Mainstream Educational Research Research Articles

School food, sustainability, and interdependence: learning from Japan’s Shokuiku?

ABSTRACT As the sustainability imperative looms, mainstream educational research in the English-speaking world continues a long tradition of failing to see food as integral to education. Japan’s tradition of Shokuiku (food education) stands in stark contrast, providing an external reference point to direct critical attention on Anglo-American school food philosophies, policy, and practice. This article analyses Shokuiku, tracing the genealogy of Japan’s 2005 Basic Law on Shokuiku, a landmark education policy that shifted the 1954 School Lunch Act away from the scientific and nutritional discourses of the mid-20th century and back to Japan’s school food cultural traditions. While still teaching nutrition, Japan’s Shokuiku emerges as distinctive in its broader goals of interdependence, gratitude towards nature, emphasis on culture, and awareness of relations between production, consumption, and sustainability. From a pragmatic perspective, Shokuiku may offer new ways to combat rising obesity worldwide, lessen meat consumption, and reduce humanity’s unsustainable ecological footprint.

Stories of a Transformation in Consciousness: A self-study to ground narrative inquiry research in consciousness education

Abstract This article is a narrative account of my search for knowledge about the nature of consciousness, and the implications of my findings for research and education. For over three decades, I accepted the dominant script presented to me through my education, both formal and informal, which assumes that the brain creates consciousness. Further, when the brain dies, consciousness dies with it. However, the unexpected death of my partner pushed me to investigate these assumptions. Through reading consciousness studies research, I learned of considerable empirical evidence that challenges the materialist paradigm taken for granted in the educational and social cultures in which I was raised. An analysis of the literature, combined with the learning gained from my own experiences, transformed my understanding of reality. This led me to radically question the ontological and epistemological assumptions of mainstream educational and social research. I end with a call for the development of an integral framework for consciousness education that would liberate researchers and educators from the materialist paradigm that is so deeply embedded in Western culture and contribute to an emerging postmaterialist worldview.

Is leadership a myth? A ‘new wave’ critical leadership-focused research agenda for recontouring the landscape of educational leadership

Intentionally provocative, this article identifies weaknesses in mainstream educational leadership scholarship, and draws upon ‘new wave’ critical leadership studies to propose a new, potentially paradigm-shifting, direction for the field. The central argument is that educational leadership researchers, in focusing predominantly on how institutional heads and other formal ‘leaders’ may best ‘do’ leadership, are addressing the wrong questions and setting off from the wrong departure point. The unit of analysis should shift, it is argued, from leadership to influence, within a new research agenda that replaces surface-level, causality-assumptive ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ questions that have shaped mainstream educational leadership research for over thirty years, with more fundamental ‘who? and ‘what?’ questions, aimed at identifying who is in fact doing the influencing. An aspect of such inquiry is leadership scepticism and agnosticism, which confronts the question: Does leadership exist, or is it a myth that we have reified? A highly original feature of the proposed new research agenda is the adoption of the author's theoretical notion of a singular unit of micro-level influence as an ‘epistemic object’ – a concept derived from STEMM research, denoting a vague and undefined potential focus of inquiry that may (or may not) turn out to be significant.

Bringing teachers to the table: the need to teach food in teacher education

ABSTRACT We cannot underestimate the importance of food in schools, yet in the education sector, we have. Despite increasing societal focus, broad attention to food in schools remains largely missing from mainstream education research, and teacher education more specifically. This paper is a contribution in emerging scholarship that criticallyconsiders food in education research by arguing that food inschools is a crucial area generally overlooked by the field ofteacher education. This paper articulates my experience incorporating food within teacher education, through the design and teaching of a course entitled “Food and Schools” for education undergraduate students at a flagship state university. I highlight major course themes and aspects and key insights from students and conclude with considerations for teacher education programs.

The concept of hidden extracurriculum

ABSTRACT The world of extracurricular learning spaces unjustifiably falls outside the scope of mainstream educational research: resources that focus on researching extracurricula are few and far between. In the arena of extracurricular activities, one continuously encounters phenomena such as dynamic shifts in individual and collective development, sudden bursts of motivation, significant and often unexpected emotional upheavals, transformations in the patterns of in-group communication, and the like, all of which indicate the fulfillment or failure of pedagogical functions as well as the manifest, hidden and latent nature of certain influences. We argue that that when organized in a pedagogical context, especially and mostly outside the school itself, the extracurricula are also characterized by hidden learning objectives and outcomes that can be described by the concept of the hidden extracurriculum, taking the cue from the notion of the hidden curriculum.

Don't let me be misunderstood: Psychological safety, Black girls’ speech, and Black feminist perspectives on directness.

Black feminist scholars have produced compelling frameworks for assessing direct speech behavior, both within and external to Black female speech communities. These frameworks are marginalized in mainstream organizational psychology and educational psychology research on psychological safety. Psychological safety is a concept that positions directness as a marker of contextual comfort. In this article, I center Black feminist theories to analyze how Black girls make sense of their own direct speech behaviors, particularly when they do not perceive the context as psychologically safe. My theoretical objective is to read a rubric of psychological safety popular in educational psychology with and against sociolinguistic, literary, and sociological findings on Black girls’ direct speech performances. My political objective is to call for more critical collaborations and transdisciplinary approaches that consider the cultural realities and societal conditions that might motivate Black girls’ participatory risk and reasons not wholly accounted for in conversations about psychological safety that might move Black girls and women from silence into action. This qualitative inquiry has provided important points of departure for conceptualizing psychological safety in conditions of intersecting oppression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Deschooling from above

The concept of deschooling has been making a comeback, after having been largely written off by the mainstream education research community in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, it is not just anti-capitalist radicals who are rediscovering the appeal of deschooling, but political and economic elites as well. This article traces some of the central claims and practices of this elite-led movement – that we call ‘deschooling from above’ – in current attacks on universal higher education, projects to deschool professional and technical training and an abandonment of past commitments to universal compulsory schooling. The authors argue that all of these trends need to be situated within the broader context of the unravelling of the education fix of the previous era of global (neoliberal) capitalist restructuring.

Linguistic and Cultural Collaboration in Schools: Reconciling Majority and Minoritized Language Users

This article extends the work of culturally sustaining pedagogy by moving towards the conceptualization of linguistic and cultural collaboration (LCC) in classrooms through reconciliation of majoritarian and minoritized language users. Whereas attention in mainstream educational research has been given to students’ cultures, this article underscores that explicit attention to diverse languages and language varieties is essential to reconfiguration of power relations in schools and reconciliation among culturally and linguistically minoritized and dominant groups. Drawing on scholarship regarding plurilingual and multilingual practice, the authors conceptualize LCC as both a process and a product that expands all students’ critical multilingual language awareness. They draw on an ongoing research‐practice partnership (RPP) with a U.S. school district experiencing growing cultural and linguistic diversity. The article focuses on a single school to illustrate how LCC has been taken up as a whole‐school approach to leveraging students’ and families’ cultural and linguistic resources as vital to learning and living together in a multicultural and multilingual world. After outlining development of the RPP following a social design–based methodology, the authors discuss how in practice reconciliation is forged as teachers, students, and their families engage in collaborative multilingual bookmaking. They focus on three aspects of reconciliation (collaboration, restoration, living together) that support students in becoming more language‐aware and in moving towards multilingual activism.

教育行政学とPolitics of Educationとの間 社会科学に貢献するために必要なこと

教育行政学とPolitics of Educationとの間 社会科学に貢献するために必要なこと

Academic English as standard language ideology: A renewed research agenda for asset-based language education

The author situates language education policy and scholarship on Academic English within the broader historical context of standard language ideology, the view that the language variety of socio-economic elites is intrinsically more complex than other varieties. It is argued that the current predominant focus on the nature of school language gives the impression that school language alone can express complex ideas or use complex grammar, leaving little conceptual space for leveraging children’s home language varieties. The author calls for a return to historical commitments to an asset-based approach to school and home language differences in mainstream language education research.

Envisioning a Culturally Imaginative Educational Psychology

Culture has mostly been neglected in mainstream educational psychology research. In this paper, we argued for the need to cultivate a cultural imagination and provided seven key recommendations for conducting culturally imaginative research. We explained how these recommendations could prove useful in avoiding the two types of errors that trap cross-cultural researchers. The first type is the cultural attribution error which pertains to attributing any observed difference to culture even if culture is not the relevant factor. The second type is the cultural blind spot error which pertains to the failure to see how culture influences psycho-educational processes and outcomes. We proffered seven recommendations to avoid these twin pitfalls. We reviewed the papers published from 2006 to 2016 in four flagship educational psychology journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, and British Journal of Educational Psychology. Our review focused on how educational psychologists have studied culture over the past decade and how the published studies aligned with our seven recommendations. The content analysis indicated that only a small percentage of the articles dealt with culture, most of the studies drew on Western samples, and that almost all studies relied on an etic approach with very few studies using an emic bottom-up perspective. We ended with a justification for why a culturally imaginative educational psychology is urgently needed in an increasingly diverse world.

Practising forethought: the role of mental simulation.

Did you know that forethought can be practised? Asking someone how he or she may ‘remember’ the future is an odd question. Particularly so in the clinical simulation community where recall analysis and reminiscence are emphasised over anticipation and prescience. Pre-Briefing is usually a poor relative of debriefing— or so it seems. There are ample studies that ‘feed forward’ with ‘feedback’ have a stimulus more powerful in learning than other variables in education.1 Surprisingly this is not so clear for the ‘debrief’. The reason is partly because the terms ‘debrief’ and ‘feedback’ are used so interchangeably. And unlike healthcare, aviation and the military, the word ‘debrief’ is not part of the mainstream educational research vocabulary. Recent reviews in the healthcare simulation literature attempt to clarify the nature and function of the debrief. Sawyer et al make the distinction that ‘debriefing’ is intrinsically ‘interactive’ and diagnostic, whereas ‘feedback’ is ‘one-way conveyance of information.2 Fanning and Gaba refer to the debrief as the ‘heart and soul’ of lifelong learning.3 But these views may be both reductive and overstating the case. In science, theory directs what researchers and educators do and hindsight analysis legitimises theories by reflection in action and on action. 4 5 Consequently models of how to debrief proliferate in health education and become paradigmatic in describing what constitutes good teaching or effective learning, or both. And here is the quandary. In these descriptions of debriefings construed as collective epiphanies a more complex and multidimensional idea of learning risks being collapsed into one which is essentially retrospective and episodic. In the kindred field of counselling, we learn that this overemphasis can be unhelpful, if not detrimental.6 Indeed, a pointed criticism of current models of reflection is that they do not sufficiently acknowledge the place of anticipation and …

A rights-based approach to science literacy using local languages: Contextualising inquiry-based learning in Africa

This article addresses the importance of teaching and learning science in local languages. The author argues that acknowledging local knowledge and using local languages in science education while emphasising inquiry-based learning improve teaching and learning science. She frames her arguments with the theory of inquiry, which draws on perspectives of both dominant and non-dominant cultures with a focus on science literacy as a human right. She first examines key assumptions about knowledge which inform mainstream educational research and practice. She then argues for an emphasis on contextualised learning as a right in education. This means accounting for contextualised knowledge and resisting the current trend towards de-contextualisation of curricula. This trend is reflected in Zanzibar’s recent curriculum reform, in which English replaced Kiswahili as the language of instruction (LOI) in the last two years of primary school. The author’s own research during the initial stage of the change (2010–2015) revealed that the effect has in fact proven to be counterproductive, with educational quality deteriorating further rather than improving. Arguing that language is essential to inquiry-based learning, she introduces a new didactic model which integrates alternative assumptions about the value of local knowledge and local languages in the teaching and learning of science subjects. In practical terms, the model is designed to address key science concepts through multiple modalities – “do it, say it, read it, write it” – a “hands-on” experiential combination which, she posits, may form a new platform for innovation based on a unique mix of local and global knowledge, and facilitate genuine science literacy. She provides examples from cutting-edge educational research and practice that illustrate this new model of teaching and learning science. This model has the potential to improve learning while supporting local languages and culture, giving local languages their rightful place in all aspects of education.

The significance of consciousness studies and quantum physics for researching spirituality

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to argue that researchers interested in studying spirituality may benefit from paying attention to the phenomenon of consciousness. Despite consciousness being integral to human experience, it is largely ignored in research into spirituality. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the study of spirituality, and explorations of consciousness, have much to offer each other. My contention is that the subject of consciousness has not received much attention within mainstream social and educational research, due to the prevailing, often unconscious, influence of Newtonian science, which assumes consciousness to be an epiphenomenon of the brain. However, developments in science, particularly in quantum physics, have shown that the world cannot be explained by Newtonian principles of separation and atomism. At the same time, a growing disillusionment with science has resulted in the emergence of a grassroots spirituality which challenges a materialist scientific paradigm. In science and spirituality, there is a growing realization of the interconnectedness of everything, with the quantum principle of ‘entanglement’ suggesting that differentiation between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ is an artificial one. Instead, there is a meaningful relationship between experiences of consciousness in inner and outer worlds, with neither existing independently of the other. I conclude by presenting a case for developing research methods which reflect a secular spiritual world view that creates harmony between science, spirituality and our experience of consciousness.

Measuring attitudes toward plagiarism: issues and psychometric solutions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of failing to psychometrically test questionnaire instruments when measuring university students’ attitudes towards plagiarism. These issues are highlighted by a psychometric evaluation of a commonly used (but previously untested) plagiarism attitudinal scale. Design/methodology/approach – The importance of psychometric testing is shown through an analysis of a commonly used scale using modern techniques (e.g. Rasch analysis) on 131 undergraduate education students at an Australian university. Findings – Psychometric analysis revealed the scale to be unreliable in its present form. However, when reduced to an eight-item subscale it became marginally reliable. Research limitations/implications – The main implication of this paper is that questionnaire instruments cannot be assumed to function as they are intended without thorough psychometric testing. Practical implications – The paper offers valuable insight into the psychometric properties of a previously untested but commonly used plagiarism attitudinal scale. Originality/value – The paper offers a straightforward and easy to understand introduction to researchers in higher education who use questionnaires/surveys in their research but lack an understanding of why psychometric testing is so critical. While similar papers have been written in other fields which advocate psychometric approaches, such as Rasch analysis, this has not been the case in higher educational research (or mainstream educational research for that matter).

Constituting Common Subjects: Toward an Education Against Enclosure

Drawing upon socio-ecological and critical educational theory, this article examines neoliberal educational reforms through a theoretical framework of commons and enclosure. Neoliberal reforms should be regarded as enclosures because they seek to privatize education for profit accumulation, foreclosing the possibility of education operating as a commons, or a collective process of sustainable, democratic, and ethical social production. However, educational enclosures have subjective dimensions as well. Specifically, the author argues, there is a raced, classed, and gendered process of educational subjection operating through these enclosures. Although mainstream educational research calls for educational innovations in policy and practice, this article contends that the proliferation of ecological devastation and economization of curriculum and pedagogy requires that educational studies rethink educational collectivity and the possibilities of constituting common subjects who resist, refuse, or seek to dismantle neoliberal subjection and enclosure and instead produce social life in common with each other and with nonhumans and ecosystems.

Creating Time: Students, Technologies and Temporal Practices in Higher Education

The nature of time has been considered in some depth within philosophy and social theory, while theoreticians have also explored interrelationships between temporality, artefacts and social process. However, the notion of time in mainstream educational theory and research has arguably been regarded as fixed, naturalised, undifferentiated ‘context’, and has tended to escape examination or problematisation in the learning technology literature. However, as the contemporary university becomes increasingly permeated by digital mediation both online and ‘face-to-face’, relationships between digital media, time and socially situated practices of meaning-making are foregrounded. This article will report on a UK-based research project which investigated postgraduate students' day-to-day engagements with technologies, drawing on a combination of qualitative focus group, interview and multimodal journaling. The data suggest that for these students the dimension of time is in complex, dynamic and contingent interplay with a range of networked devices and shifting material domains and practices, which are mobilised for textual engagement and production. It will argue that student entanglements with devices and digitally mediated texts serve to pause, distribute, elongate and render simultaneous the temporal nature of their practices in emergent ‘temporal practices' in complex relationships of co-agency with devices and technologies. It will conclude that a typological analysis is inadequate to understanding these complex, emergent engagements.

Relational Education: Applying Gergen’s Work to Educational Research and Practice

This article sketches the implications of Gergen’s relational approach for educational research and practice. Gergen suggests that we envision education as a set of processes intended to enhance relationships. This is a radical departure from most mainstream educational research and practice, which is designed to enhance the individual’s mind. We first examine three key assumptions about individuals and about knowledge that undergird mainstream educational research and practice—an emphasis on the individual as separate from the world, an account of knowledge as decontextualized and a tendency towards hierarchies which favor purified knowledge over lesser forms. We then describe three alternative assumptions from Gergen’s relational account of education—an emphasis on individuals as woven into contexts and knowledge as produced in relations, a view of knowledge as contextualized, and a view of knowledge and action as heterogeneous, not pure. We provide examples from current educational research and practice that illustrate these three assumptions about relational education.

Identifying Implications of Tensions in a Series of Collaborative Self-Study Groups

Drawing on 14 years of collaborative self-study group work at their university, East and Fitzgerald reviewed the data, stories and findings from that collaborative work, seeking to go beyond those original stories to identify practical implications of the tensions that emerged and played out within the various groups. Findings were shared and reinterpreted by a colleague, distant both literally and figuratively, who named taken-for-granted aspects of the work and provided alternative perspectives to expand our understanding. This review of our self-study groups refined our understanding of the nature and process of collaborative self-study work in which we strive to support each other with the objective of helping each other change our practice. Our analysis can inform others who want to pursue collaborative group self-study. Additionally, in going beyond our stories, we found that the tensions in our work mirror the tensions in the larger self-study field as it considers its relationship to mainstream educational research.

Culture, Craft, & Coherence: The Unexpected Vitality of Montessori Teacher Training

This essay examines the how’s why’s and what for’s of Montessori teacher training. Treating the Montessori system as an illuminating case of alternative teacher preparation, three concepts common to the lexicon of teacher education - culture, craft, and coherence - are explored in detail. Drawing both from both mainstream teacher education research and ethnographic studies of Montessori teacher training, the essay probes several conceptual puzzles aimed toward reconsidering key ideas related to the development of cultural and technical expertise.