Search results

This chapter presents a critical analysis of administration and its dysfunctional relationship to teaching and learning. Researchers conducted an ethnographic study over the course of 2 years. The reflective narrative (Nielsen, 1995) is of an iteration of Smith and Geoffrey's (1968) insider–outsider technique revealed systemic dysfunction, professional deference, and disregard. It provides the framework from which to view the dysfunctional behavior of both teachers and administrators. The critical analysis provides a research to practice component, which informs the preparation of future administrators through the revelation of the study's administrative challenges and expectations in the field of education.

Jan's my wife, and the tale of my devious progress through the profession that the editor asked me to write for your amusement is really in two parts—before and after 1958, the year in which I married Jan, moved back to Hertfordshire and into library management, and acquired a respectable car. Thinking about writing a ‘Talepiece’ I wondered if a ‘Guide to young librarians to the route to the hot seat’ based on my experience would be welcome to the NEW LIBRARY WORLD readers. I doubt if it would help anyone setting out now to try to find a way to the chief officer's bench, for my 24 years in librarianship has seen change at a very rapid pace, and not only in libraries. Local government has changed as much, if not more.

Reviews the level of awareness and use of total quality management (TQM) in the UK retail sector. Surveys top management in retailing for views on TQM and reviews the results to establish knowledgeability of quality issues and the degree of receptiveness to TQM. Seeks views on process improvement and priority business areas, to establish the extent of compatibility between retailer goals and the TQM approach. Considers the potential use of TQM as a means of driving quality improvement in the light of theory, experience and the survey.

JOAN BUTLER, Organiser of Library Work with Young People at Hertfordshire County Library, spent a fortnight in April on a British Council‐sponsored visit to Jordan, lecturing and advising on the development of school libraries and the training of teacher librarians.

The standard method of analysing F.47 take‐off camera films, described in reference 1, is very laborious. It was developed for use when take‐offs were not normally made from runways. Now that most measured take‐offs are made from a runway a simpler method of analysis has been introduced. This requires a fixed camera position at a known distance from the centre line of the runway from which the aircraft is taking off. The essential distances for the take‐off can then be determined from the azimuth angle on the camera record without measuring the image of the aircraft on the film.

The subject of Supersonic Aerodynamics, and indeed of compressible flow generally, is not fundamentally difficult; in fact, some aspects of supersonic flow are appreciably simpler than the corresponding aspects of low speed flow. What makes the subject appear more complicated is the large number of interrelated parameters which are of interest and importance, so that any given relation may be expressed in a large number of equivalent forms. Basically, the aeronautical engineer is largely concerned with the variation of pressure with speed; but in compressible flow, pressure variation implies density variation, and simultaneous variation of pressure and density immediately suggests temperature, the speed of sound, and (with the velocity) Mach number as alternative parameters. Again, many of the ‘constants’, such as the isentropic index y, the specific heats, and the gas constant R, are inter‐related. Since each parameter has its own place and its own field of importance, a multiplicity of forms for a given relation must be accepted; and a handbook in which the important forms are set out for reference becomes essential.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

Can we model politics as exclusively based on self-interest, leaving virtue aside? How much romance is there in the study of politics? We show that James Buchanan, a founder of public choice and constitutional political economy, reintroduces a modicum of romance into politics, despite claiming that his work is the study of “politics without romance”: Buchanan’s model needs an ethical attitude to defend rules against rent-seeking.

We claim that Adam Smith, more than David Hume, should be considered one of the primary intellectual influences on Buchanan’s public choice and constitutional political economy. It is commonly believed that Hume assumes in politics every man ought to be considered a knave, making him an influence on Buchanan’s idea of politics without romance. Yet, it is Smith who, like Buchanan, describes rent-seeking and suggests that public virtues may be the remedy through which good rules maintaining liberty and prosperity can be generated and enforced. Smith, like Buchanan, rejects sole reliance on economic incentives: the study of politics needs some romance.

This chapter gives one version of the recent history of evaluation case study. It looks back over the emergence of case study as a sociological method, developed in the early years of the 20th Century and celebrated and elaborated by the Chicago School of urban sociology at Chicago University, starting throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the basic methods, including constant comparison, were generated at that time. Only partly influenced by this methodological movement, an alliance between an Illinois-based team in the United States and a team at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom recast the case method as a key tool for the evaluation of social and educational programmes.

Lawrence Angus is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne. Much of his work has been conducted in relation to educational policy and institutional restructuring, which he connects with issues of social formation, culture and equity. Angus’s current interest is in the part played by schools in the construction and legitimation of various forms of culture and knowledge associated with the use of new technologies, and the implications of these for educational practice, inclusion/exclusion and (dis)advantage. Angus has a strong research and publication record in socio-cultural analysis of processes of schooling, and a record of strong policy work including participation in government advisory committees. His analyses of educational processes and practices and what these mean for the conceptualisation of educational policy and educational reform have been especially influential. His most recent book, with Terri Seddon, is Reshaping Australian education: Beyond nostalgia (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2000). He has extensive experience of qualitative research and has published internationally on methodological debates and innovations in critical ethnography.Karin Aronsson is a professor at the Department of Child Studies, Linkööping University. Much of her research concerns multiparty conversations in institutional settings, e.g. family therapy talk, pediatric interviews, and classroom conversations. Other investigations concern codeswitching in bilingual children’s play, and language shift phenomena in relation to sibling caretaking. Several of her studies map the social choreography of talk-in-interaction along specific continua; e.g. formality-informality and alignment-disalignment. A series of recent studies concern classrooms dialogues as arenas for informal learning.Dennis Beach is a senior research fellow and associate Professor at the Department of Education Gööteborg University, Sweden. His main responsibilities are for the development of ethnographic research methods at the department, the supervision of Ph.D. research and teaching within the sociology of education. Together with Marie Carlson from the Department of Sociology at Göötborg University, Beach is currently leading a recently funded Research Council project on the restructuring of adult education and the collective renewal of Swedish For Immigrants Education (SFI). His previous research projects have been in the restructuring of upper-secondary education and of various programmes within university-based vocational education.Shereen Benjamin has worked as a class teacher of young children in primary and special schools, and as a learning support teacher in the secondary school in which her doctoral research was based. Her Ph.D. was completed at the London University Institute of Education, with the support of an Economic and Social Research Council studentship. She is currently lecturing in the Inclusive and Special Education division of the University of Birmingham. She is interested in the intersection of gender/sexuality, social class and ‘special educational needs’, and is researching inclusive school cultures in collaboration with practising teachers and with colleagues from The Open University and Leeds Metropolitan University.Jeff Bezemer (1976), MA, studied Language and Culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 1999, he graduated with a specialisation in Dutch as a Second Language. Since 1999, he is affiliated to Babylon, Center for Studies of Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society at Tilburg University. After having been involved in empirical-analytical studies on school achievements of islamic school pupils, and adult lingua-franca-interaction, he is currently engaged in an international-comparative, empirical-interpretative Ph.D. project on multilingualism and education in a multi-ethnic, Dutch primary school.Diann Eley is currently a Research Associate at Loughborough University in the Department of Physical Education, Sport Science and Recreation Management. Her main research interest is the social-psychology of volunteerism and leadership in young people and sport.Laura Dawn Greathouse received her doctorate, from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2000, for her dissertation dealing with refugee and immigrant students in English for Speakers of Other Languages classrooms. Her research focus remains on inequality and education, especially in linguistic minorities. In her current position as assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, she is responsible for the administration of the credentialing of students with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology to teach at the elementary or secondary educational levels. She is currently working on social acceptance of Middle Eastern descent students in a post-September, 2001 America.Caroline Hudson’s research interests include basic skills provision for offenders; the relationships between basic skills, offending behaviour and social exclusion; school attendance and truancy; evidence-based policy; the effectiveness of basing police officers in schools; and the literacy demands of the secondary school curriculum. Her doctoral ethnography was of young people’s perceptions of the relationships between their family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear and single-parent) and their experience of family and schooling. Formerly a secondary school English teacher, Caroline has worked as a Research Officer at the University of Oxford, and is currently Basic Skills Development Advisor at the Home Office National Probation Directorate.Bob Jeffrey is a research fellow in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University. He was a primary teacher for twenty years before joining The Open University as a project officer on an Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) research project concerned with creative teaching in primary schools directed by Professor Peter Woods. Under the same direction he gained another ESRC research award focusing on the effects of Ofsted inspections on primary teachers. He has continued his research in three areas, creative teaching and learning, primary teacher’s work and research methodology, publishing extensively both individually and with a team within his university faculty. He has also established extensive European connections in the area of creativity and ethnography through the administration of email discussion lists, co-ordinating an ethnography network at the European Conference of Educational Research, submitting European Union research proposals, and organising a Special Interest Group within BERA. He has been invited to give papers at Padua University, Italy and to run methodology workshops in Tallinn, Estonia.Allyson Julé (Ph.D., University of Surrey Roehampton, London, U.K.) currently teaches in the TESL Certificate Program at Trinity Western University, Langley, British Columbia and at the English Language Institute at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include gender in ESL; the Punjabi Sikh experience in Canada; ethnography in education; and classroom talk analysis in teacher education.David Kirk is with the Department of Physical Education, Sports Science and Recreation Management at Loughborough University. His research interests include educational reform and curriculum development in physical education, young people in sport, and situated learning in physical education and sport. His most recent book is ‘Schooling Bodies: School Practice and Public Discourse, 1880–1950’ (Leicester University Press, 1998).Eamonn McKeown is a Senior Research Fellow in Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at University College London. His background is in Social Anthropology having completed both his first degree and Ph.D. at Queen’s University, Belfast and he has previously been employed as a Research Fellow and tutor at Queen’s University, Belfast and University College Swansea. He has published on a range of educational research issues (selection in Northern Ireland, male recruits to primary school teaching, gender and science teaching, occupational sex-typing among primary school children) and has conducted extended fieldwork in Papua New Guinea examining the relationship between formal education and local culture and in New York investigating the nature of contemporary Irish-American identity. He is currently completing a book on literacy appropriation in a Papua New Guinean highlands community.Ann MacPhail is currently a lecturer in the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, University of Limerick. Her main interests revolve around young people in sport and curriculum development in PE During the past three years Ann has been involved in a number of projects involved with school PE and sport, including model-based teaching and learning in school PE and an ethnography of junior sport participation.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Anna Sparrman has a professional background as a museum curator. She received her Ph.D., in 2002, from the Department of Child Studies at Linkööping University, Sweden. The thesis was concerned with images and visuality in children’s culture as well as commercial childhood. Her main research interest is visual culture in everyday life. She now works as a researcher at the Department of Child Studies.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a research associate at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, where she is undertaking doctoral studies in Internet literacy practices of tertiary English as a Second Language (ESL) students. She teaches international students entering tertiary studies, where she focuses on writing processes and issues of intellectual property. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is particularly interested in Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field, and applies these critically in analyses of international students and their interactions with academic culture, print-centred and internet learning styles, and issues of intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher and Prospect on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, editor) Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) and Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He recently directed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.