, and ILE environments. It can be used as a heuristic for leaders and teachers to structure learning in ILE to enhance students’ learning experiences and support learner agency and achievement.
There has been growing interest in the interplay of social and material elements in innovative learning environments (ILE) and attention to the agency of teachers and students. This chapter considers how school spatial design can influence students’ and teachers’ sociomaterially mediated capacity to act. The authors’ research was undertaken at a time in Aotearoa when there were moves to implement ILE across schools to reflect a pedagogic vision for twenty-first century learning, with significant government investment in building design (Ministry of Education. (2015). Designing schools in New Zealand, requirements and guidelines. Wellington: Ministry of Education. https://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Primary-Secondary/Property/Design/Design-guidance/DSNZ-version-1-0-20151014.pdf). ‘Spatial agency’ is an emergent theme in the case study research. For both students and teachers, agency involves spatial literacy where they notice and recognise the pedagogical affordances of the material spaces and objects in the learning environment. These pedagogical affordances can be used to advantage for learning both individually and with peers. The emphasis on openness and flexibility creates an impetus for students to demonstrate spatial agency where they effectively navigate socio-material spaces. With potential for such a profound influence on teaching and learning in Aotearoa schools, research into how teachers and students enact agency in ILE is timely.
The global emergence of Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) has disrupted the conventional grammar of schooling prompting more collaborative and flexible teaching and learning arrangements. While the emergence of a new grammar and its complexity for experienced teachers is acknowledged, the ramifications for initial teacher education (ITE) are under-researched. With practicum at the heart of ITE it is vital that teacher educators become conversant with the grammar of an ILE practicum so they can support student teachers to thrive in these environments. Utilising Gislason’s (Gislason, Learning Environments Research 13:127–145, 2010; Gislason, Alternator and Deed (eds), School space and its occupation: Conceptualising and evaluating innovative learning environments, Brill Sense, The Netherlands, 2018; Gislason, Learning Environments Research 13:127–145, 2010) school environment model and an instrumental case study design we identified key influences for three key participant groups within the ecology of practicum—student teachers, associate teachers and teacher educators. Our findings suggest the conventional grammar of practicum is incongruous with a collaborative grammar that underpins an ILE practicum. Such a grammar amplifies the importance of relational, leadership, and collaborative skills for student teachers as well as highlighting a necessity to re-imagine practicum traditions such as full management.
Implicit within the design of many Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) in New Zealand primary schools is the intention of a group of co-located teachers working together with an ‘up-scaled’ community of students. To some these socio-spatial settings are suggestive of pedagogical and spatial freedom, of high levels of professional and student agency, and a transformation away from routines established in previous traditional classroom environments. The shift into ILEs may therefore encourage possibilities for novel approaches, the utilisation of individual strengths and opportunities for teachers to determine together how facets of learning, time and space are organised. However, the level of structure required by teams to successfully and collaboratively achieve this presents as a complex, and time-consuming task, with teachers often finding themselves in a space between practicality and potential. This paper draws on observational and interview data from one primary school ILE—part of a wider case study of teacher collaboration in six New Zealand schools. It considers the role of pedagogical and organisational structures alongside levels of autonomy experienced by teachers on adapting to new spaces. The findings indicate that while the occupation and ongoing inhabitation of Innovative Learning Environments may well present opportunities for teachers, tensions may be felt between predominating or created structures, and aspired or idealised practice.
A shift to Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) in New Zealand schools is a current Ministry of Education strategic direction challenging how we as teacher educators prepare candidate teachers (student teachers or trainee teachers) to teach in these emerging environments. Candidate teachers in our primary teaching degree increasingly are placed in ILEs on practicum as these develop in schools in our geographic area. Our students report anecdotally that teaching in ILEs poses them steep and novel challenges around how they plan, teach, assess, manage students and learning, as well as work collaboratively with associate teachers and, increasingly, other colleagues. With our current programme underpinned by a more conventional image of teaching and learning, and schools transitioning between conventional and arguably more innovative, bespoke environments, we wondered how our students navigated the novel pedagogical and physical configurations they encountered in ILEs on practicum. We conducted focus group interviews with our candidate teachers and recent graduates who had completed one or more practicum in an innovative learning environment (as defined by the practicum school). We explored participants’ perceptions of the particular demands ILEs created for them. Utilising Lefebvre’s (The production of space. Trans. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1991) socio-spatial trialectic and Monahan’s (Built pedagogies & technology practices: designing for participatory learning. Palo Alto, CA, 2000) notion of “built pedagogy” in this chapter we identify key socio-spatial entanglements, or harmonics, that emerge from our analysis and explore how these inform how we might better prepare our candidate teachers in these transitional times.
The Ministry of Education in New Zealand in 2013 provided funding for universities to develop and implement initial teacher education programmes with innovative school–university partnerships to promote the success of graduates. To enhance the success of this new programme, four teacher educators reviewed the literature on school–university partnerships. The authors investigated critiques of and successful strategies for partnerships to develop three models to be trialled by primary school partners and the university staff involved in the pilot programme. Model A represents the traditional practicum partnership whereas models B and C look at partnership as a professional learning community. These models are explained and the findings from discussions throughout the initial implementation of the programme to determine aspects conducive to success for student teachers in each context are outlined. Questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups provided school and university staff members the opportunity to analyse the models as well as benefits and challenges of such a relationship. From this analysis, the four teacher educator/researchers concluded that working as a professional learning community with student teachers, teachers and university lecturers provided a strong foundation for partnership. School and university staff members valued working together as professional development for all partners, as a potential avenue for joint research, and as a platform to enhance student teacher’s preparedness for their first classroom.
Significant funding is devoted across the world to transforming traditional classrooms into flexible learning environments. These efforts are often motivated by a desire to create learning spaces attuned to twenty-first century competencies, which involve learning how to communicate, collaborate, think creatively, and how to become critical users of technologies engaged in both the consumption and production of knowledge. In New Zealand, these flexible learning spaces are seen as part of innovative learning environments (ILEs), which are conceptualised as ecosystems involving learners, educators, communities, pedagogical practices, knowledge, and digital and material resources, including buildings and furniture. In line with ILEs, the notion of place-based spaces for networked learning foregrounds learning activity as enmeshed in an assemblage of elements—involving physical spaces, artefacts, digital technologies, people, ideas and tasks. In this paper, we adopt a networked learning perspective to frame the New Zealand learning landscape. Key findings from a national survey with 222 primary teachers, 126 secondary teachers and 163 school leaders, show that most teachers and leaders perceived their schools as being in-transition to ILEs. Findings highlight the importance of having a shared vision and leadership dedicated to supporting teachers’ experimentation with new practices in innovative spaces. The survey details the digital and material resources, the social configurations used in classrooms, the types of learning tasks students are engaging in and a range of emergent practices in innovative and traditional environments for learning across New Zealand.
The recent scholarship on agency is mostly centered around a relational (also known as situative, contextual, distributed, and ecological) approach that draws attention to agency being situated in context and contingent on sociocultural interactivities and contextual dynamics. My central argument is that there is a residue of passivity in these conceptions. Illustrative of this are the works by Bietsa and colleagues which I analyse to reveal conceptual flaws that need to be addressed. To overcome these flaws, it is important to reconstrue no less than the very basic premises about human development, context/reality, and teaching-learning to foreground a more radical view of agency conducive to combatting inequalities and injustices in education. In the alternative approach, termed the Transformative Activist Stance, human development is posited to be not only fully immersed in the world and its contextual dynamics but, more critically, realized by each individual's agentive contributions to communal practices, whereby these practices are changed as a whole every time a person acts as an active member of community. The emphasis is on the nexus of people changing the world and being changed in this very process of them changing the world—as two poles of one and the same, bi-directional and recursive, co-constitution of people and the world in a simultaneous self- and world-realization. People never merely react or respond to what exists but agentively act in co-realizing both the world and themselves. Agency in this account is accorded with a formative role in the processes of co-realizing both human development, the overall sociohistorical dynamics, and the world itself. Importantly, agency development is contingent on access to cultural tools that need to be provided by society and agentively taken up by each individual. There are starkly contrasting sociopolitical conjectures and implications geared to the issues of inequalities and injustices in education. The notion of a radical-transformative agency is deployed in order to expose and overcome ideologies of passive adaptation to, and acquiescence with, the existing order of things and the world as it presumably “is.”
The idea that the New Zealand education system will cater to all students, regardless of ability, and support them in developing their full potential to the best of their abilities, is enshrined in the famous 1939 Beeby/Fraser statement. Equality of access policy discourse has shifted to emphasise equitable outcomes, focussed increasingly on preparing students for success in the globalised, 21st century knowledge economy. In this context, the design and development of innovative new school buildings and refurbishments of existing facilities have been promoted as a policy that will enable, even bring about, modern pedagogical practices that, in turn, will achieve the stated aim of preparing students for the 21st century global economy. Arguments against retaining traditional single-cell classrooms include their perpetuation of traditional, mainstream (‘one-size-fits-all’) approaches to teaching and learning, while new, radical building designs hold the promise of enabling the desired ‘new’ pedagogies. Flexible learning environments encourage and enable teachers to exchange ‘front-of-the-room’, single teacher presentational approaches for collaborative, dispersed and facilitative styles, often in teams, working with multiple students in shared, common learning spaces. The New Zealand Curriculum has ensured inclusion as an educational principle, and current Ministry of Education policy discourse reminds schools of their commitment to this principle, and specifically links building design and design processes to ensuring inclusivity. So it should be asked whether non-traditional, flexible learning spaces can be inclusive. This article places this question in the context of the historically evolving approach to inclusion in the New Zealand context, and with reference to the ‘spatial turn’ in recent New Zealand education policy. This turn to enhanced flexibility and innovation has implications for inclusivity, reflected in both Ministry of Education policy discourse and critiques suggesting the exclusionary effects of flexibility. It is argued with reference to Lefebvre that notions of inclusion and exclusion are inherent in social practices that are both superimposed upon material space as much as they are influenced by the design features of that space.
With fast-paced and profound change underway in schools, Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) pose significant challenges for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes also. Even within a pre-service programme where preservice teachers spend two days of every week in schools and so are aware of and informally involved in ILAs, these environments and the pedagogies they require pose significant challenges for practicum preparation. In this article we report on a small-scale focus group study that explored how preservice teachers learn to teach in ILEs on practicum. We investigated how they grapple with teaching in ILEs at a time where alignment between our ITE programme and bespoke ILE developments in practicum schools is not assured. Our findings suggest that although ILEs offer preservice teachers new and unfamiliar challenges for practicum, such as orchestrating and taking responsibility for larger, more flexible groupings of learners, ILEs also offer opportunities for enhanced collaborative support and pedagogical responsibility. We also identify key anchoring practices that our preservice teachers utilise to make sense of the unfamiliar with the familiar.
The imaginary of the modern learning environment projected by the New Zealand Ministry of Education marks a subtle yet significant departure from a previously progressivist hegemony in pedagogy formation towards an instrumentalist pedagogy. The chapter interrogates this imaginary and its projected pedagogical implications for teachers. Analysed is a recently relaunched website specifically dedicated to MLEs, ile.education.govt.nz. Lefebvre’s concept of mental space is key to this analysis. Document analysis is used to argue that a critical reading exposes an underlying advocacy for placing the emphasis of pedagogic formation onto the physical environment and new technologies available to the practitioner. This amounts to de-centring the child in pedagogy formation. An instrumentalist education agenda, seated within a neoliberal philosophical approach, underpins the process of this shift to MLEs. Instrumentalism in education is sharply distinct from progressivism, which understands education as an end-in-itself. This shift occurs as a result of the apparent similarity in the meanings of certain key terms which actually operate from markedly distinct philosophical bases. By retaining much of the progressive discourse, instrumentalist pedagogic approaches are gradually altering the meaning beneath these signifiers. The de-centring of the child develops symbiotically with the adoption of an instrumentalist pedagogic identity. This chapter promotes critical debate around the fundamental drivers of pedagogic formation in an innovative and modern learning environment, and what implications this presents for a national education system.
Resistance has often been connected with anti-social attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, unusual and sudden explosions of violence and emotional outbursts. This book goes beyond these conventions. Exploring various key questions, ranging from concept definitions of affect and temporality, to complex entanglements of various social dimensions and ethical questions, this accessible guide provides a robust theoretical and methodological framework for researching of resistance and social change. By drawing connections between resistance and politics, between performance and everyday strategies, and between the juridical and its counter-strategies, this book provides students with a transdisciplinary understanding of contemporary debates in this emerging field.
This paper provides insights into teacher and school-based administrators’ responses to policy demands for improved outcomes on high-stakes, standardised literacy and numeracy tests in Australia. Specifically, the research reveals the effects of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and associated policies, in the state of Queensland. Drawing suggestively across Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, the research utilises interviews with teachers and school-based administrators to reveal how high-stakes, standardised testing practices served to discursively constitute performative teacher subjectivities around issues of funding, teacher and school reputation and target-setting within what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’. The paper argues that the contestation evident within this field is also reflective and constitutive of more educative schooling discourses and practices, even as performative logics dominate.
Students in urban under-resourced schools are often disengaged from the curriculum. Distributing voice (agency) to them would seem an obvious counter to their alienation, allowing them to be co-constructors rather than objects of their education. Beyond being pragmatically sound, student agency is, arguably, a psychological and moral imperative. However, what is imperative is not necessarily doable as we illustrate in two student agency high school projects. We analyze the outcomes using four previously identified factors: school context, project scope, personal gratification, and assumption of genuine authority (rather than teacher delegated power). In conclusion, we raise two issues requiring more reflection and investigation: what is the role of a teacher who is an employee of the school yet wants to help her students protest against injustice? How can agency be developmentally staged so that students become skilled in assuming responsible leadership in their schools?
The paper considers theoretical notions of power in relation to student voice. As an action‐oriented practice some aspects of student voice have received little theorisation as yet. This paper aims to contribute to a growing body of work on student voice which is addressing its current theoretical under‐elaboration. It does so by concentrating on the dimension of power. The central argument is that power is a significant factor in shaping both the philosophical underpinnings of student voice work and the practical assumptions which are made about what is possible in student voice work. The paper focuses on the British context. It examines the theoretical legacy student voice has inherited from radical pedagogy and places a critical spotlight on the notions of ‘empowerment’ and ‘dialogue’. It ends with a consideration of postmodernist notions of power which the authors argue provides the opportunity to examine more critically the way in which power conditions what is possible in student voice work.
The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that
Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea of productive power
incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices
and struggles over truth and objectivity. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the
argument. The radicality of his method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political
struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization
of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological
foundations. He affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that
order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step
whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that
treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic and social practices of
power. The second key move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality.
I conclude by considering the implications of Foucault’s politicization of ontology for our understanding of politics.
KeywordsFoucault-Political ontology-The political-Politics-Power
The advent of innovative learning environments (ILEs) raises challenges for initial teacher education, but as yet, such challenges have been under-addressed within policy and research. As ILEs become more common, preservice teachers (PSTs) find themselves in practicum placements in these environments. However, as change in schools is occurring more rapidly in schools, initial teacher education (ITE) programmes can struggle to respond to these emergent developments within a policy and guidance vacuum. We work as teacher educators within a small regional primary initial teacher education (ITE) programme. Grappling with potential implications of ILEs for our ITE programme, we noticed our PSTs were already negotiating such spaces on practicum. We therefore undertook research to learn more about how these PSTs managed to adapt to ILEs during their professional experience, despite the more conventional image of learning and teaching underpinning their teacher education programme at the time. We hoped to both understand how the ILE practicum worked from their vantage point, and how we might adapt our programme to more explicitly support PSTs since ILEs are emerging as enduring features of their professional practice landscape. We therefore conducted focus group interviews with a small number of our final year primary PSTs to explore their experiences of learning to teach in an ILE. We identified a number of potent forces, components and relations—or affects—that influence PSTs’ capacity to act as teachers in the social assemblage of the ILE practicum. ‘Learner agency’ emerged as a particularly influential force. While we concur that learner agency is foundational to engaged learning at school, we noticed that the notion of learner agency also constrained PSTs teaching on practicum in ways that disrupted how we thought about the ILE practicum. Our analysis suggests that learner agency, a foundational material, pedagogical and relational force of ILEs, has implications for ITE curriculum, pedagogies and practices.
In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the impetus to create open learning spaces that afford spatial and pedagogical flexibility have disrupted the nature of teachers’ work. In redesigned education facilities, teachers engage in sophisticated processes of collaboration and ongoing teacher professional learning. Moving from traditional classroom designs brings with it a shift in how knowledge is transmitted, co-produced and engaging with aspirational pedagogy and attending to the power dynamics of students and teachers and teachers as co-collaborators. Using a patchwork metaphor to frame our methodological approach, examples from research projects into teachers’ work from across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia addresses the question: What is involved in high-quality teacher collaboration in Innovative Learning Environments? This patchwork of practice is intended to support the work of those charged with researching, reviewing and enhancing collaboration in ILEs. Specifically, dimensions of alignment, acculturation, adaptation, aspiration and agency can inform teacher professional learning and development. By examining the complex conditions of ILEs in a range of projects, where teachers are no longer alone in teaching but contribute to both short-lived and sustained collaborations, we identify examples from research that illustrate new teaching realities in ILEs, and frame possibilities for action.
Emerging research shows teachers and architects perceive higher numbers of affordances for learning in innovative learning environments (ILEs) than in traditional classrooms. Yet, offering ILEs alone will not bring about significant changes to teacher practices nor students’ learning experiences. Supporting teachers to perceive and utilise spaces that offer multiple activity settings, such as afforded by ILEs, is important in eliciting pedagogical change. This research explored the development of strategies intended to support teachers to actualise the affordances of ILEs, i.e. take advantage of new learning spaces for effective teaching and learning. An innovative methodological pairing of Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Co-design was employed to explore teachers’ instructional practice development in relation to new learning spaces. The study uncovered insights into current and future practices, where teacher participants planned, enacted, and reflected upon their pedagogical strategies. It was found that empowering teachers to actualise ILE affordances involved generating communities of practice that provided them with the ‘time and space’ to collectively develop their practice.
Innovations in schooling and the architectural design of schools offer the opportunity to re-examine existing pedagogical practices. Graduating teachers need to be ready to teach and conversant with changing school environments and approaches to school organisation. However, there is a dearth of research that explores the student teachers’ perceptions of their experiences on practicum in innovative learning environments (ILEs). This article discusses the perceptions of over 100 student teachers undertaking primary teaching qualifications in New Zealand. An online questionnaire asked for responses to a range of statements about innovative learning environments (ILEs) and teacher education preparation for this type of school environment. Analysis of the findings indicated a wide range of experiences on professional practices, with more experience of ILEs generally leading to more positive perceptions of these environments. Student teachers perceived that more course-based preparation about ILEs was needed, though others perceived that the best way to learn about ILEs was during professional practice placements.
The rise of innovative learning environments, with multiple teachers and larger cohorts of students, can de-privatise practice as teachers have the opportunity to observe each other teaching. However, they also provide the opportunity for collaboratively planning and teaching, and engaging in reflective dialogue about specific pedagogical approaches to enhance student learning and achievement. This may enable teachers and senior staff to promote effective and sustained student learning. Digitally enabled learning environments with the spatial affordances of innovative learning environments can provide the opportunity for the school environment to be a link to knowledges and understandings within the global world. This article reports on a national online survey of 335 primary and secondary principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of work in innovative learning environments with multiple teachers. Multiple-choice and open-ended questions were analysed. The focus was on exploring the use of digital technologies within schooling in Innovative Learning Environments. The findings indicated that respondents were generally positive about the use of Innovative Learning Environments, particularly as experience of such environments increased. The research also found that cloud-based information communication technology enabled a shared online approach to communications, particularly teachers’ collaborative planning and writing of reports. Nevertheless, regardless of the enhancement of digital technologies, most of the respondents perceived that the effectiveness of the teacher, their relationships with the students and their pedagogical practices remained critical.
This paper reports findings from an interpretive policy and discourse analysis of documents informing contemporary initial teacher education (ITE) policy development in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study first asks: what is the problem of teacher education as constituted in policy and associated documents in the period 2010-2018? We then compare the problems, suggested solutions, and recent evidence about the work of teacher education in New Zealand, to discuss the policy discourse, and theorise about the potential utility of solutions to address the problems raised. Our comparative analysis of the problems of ITE and proposed policy solutions with research evidence of teacher education work underscores the imperative of engagement with local and relevant evidence-based knowledge as a basis for informed policy decision making.
United Nations: Convention on the Rights of the Child * - Volume 28 Issue 6 - Cynthia Price Cohen
There is growing interest in innovative educational space design and the relationality of spatialised teaching practices. This paper addresses the characteristics of spatialised professional learning in newly redesigned or purpose built new generation learning environments (NGLE). The case study is situated within Aotearoa/New Zealand context, a country where there has been considerable policy focus and investment in NGLE. Data from principals who have established NGLE in their schooling settings is analysed, with consideration given to the preparation of teachers to take up spatialised practices. The study highlights key characteristics of spatialised PLD practice – fostering spatial literacy; professional cross-pollination; co-teaching and peer coaching; deprivatisation and bespoke professional learning design. The value of this research lies in its contribution to researchers and practitioners in the schooling sector as they consider approaches to professional learning in NGLE.
The impetus to move to new generation learning environments places a spotlight on the relational dynamics of classroom spaces. A key feature is the notion of learner agency. A complex notion, learner agency involves both compliance with and resistance to classroom norms and therefore is far more sophisticated than acquiescence with classroom norms and protocols. This article traces a taxonomy of agency in education settings. To date agency has been theorised extensively in a range of ways. Firstly there is agency of the sovereign self, an autonomous learner that has emerged from self-determination theory. Secondly, relational agency is produced through sociocultural influences and linked with the ‘relational turn’. Thirdly, we have ecological agency, a temporally embedded process of social engagement where young people shape their actions in response to their context. Finally, there is an emerging new material conception of agency that is starting to gain traction in Education research and is yet to be explicitly recognised as an important consideration for educational practice. Consideration is given to this typology in light of case study data from school leaders who comment regarding learner agency in the context of new generation learning environments.
An Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development research priority, innovative learning environments (ILEs) have been translated into policy and practice in 25 countries around the world. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, learning spaces are being reconceptualised in relation to this policy work by school leaders who are confronted by an impetus to lead pedagogic change. The article contributes a conjunctural analysis of the milieu around the redesign of these education facilities. Recognising that bodies and objects entwine in pedagogic spaces, we contribute a new materialism reading of ILEs as these are instantiated in New Zealand. New materialism
recognises the agential nature of matter and questions the anthropocentric narrative that frames the post-enlightenment conception of what it means to be human. The decentring of human subjects through a materialist ontology facilitates a consideration of the power of objects to affect the spatial politics of learning environments. The article traces a relationship between the New Zealand strategic plan for Education 2015–2021 and principals' conceptions of ILE as the lived spaces of this policy actualisation and the disciplinary/ control society conjuncture. Informed by theories of spatial practice, we argue that principals’ understandings of ‘space’ are integral to pedagogic approaches within open-plan spaces. A conjunctural analysis can expand the capacity to act politically. By examining the complex conditions of a political intervention, in this case ILEs, we trace the displacements and condensations of different sorts of contradictions, and thus open up possibilities for action.
This article examines power issues related to language diversity in organizations, thus answering the need to investigate the role of language in cross-cultural management. More specifically, it contributes to a better understanding of how intraorganizational power relations are (re)defined through language use. Building on insights from language-sensitive research in international business, the article suggests that a further conceptual development of power is needed to study multilingual organizations and their “politics.” Inspired by the writings of Michel Foucault, it aims at developing a differentiated notion of power that allows moving beyond possessive, competitive, and limitation-oriented understandings. It investigates power from a discursive perspective and thus suggests conceptualizing power as an effect of speaking acts. From this point of view, people contribute to the creation of power relations by adopting a multiplicity of subject positions when they talk about their and others’ experiences in multilingual organizations. These processes were empirically investigated by conducting a qualitative case study of a multinational company located in Switzerland. The findings show a variety of subject positions for members of multilingual organizations, ranging from “winners on the rhetorical battlefield” to “helpers paving unskilled speakers the way.” While being in the position of the “battle winner” means discursively constructing competitive power relations, being a “helper” entails the discursive construction of cooperation-oriented power relations. Adopting a discursive approach thus allows to move the focus from “having”/“not having” power and from conflicts to a broader perspective on power relations. Power is then considered as productive in a general sense, and this productivity might engender competition as well as cooperation.
Theorising power in student voice is contested terrain dominated by critical theory but challenged increasingly by post-structural approaches. Although critical approaches have suited the advocacy needed to establish student voice as worthy social justice work in this article I explore post-structural resources that more generatively account for the complexity, multiplicity and ambiguity of power dynamics within student voice initiatives. I examine what is opened up when power is conceptualised as ‘games of truth’, multifarious, generative and deployed tactically by both students and researchers to co-produce ‘truths’ that emerge as student voice. I ‘plug in’ games of truth to data from one student voice encounter, researcher reflections and participatory research discourses to generate an assemblage of power dynamics in student voice differently. I argue that viewing power as games of truth opens up to student voice as contingent and recursive tactical contests over truth played between mutually powerful, yet differently powered players.
Hanna Dumont and David Istance set out the reasons why, over recent years, learning has moved increasingly centre stage politically. These include the nature of knowledge economies and societies, the demands of 21st century competences, the ubiquity of ICT, frustration with the lack of success of repeated education reforms and the burgeoning learning research base. They call for harnessing knowledge about learning and applying it more systematically to education. The chapter argues why these developments call for a particular focus on innovative "micro" arrangements – "learning environments" – which are conceptualised in this OECD work at a level between individual learners and conventional educational parameters. The chapter locates the book as seeking to address the "great disconnect" (as it has been called) between research, on the one hand, and policy and practice, on the other.
Modern open school architecture abstractly expresses ideas about choice, flexibility and autonomy. While open spaces express and authorise different teaching practice, these versions of school and classrooms present challenges to teaching routines and practice. This paper examines how teachers adapt as they move into new school buildings designed and built on the concept of openness. After considering how modern architectural and education concepts of openness authorise different approaches to teaching and learning, a case study is provided of how teachers perceive and respond to these action possibilities. The main conclusions are that the nature of open schools and classrooms means that it is difficult to achieve a mature system with coherent pedagogical practice, a shared culture and mutuality between teacher and student learning. Rather, there is a continual process of negotiation as teachers react and adapt to the affordances of open learning environments. Hybrid pedagogy tends to result from the friction between routine and possible practice within open space, increasing the intensity of teaching practice.
‘Student voice’ is now taking a more central role in educational policy, guidance and thinking. As it does so, however, it becomes less clear how to interpret it: it can perhaps no longer be seen as a radical gesture that will necessarily challenge educational hierarchies. Drawing on qualitative research into one student participation project, ‘Students as Researchers’, the article explores how far Foucauldian concepts of governmentality may offer a more sophisticated understanding of the power relations embedded in student voice initiatives. From this perspective, for instance, such projects may be read as attempts to instill norms of individualism, self-reliance and self-management, which resonate with new configurations of power and authority under neo-liberalism, respond to specific debates about school standards, effectiveness and competition, and help construct young people as reflexive ‘knowledge workers’. Whilst a governmentality perspective does not preclude acknowledging the positive effects of participation projects, it does draw attention to their complexities, such as the new value hierarchies and exclusions they may create, problematising particular groups of young people and limiting possibilities for resistance.
Schooling redesigned: Towards innovative learning systems. Educational Research and Innovation
- Organisation Economic Cooperation Development
Organisation Economic Cooperation Development. (2015). Schooling redesigned: Towards innovative
learning systems. Educational Research and Innovation. OECD Publishing.
Understanding foucault: A critical introduction
- T Schirato
- G Danaher
- Schirato T.
Next steps - Report of the quality initial teacher education review
- Australian Government
Australian Government. (2022). Next steps -Report of the quality initial teacher education review.
https://www.dese.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/next-steps-reportquality-initial-teacher-education-review