The concept of the professional learning community (PLC) has been embraced widely in schools as a means for teachers to engage in professional development leading to enhanced pupil learning. However, the term has become so ubiquitous it is in danger of losing all meaning, or worse, of reifying ‘teacher learning' within a narrowly defined ambit which loses sight of the essentially contestable concepts which underpin it. The primary aim of this paper is therefore to (re-)examine the assumptions underpinning the PLC as a vehicle for teacher led change in schools in order to confront and unsettle a complacent and potentially damaging empirical consensus around teacher learning. This paper examines the characteristics and attributes of the ‘effective' professional learning community as identified in the literature, drawing out the tensions and contradictions embodied in the terms professional, learning and community. The paper considers the implications of this analysis for practice, and concludes by offering some insights into the nature of ‘school improvement', and the role of PLCs in realizing this

Humour and laughter have been regarded as suitable topics for research in the social sciences, but as methodological principles to be adopted in carrying out and representing the findings of research they have been neglected. Indeed, those scholars who have made use of humour – wit, satire, jokes etc. – risk being regarded as trivial and marginalised from the mainstream. Yet, in literature the idea that comedy can tell us something important about the human condition is widely recognised. This neglect of the potential of humour and laughter represents a serious omission. The purpose of this article is to make a sensible case for the place of humour as a methodology for the social sciences

Drawing from a Scottish study, this article examines ways in which the school environment can impact upon the well‐being of pupils and their associated behaviour. It identifies tensions between existing school structures and cultures and the promotion of positive mental health, particularly in relation to the curriculum, pastoral care, discipline and teacher/pupil relationships. In many cases, schools attempt to address mental well‐being by bolting fragmented initiatives onto existing systems, and we argue that a more fundamental review of values, policies and practices throughout the school is needed. This paper also looks at the roles of interagency workers in schools, and reports that, in most cases, these workers are seen as offering a parallel service to the mainstream school, targeted at the most troubled or troublesome pupils. We suggest that schools should draw on the skills and understandings of these workers to help build new cultures throughout the school for the benefit of all children and young people.

Interest in the narrative construction of identities has become widespread in social research. Much of this research focuses on the grander narratives we tell about ourselves, the big retrospectives elicited from interviews. However, if identification is conceived as an ongoing performance accomplished locally in and through everyday interactions then it is the narratives that emerge in this context that become the focus of interest. “Small stories” are the ephemeral narratives emerging in such everyday, mundane contexts, which it is argued constitute the performance of identities and the construction of self. Drawing on Bamberg’s Positioning Analysis, this paper examines the construction of identities in a “small story” told by two student teachers, showing how this enables the participants to make claims about their developing professional identities. The paper also examines positioning analysis and its ability to link these locally produced identities to wider discourses.

Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics – both data and algorithms – are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about learning and learners – and indeed the tendency not to theorize learning explicitly – that underpin such implementations. Finally, we describe an attempt to devise our own analytics, grounded in a sociomaterial conception of learning. We use the data obtained to suggest that the relationships between learning and the digital traces left by participants in online learning are far from trivial, and that any analytics that relies on these as proxies for learning tends towards a behaviorist evaluation of learning processes

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and elsewhere are having a hard time, pushed into the marketplace with the turn to 'academic capitalism' and now suffering the effects of the economic downturn. Increasingly, the discourse of 'excellence' is being invoked as HEIs are held to account and public funding for research is predicated on the basis of 'impact'. What effect is this having on the long-established ideals appealed to in the idea of a university (if such an idea can be said to exist)? This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach in order to examine the ways in which dominant discourses are operationalised in the university through everyday communications and how, in turn, this impacts on the development of academic identities. The aim of this paper then is to examine the often uncomfortable point of insertion between the personal and the institutional in and through which subjectivities and identities are constituted as a means to understand the state we're in.

Empathy is a notoriously slippery term. While within current discourses of qualitative research, empathy is widely held to be `a good thing' (as the appropriate ethical relation between the researcher and participant) there may perhaps be more suspicion about its use as an analytical method in research practices, and in the use of rhetorical strategies in research narratives whose aim is to evoke empathy in the reader, both of which may be regarded as bordering on manipulation and thus arguably ethically ambiguous. This article sets out to examine empathy as both a tool and goal of qualitative research, surfacing and questioning some of the tacitly held assumptions that underpin the appeal to empathy and exploring these in the context of my research into institutional identities.

Partnership between home and school is a key aspect of current educational policy. At the level of policy of the notion of partnership is constructed unproblematically as smooth consensus, but this may not be the way it plays out in school where deeply rooted assumptions surrounding parenthood – and in particular motherhood – may pertain. This paper is concerned with home–school relations and the way in which schools construct deviance and attribute stigma. It is an analysis of a narrative written by a parent of a child diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It explores Jenny's narrative concerning the events surrounding the diagnosis, in particular the part played by the school in this process, and the descent of a family from normality into madness. The paper begins with the attribution of deviance, the development of stigma and the birth of the Goldfish family. It then goes on to present three Hogarthian scenes documenting the family's progress, and examines the peculiar convergence of social pressures which result in madness, before drawing some conclusions concerning the construction of deviance and the role of the school in this.