COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as ...frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of
n
= 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call ‘afflictions’ exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways ‘affordances’ derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early ‘entry-level’ use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.
This paper asks a series of questions to prompt critical, informed thinking around research and practice in relation to parental engagement with children's learning. The questions ask how we, who ...research and work in this area, acknowledge and deal with the discourse of a culture of poverty, whether and if the "private sphere" of the family indeed remains private, what may be considered "good parenting" and why. The questions go on to investigate the place (or lack of it) of gender in work around parental engagement, and looks to the future to ask what work in this field can do in the face of the inequities in society which have required the field to exist in the first place. Finally, the questions are reframed to form the basis of a new research agenda.
This article builds on the seminal work of Paulo Freire, whose critique of the "banking model" of education has inspired educators to look beyond mechanistic, didactic means of teaching, toward more ...constructivist, engaging methods. In this article, I argue that, although the teaching of children has changed as a result of work such as Freire's, school staff often revert to a "banking model" when seeking to engage parents. This paper utilises Freire's characteristics of "banking education" as a lens to look at relationships between schools and families. Based on this, the paper then suggests a way of moving toward a more equitable, sustainable and fruitful partnership between all those involved in schooling and learning (with the former being a formalised subset of the much larger latter).
Based on the literature of the field, this article traces a continuum between parental involvement with schools, and parental engagement with children's learning. The article seeks to shed light on ...an area of confusion; previous research has shown that different stakeholder groups understand "parental engagement" in different ways. Other literature makes it clear that the greatest benefit is derived from the furthest end of the proposed continuum, that is, parental engagement with children's learning. The continuum gives examples of each stage of the movement along the continuum. The continuum is illustrated not only in prose but as a diagram. The article concludes with a discussion of the agency of parents and schools in the movement along the continuum.
The value of parental engagement in the learning of children and young people has repeatedly been shown to be of value in the literature, and in practice. One of the ways many parents feel they can ...be involved in their children's learning is through support with homework, and homework forms a ubiquitous part of schooling in most systems. However, parental engagement with homework has been shown to be problematic in the literature. This paper combines the literature on parental engagement, with that on both the effectiveness and purposes of homework and that on the importance of mastery orientations for young people, to argue that the effective forms of parental engagement in young people's homework will be engagement that supports and leads to mastery orientations on the part of children. The paper includes a schematic for this engagement and concludes with principles for designing homework tasks.
This article reports on and analyses a yearlong project supporting school staff to increase parental engagement with children's learning. Working with 34 schools, the project included the provision ...of a toolkit (information and activities) as well as opportunities for school to school learning. The project was useful for all schools, but some schools experienced profound changes in outlook, belief and practices. The major influences of change in this project were professional discussion, the use of the tools provided and reflection on both tools and discussion. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for school leaders.
While much ink has been poured on the phenomena of human (and indeed, avian) superstition, most of the attention has been focused on a process seen as somehow pejorative, as negative – as correlated ...with feelings of inadequacy or powerlessness, or with faulty understanding of science can causality. This paper proposes a different thesis: that there are some forms of superstition which actually reflect an exercise of human agency, of exertion of control over a universe which is perceived as capricious, rather than as absolutely predetermined or fated. To this end, a new system of classifying superstitious beliefs and practices is proposed, which delineates not on the purported outcome of the action but on the level of human agency involved. Many superstitions are based on the ultimately hopeful premise that willed human action can have an effect on the future.
PDF
