We suggest that there is a need for those who seek to explore issues associated with the implementation of citizenship education in England to clarify its specific nature. This can be done, at least in part, through a process of comparison. To that end we review some of the connections and disjunctions between 'character education' and 'citizenship education'. We argue, drawing from US and UK literature but focusing our attention on contexts and issues in England, that there are indeed some broad areas of overlap between these two fields. Citizens should be of 'good' character and the educational initiatives that we consider both emerge from a concern about current trends in society. However, we suggest that the overlaps with citizenship education principally apply when character education is drawn very broadly. When we examine a particular approach to character education that is often US-based, and titled as 'citizenship', we note many contrasts with citizenship education as formulated in the National Curriculum for England. We suggest that citizenship educators in England need to interpret claims about the similarity between these two fields with caution, or meanings that apply to both character education and citizenship education will be distorted.

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The last few years have seen an increase in research studies on the impact and effectiveness of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the teaching and learning of English as a school subject. It is against that research background and against recent developments in policy and practice in the UK that the present systematic review of the effectiveness of different ICTs in the teaching and learning of English has been undertaken. The aim of this review was to shed light on whether ICTs are effective in the teaching and learning of English for 5- to 16-year-olds. A total of 2103 papers were found in the initial search of studies published between 1998 and 2003 on the topic of the review. An in-depth review on the effectiveness of ICT in the teaching and learning of written composition in English concentrated on nine studies. As eight of the nine studies were judged to be of medium weight of evidence and were also different from each other in nature, it was not possible to arrive at a clear answer to our in-depth research question. Rather, we wish to report that the field is in a preparadigmatic state where definitions of English, literacy and ICT are still relatively unclear, and where the causal and/or reciprocal relationships between them have yet to be fully theorised

Syed (2020) We are invited to imagine: using a literary text to encourage cross-cultural dialogue about citizenship,

The under-achievement of boys in secondary schools throughout the United Kingdom has been a matter of concern for several years. Recent national assessment results suggest that the gap between the achievement of boys and girls is becoming increasingly wide. Can developments in electronic communication provide disaffected boys with real contexts, purposes and audiences for writing and reading? This paper examines some of the main issues and concludes with the suggestion that the 'frame' provided by the computer screen has the potential either to offer a supportive structure upon which boys can buildor to become yet another means by which their academic failure can be measured.

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Teacher training is increasingly accountable to central government. Trainees -the word itself is significant -are expected to demonstrate competence in a wide range of professional standards if they are to achieve qualified teacher status. Training partnership schools, understandably, impose their own conditions for entry into their 'communities of practice'. In these circumstances, trainees -and their trainers -have increasingly fewer opportunities for risk taking or for exploring new configurations of the teacher pupil relationship.This paper describes an attempt to exploit the potential of email as a means of granting access to a 'pedagogical arena' in which trainees and students might attempt to negotiate their own ways of working together. It concludes by suggesting that both groups found this a challenging task and by noting that the trainers involved decided that, if the project were to run again, a certain amount of autonomy would need to be sacrificed to direction. Entering a community of practice: tensions and challengesOur own institution is no exception. Two thirds of our 36-week course is 'field-based' and the remaining 12 weeks are given over to what we hope Putnam and Borko would acknowledge to be 'authentic activities' located within the university classroom. If an apprenticeship model is to work

Researchers into Literature and Education from Norway, Pakistan and the United Kingdom used William Golding's Lord of the Flies to explore the potential of a literary text to encourage intercultural dialogue, employing an innovative teaching method, Google Circles, to provide a platform for asynchronous online discussion among three cohorts of students in higher education. The authors present here the ethical and moral responses to the novel. The authors' analysis of the data explores the students' thoughts about human nature and law and order, as well as responses made by the students to moral turning points in Golding's novel. The authors report that -although the novel provided a space for students from three national contexts to debate major existential questions using the affordances of the asynchronous digital platform -the students found it difficult to distinguish between the writer, the implied author and the narrative voice.