The history of educational development is rooted in the improvement of teaching techniques. As a result, centres or units have normally been located in central registrars or human resources departments, library, learning and technical support services, or established as semi-autonomous entities. The alignment of educational development with…

This research note aims to address concerns about schools as sites where students wrestle, materially and subjectively, with classed based notions of femininity, the promotion of heterosexuality, and the support of heteronormative, middle class families against and in contrast with their own working class families, identities and experiences. Two…

Through reflection on the First International iPED Conference 2006, and its overarching theme of "Pedagogical Research and Academic Identities", this paper considers the achievement of the wider aims of the conference, which were to facilitate dialogue between researchers in order to explore the conference themes collaboratively, and to…

This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular…

In this paper I begin by outlining the key characteristics of a view of learning that has been pre-eminent in the past 30 years in the United Kingdom. The focus of this discourse has been less upon understanding the processes and practices of learning as a complex process and more upon improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the curriculum…

Since the early 1970s adult literacy projects and classes have developed and published student writing in the UK. Early practitioners responded to the dearth of suitable learning materials and aimed to nurture hidden voices "from below" through a democratic educational process. Based on reading student written publications as well as…

While it is generally accepted that literature fosters (inter)cultural learning, few qualitative studies have sought to understand in what ways interculturality is developed. This article investigates the development of Spanish L2 students' intercultural awareness through the reading of a short story entitled "Norma y Ester" by Argentine…

This article suggests that community music in the United Kingdom emerged as a sub-strand of the community arts movement during the political and cultural changes of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Through five themes: musicians in residence, music animateur, music collectives and punk rock, definitions, and training, Part 1 of this article…

This paper deals with European language policy and its contribution to the formation of a European identity. The realisation of the "European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" in Germany and the United Kingdom is discussed and evaluated. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable explosion of knowledges across the academy, media and political discourse, generating a wide range of representations of men and masculinity. In this paper, we interrogate the failure for an accompanying understanding of the epistemological and methodological implications of the research process in this…

In this article, I attempt to bring some colour to a discussion of fraught topics in education. Though the scenes and stories (from education and elsewhere) that feature here deal with racism, the discussion aims to say something to such topics more generally. The philosophers whose work I draw on here are Stanley Cavell and Judith Butler. Both…

Based on meetings of the Society for Research into Higher Education's Student Experience Network over the past three years, the genuinely open research question is posed whether there is one or more undergraduate student experience within English higher education. Answering this question depends on whether what is taught or what is learnt is…

In this paper we describe the design of a managed learning environment called MTutor, which is used to teach an online Masters Module for teachers. In describing the design of MTutor pedagogic issues of problem-based learning, situated cognition and ill-structured problems are discussed. MTutor presents teachers with complex real-life teaching…

There is a tendency in academic literature concerning children from diverse social and linguistic background to concentrate on failure within the school system. It is only in recent years that this is beginning to change. In this article the author argues that if we are to motivate children towards success we need to have a clear picture of the…

Accounts of fathers' reluctance to engage with locally based family learning groups rarely acknowledge the relationship between learning and identity. This tends not to be the case in parallel accounts of women's reluctance to become involved in groups or networks where the mainstream clientele is male. Drawing on the case study of a national…