To help prepare future faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields to teach undergraduates, more research universities are offering teaching development (TD) programs to doctoral students who aspire to academic careers. This study found that participation in TD programs is positively associated with college teaching self-efficacy.
This article considers the professional work, identity and recruitment of head teachers (HTs) in Wales. Drawing on the sociology of professions, the article illustrates how intensive educational policy reform post-2011 has restricted HTs' professional agency and re-orientated the head teacher role towards organisational professionalism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews (n=30) with both head and deputy head teachers, the article argues that issues with the recruitment and retention of HTs in Wales can, in part, be explained by the promotion of managerial and technicist approaches to professional practice. This role reconfiguration is the result of myriad and, at times, overlapping accountability mechanisms. The article illustrates how these changes to HT professional roles and identity are more intense within a small education system where HTs had, traditionally, enjoyed an elite professional status. To ameliorate these issues, the article proposes policy initiatives which the Welsh Government could introduce to foster the agency of HTs within a revised professional framework for educational leadership in Wales.
This paper investigates how risk perception amongst teachers within an outdoor educational initiative, Forest School, both shape and are shaped by their understandings of childhood, pedagogy and their own professional identity.Drawing on a social constructionist perspective in theorizing risk and childhood, the paper argues that contemporary, hyper-sensitised concerns regarding children s vulnerability emanate from both fears of the modern world and the proclivity towards over-protection which these fears precipitate. Rather than treating this hyper-sensitivity as irrational or paranoid, the paper draws on socio-cultural theories and qualitative methods to interrogate how risk is perceived, managed and performed by teachers within an initiative which aims to reintroduce risk into children s lives. The research found that while these teachers motivations to participate in Forest School were derived from a desire to expose children to formative risk-taking in the outdoors, the hegemonic cultural and institutional risk aversion which they were attempting to counter, aligned with their contested occupational identity, created tensions in how they managed and performed risk which militated against the full realisation of a Forest School pedagogy. permeates the childhood in crisis thesis: that children are at risk from the absence of risk itself-particularly risk-taking behaviours within outdoor play. This denial of formative risk exposure is the consequence of both children s technologically-mediated, indoor, sedentary lifestyle, and adults overprotection, caused by fears of the modern world: thus parental hyper-sensitivity to risk, and the protectionary impulses this engenders, is itself limiting children s freedom and having a negative impact upon their physical and psychological wellbeing. This highly reflexive, self-reinforcing, concern about concern proceeds: children are at risk and childhood is under threat, primarily from social changes wrought from technological advancement, and, thus, need to be protected from the encroachment of the adult world; adult (over)protection is itself corrupting childhood through denying children formative, risky, experience; adults attempts at protecting children and preserving childhood are part of the problem, rather than the solution; childhood is at risk, from both the encroachment and the protection of the adult world. This hyper reflexive concern is evidence for Beck s general reflexive individualization thesis Beck, 1992), and his and Beck-Gernsheim s 99 illustration of how such reflexive individualisation colonises even the most intimate inter-personal relationships.As an antidote to both technological over-exposure and this perceived overprotection, there have been shifts amongst parents, campaigners and advocates (organisations such as Wild Nature, Playing Out and Project Wild Thing); policy
This chapter describes a comprehensive program to prepare science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral students for faculty careers that integrate research and education.
This paper explores issues of headteacher recruitment, retention, and professional development in Wales, within the context of the wider educational policy reforms which, since 2011, have introduced greater external accountability into schools. The paper argues that these reforms have resulted in changes to headteachers' professional roles and identities and that some aspects have militated against headteachers' cultivation and exercising of their 'professional capital' (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012). The data is derived from 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with headteachers, deputy and assistant Heads throughout Wales. Participants' accounts articulate concerns that greater accountability within the Welsh system is acting as a disincentive to headteacher recruitment, and that headteachers often lack independent sources of support, advice and mentoring, which they can access without the burden of additional scrutiny and accountability. The paper concludes by offering a series of observations and recommendations to inform recent renewed efforts to create a new support infrastructure and framework for the development of educational leadership in Wales.
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