As schools and universities worldwide tentatively move beyond an initial emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the prospect of socially-distanced learning spaces prompts us to ask how we can maintain good educational relationships. Supporting students in a time of far-reaching changes means acknowledging that certain normalised practices, and the conceptual frameworks embedded within them, have come under significant duress. Resisting the urge to rush to quick solutions and seeing our common vulnerability and uncertainty as an opportunity for growth, we, a multidisciplinary teacher education faculty, chose to pause and use this moment of recalibration to develop a new set of orienting priorities for teacher educators. We reflect on dynamics of care, control and power inherent in educational relationships and demonstrate how relatedness in education expands beyond the human and the local towards fostering a common sense of global and ecological responsibility.
The central role played by language in mediating school experience and the prestige accorded to standard language varieties within the field of education provide the broad rationale for this paper. This qualitative study, based on a friendship focus-group design, was conducted in two groups of 12-year-old children from contrasting 'ideal type', socioeconomic groups over a period of one school year. The study examines the children's use of and attitude to language variation. A six-point typology of linguistic styles is identified based on specific patterns of usage among the participants. The study provides an insight into the levels of stratification that exist with respect to language use among children and the complex interdependence of a range of factors contributing to the persistence of linguistic continuity and discontinuity between schools and different social/gender groups.
This article examines the role of reflective practice in a growing culture of new managerialism and performativity which has emerged in schools in the Republic of Ireland over recent years. Ten student teachers participating in a Postgraduate Diploma in Education and 24 experienced teachers participating in a Master's in Education programme participated in the study. Through a series of open-ended questionnaires and focus group discussions, these teachers' experiences of the evaluative framework which now typifies schooling in Ireland, and their capacity within this paradigm to engage in critical reflection, were examined. The study comments on the extent to which meaningful reflection can be part of a performance-driven agenda, and examines the implications of performativity cultures for initial teacher education and teacher professional development.
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