Fieldwork is an important part of undergraduate degrees in Geography and has been shown to be an effective pedagogic strategy. Fieldtrips are often to remote locations, both residential and shorter day trips. For institutions, field trips can be costly in terms of money and staff time and difficult to timetable. Some students may have difficulty…

This paper discusses the issues involved in calculating indices of composite reliability for "modular" or "unitised" assessments of the kind used in GCSEs, AS and A level examinations in England. The increasingly widespread use of on-screen marking has meant that the item-level data required for calculating indices of…

Attempts to measure the quality of teaching and learning have resulted in an overreliance on quantitative performance data and the normalisation of a set of reductionist practices in England's further education sector in recent years. Focusing on lesson observation as an illustrative example and drawing on data from a national study, this article…

A cross-national descriptive research method was used to explore Turkish and English student teachers' views about intelligence, and the factors which shape them. The "Adult Version of The Implicit Theory of Intelligence Scale" [1], and the Turkish version of this scale [2] were used to investigate the views of 114 English and 201…

School inspection has formed part of both English and Swedish approaches to governing education for some time now. But latterly due to the neo liberal drive for educational excellence, both countries have remodelled their inspector workforce. Using Jacobsson's theory of governance as a regulative, meditative and inquisitive activity, this chapter…

By the year 2000, the management of education in England had lost much of its capacity to ensure the commitment of headteachers and teachers. As market forces engendered competition among schools, the bureaucratic monitoring of schools by agencies of government increased on the grounds that objective and comparable data about schools should be…

'Narrowing the gap' and addressing low educational achievement of specific social class and ethnic groups has long been an expressed government concern. This paper considers the links between poverty, ethnicity and gender and school attainment and the interrelations of these factors using national data sets and other quantitative data. The…

Located between senior management and academic staff, the role of the Associate Dean in universities appears to be growing in number, complexity and importance in recent years. A role arguably fraught with complexity, it remains largely undefined and under-researched. While little is known about the role in general, less still is known about their…

Background: Higher education outdoor studies programs retain a critical interest in student experiences as they seek to prepare citizens in a globalized, yet simultaneously neo-nationalist, world. Purpose: This research explored the impact of transculturality on the student experience of outdoor studies in the Transcultural European Outdoor…

This article draws on a study of black male teachers who teach in primary schools, and aims to contribute to studies of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) teachers. Interviews with 10 participants examine the nexus of professional and social identities and how these are (re)constructed in or by schools. The teachers' agentic actions provide…

This paper argues that Gypsy students in primary and secondary education in the UK are marginalised because of ambiguous understandings of their 'mobility'. Drawing on research conducted on the south coast of England, it examines Gypsy families' experiences of education. Despite often describing their identity in relation to travelling or…

Written examinations represent one of the most common assessment tools in education. Though typically perceived as measurement instruments, written examinations are primarily texts that perform a communicative function. To complement existing research, this study viewed written examinations as a distinct form of communication (i.e. 'register').…

Using a doctoral examination question as a starting point, this paper explores the specific race-gendered challenges Black women academics face when doing research on race. I argue that the stereotypical, racialised controlling images regarding Black women are not exclusive to African-American women and this has led some, in education, to draw on…

Peter Jarvis emphasised relationships in education: people in the West assumed we were born as individuals but we are relationally embedded from the outset and learn to become social beings. This paper is concerned with how we learn democratic sensibilities with a prime focus on "liberal" workers' education in the United Kingdom and the…

It is uncontested that British African Caribbean men are minimally represented in elite UK higher education institutions. Even as data demonstrates that African Caribbean males are more likely to study further education than White males and that the proportion of UK-domiciled Black students pursuing higher education has increased since the 2003/04…