Kitwe College of Education

Items

• A literature review of gender equity in national textbooks across the MENA region and the implications for CEDAW
  In recent decades, girls’ education across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has made notable gains. The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) treaty agreement has successfully facilitated the improvement of girls’ access in many countries. However, there is growing concern about the quality of classroom content and how it continues to marginalize females. This review examines ten studies from seven countries across the region and highlights how discriminatory patterns continue to exist in national textbooks. It then looks at how policy and political settlements address gender equity in national curricula and discusses the implications for women and girls in relation to CEDAW.
• Social media for Academics and Early Career Researchers: An Interview with Dr Mark Carrigan
• Understanding Equity Through Section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act in India
  This paper is an attempt to understand equity through section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act in India which aims to reserve 25% seats for economically weaker sections and disadvantaged groups in private schools. The paper is divided into four parts. Firstly, equity is conceptualized using Unterhalter’s (2009) concepts of equity from above, equity from middle and equity from below and Maitzegui-Onate & Santibanez-Gruber’s (2008) concepts of horizontal and vertical equity. I apply these different forms of equity to section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act in India which is an example of ‘equity from above’ and is an equalising measure in the form of ‘vertical equity’. Secondly, Sen’s (1992) capability approach is discussed to explore the inequalities in capabilities of individuals to make effective use of educational resources. Drawing on the works of several scholars who have outlined this approach, I argue that taking individual capabilities into account is essential for achieving equity in education. Thirdly, I discuss Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of different forms of capital to understand structural inequalities and its impact on educational experiences. Due to lack of cultural capital, the educational experiences of children from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds vary greatly in comparison to children from economically better sections of the society. I establish links between Unterhalter’s forms of equity, capabilities, forms of capital and functionings in order to depict how equity can be achieved in implementing educational policies. In the final part of the paper, I draw on empirical studies to explore the challenges associated with the implementation of the section 12(1)(c) of the RTE Act in India. This paper highlights how RTE 12 (1)(c) succeeds in promoting the availability of resources to the most disadvantaged in the society as well as raises concerns over the inclusive capabilities needed to promote equity of education.
• The Future of Cantonese and Traditional Chinese Among Newly Arrived Hong Kong Immigrant Children in the United Kingdom – A Study on Parents’ Attitudes, Challenges Faced And Support Needed
  Acculturation occurs where culturally different groups of individuals come into contact with each other, leading to cultural changes to either or both groups. For immigrants, home language maintenance is one aspect of acculturation. Studies have shown that home language maintenance is beneficial for immigrant children’s development in various ways. This mixed methods research looked at Hong Kong immigrants in the United Kingdom under the new British National (Overseas) Visa policy. It explored parents’ attitudes towards their children’s learning and maintenance of Cantonese and Traditional Chinese (the home language of local Hongkongers), the obstacles encountered and support needed for supporting their children’s home language development. Age-group-specific differences in findings were investigated. An online survey was used to collect responses from 96 parents regarding 146 children in three age groups: n = 28 in preschool, n = 73 in primary, and n = 45 in secondary. Results showed that almost 90% of respondents viewed Cantonese and Traditional Chinese development as important for their children, with the strongest reason being ethnic identity maintenance as a Hongkonger. More books and community gatherings were found to be needed for creating a contextualised home language environment for the children. Parents with preschool children were found to express significantly higher needs for multilingual development events than those with children in primary. The study suggested support measures and prompted future policies to consider age-group differences in home language learning support needs.
• Alternative Approaches to Behaviour Management in Schools: An Exploration of Senior School Leaders' Experiences, Beliefs and Perceptions of Interventionist Behaviour Management Systems
• Human Mind is Mediated - A Comparative Analysis of Two L2 Studies
• The Nexus of Language and Culture: A Review of Literature on Intercultural Communicative Competence in Foreign Language Education
  The issue of intercultural communication has garnered more attention than ever as the world changes with increasing mobility both physical and virtual. Such change not only transforms how we communicate but also foregrounds cultural differences and the implications of intercultural understanding. Scholarly debate on the nexus of language and culture has ignited considerable research effort to contextualise foreign language education to accommodate such changing landscape. This article reviews both this debate and empirical effort with two aims. First, it aims to explore theoretical debates on the nature of the relationship between language and culture to identify the theoretical underpinnings of educational practice. Second, it reviews relevant empirical research to reveal how the issue of language and culture has been addressed in foreign language classrooms. In the theoretical overview, three highlights in the language-culture nexus debate are summarised, followed by the proposed dual focus on language and culture in foreign language education. Particularly, a model of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) is reviewed in detail as the paradigmatic example of addressing both language and culture in foreign language education. In the empirical review, scholarly works inspired by the ICC model are synthesised into three different themes, namely “Developing ICC: The traditional classroom approach”, “Developing ICC: The telecollaboration approach” and “Assessing ICC”. Insights and limitations of previous studies are discussed and future research directions are proposed at the end.
• The Bologna Process as a Policy Transfer Issue
• How to avoid ‘Christmas Tree’ innovations: introducing and sustaining the use of learning platforms in schools
  This paper reports the results of a study investigating teacher stakeholder views of the range of leadership factors that influenced their use during the first two years of a new Virtual Learning Environment (Firefly) in a comprehensive school in London. The research was broadened to include ten schools in total. Implications are identified as well as suggestions for further research. According to much of the research reviewed, maximising the benefits of a VLE is dependent on how teachers perceive innovations in general. However, some evidence was found that leaders do have an impact on the take-up of technology in schools. The determination of the overall school leader to bring transformation and modernity to the school was found to have an effect on the uptake of initiatives that are expensive and risky in the sense that they rely on new skills and knowledge that do not at first seem relevant to some teachers. The process also involves risk because of the pace of technological change. This research aims to bring together the two factors: teacher perception and leadership of change. The aim is to help school leaders ensure successful take-up and sustaining of use so that innovations, that they introduce, are not short-lived. Key questions within the evaluation survey draw on theories of leadership and on findings from the literature review about technology acceptance. The research is summarised in a visual representation of how leaders can leverage their influence, both with the initial introduction and the sustaining of the technology, to avoid the ‘Christmas Tree’ innovation effect: in other words, a purely ornamental technology that quickly goes out of date or fails to serve its primary purpose of improving learning (Bryk, 1992, p. 7).
• Pushing Boundaries, Nurturing Growth
• Stories that Heal: How Storytelling Aided Child Trauma Recovery in The Space Between Before and After
  This article traces the plot of children’s novel, The Space Between Before and After, to examine how storytelling and the use of metaphor enabled the 10-year-old protagonist, Thomas, to heal from the traumatic experience of losing his mother to depression. Before encountering storytelling, Thomas is lost in a narrative of victimhood and lacks hope, imagination, and agency. When his neighbour, Mrs. Sharp, introduces storytelling to him to cope with his anxiety, he begins to process his trauma through metaphor and develops an intimate relationship with the elderly lady. Using Bradley and Mendoza’s (2021) model of storytelling as a framework, I interpret Thomas’s recovery journey as a process in which his feelings were first voiced through metaphor and imagination, which were then able to be processed and bridged to reality as he gained confidence and control. Furthermore, I recognise the importance of Mrs. Sharp as a secure attachment figure throughout, especially when Thomas’s father, Mr. Moran, disapproves of his storytelling, causing tension in the father-son relationship and hardship in Thomas’s healing process. Nevertheless, by the end, Mr. Moran comes to be supportive of the storytelling and asks Thomas to share his story at Helen’s memorial, symbolising community healing. The exchange between father and son after the fact reveals that agency, hope, imagination, and collective healing have come to replace the initial narrative of victimhood and hopelessness. I conclude this article with an analysis of the butterfly motif presented throughout the novel to recapitulate on the power of metaphor for children’s healing from trauma.
• Competing Paradigms for Basic Education: Human Capital and Human Capabilities and What They Mean for the World Bank and UNESCO
• Towards a more equitable future: CERJ efforts to advance equity in a post-pandemic era
• A Critical Review of School Choice and Egalitarian Justice with Special Reference to the Philippines
  The complexities of many societies in the world today, coupled with the dire need to achieve quality education and social justice in every society, makes the issue of school choice and justice topical at national and international levels. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030, has established that quality education for all can significantly contribute to sustainable societal development. This paper employed a critical review of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) and Harry Brighouse’s (2000) work on school choice and social justice. The paper applies this examination to the Philippines case, paying close attention to the relationship between school choice and egalitarian justice within the Philippines education sector. This article considers egalitarian justice as a theoretical framework relevant to its discussion on school choice in the Philippines within the context of the SDG 4 – Education 2030 agenda. Findings from this review show that many Filipino parents want the best education and future for their children, and this drives their decision on school choice. Where the public system fails to provide quality education for their children, parents tend to choose other school options to enrol their children, and they remain loyal to affordable schools. The Government of the Philippines provides educational vouchers for private schooling to ensure accessible, equitable and quality education for all. Consequently, private schools are developed at the cost of public schools, while many Filipino children still attend public schools. This creates unintended inequalities within society. This paper concludes that realising egalitarian justice in a society under the school choice system will be quite problematic. Although school choice could help in making education available to some, it could spell doom for others. This review paper is relevant because, with less than 11 years left to achieve SDG 4, challenges historically inherent in many education systems and current problems being faced by educational actors on achieving the SDG 4 are worthy of our attention. Therefore, the paper calls for more research to be done on school choice and egalitarian justice in different socio-political contexts.
• Digital translanguaging and Arabic-English transliteration (Arabizi): Insights from Syria and Lebanon
  In a globalised and technologically advancing world, an increasing number of people practice digital translanguaging. However, monoglossic ideological resistance to such practices remains, some of which can be conceptualised through the lens of moral panic. This research navigates one example of digital translanguaging, Arabic English Transliteration (AET), sometimes referred to as Arabizi. AET is the act of using English characters to write Arabic words. The current study employs a small-scale qualitative survey involving 26 Syrian and Lebanese youth with tertiary education experience. It addresses gaps in the AET literature by exploring attitudes and perceptions of AET use and examining the reasons that underlie its adoption. Analysis reveals a difference in the attitudes of Lebanese and Syrians, suggesting a need to move away from an exclusive focus on digital texts towards examining the socially-situated nature of their production and interpretation. An in-depth interview was then conducted with one participant who reported changes in her practice, from shunning AET to ample use of it, which corresponded with a study abroad learning experience. This interview provides nuanced evidence of the need to account for the educational, social and cultural contexts in the study of digital translanguaging. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and the potential connections between AET use and socio-cultural factors as well as a series of questions and directions for future research including the potential implications for English as a medium of instruction in education contexts.
• Predictors of Parental Attitudes Towards Inclusion in China
  Few studies have investigated predictors of parental attitudes (PA) towards inclusion in China. There was also contradictory evidence on the role of several predictors of PA towards inclusion among studies in the Chinese context and between studies conducted in China and the Western world. This study aimed to identify the strongest predictors of PA towards inclusion in China by investigating and comparing different variables, including parental gender, income, education level, exposure to inclusion and the number of children with special education needs and disabilities in the household. A total of 203 participants completed an online quantitative questionnaire. The results showed that a higher parental education level, more exposure to inclusion and a larger number of children with SEND in the household significantly predicted more positive attitudes towards inclusion. Among them, exposure to inclusion was the strongest predictor. Several limitations of the current study were discussed followed by recommendations for future research. Implications of the current work for policymaking and home-school collaborations were outlined.
• Does ‘WOW’ translate to an ‘A’? Exploring the effects of virtual reality assisted multimodal text on Chinese Grade 8 EFL learners’ reading comprehension
  In recent years, the incorporation of multimedia into linguistic input has opened a new horizon in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In the reading aspect, the advent of virtual reality (VR) technology extends the landscape of reading repertoire by engaging learners with auditory, visual and tactile multimodal input. However, few studies have yet examined the pedagogical potential of VR technology in enhancing learners’ reading comprehension. This study aims to fill this gap by assessing the effects of VR-assisted multimodal input on learners’ expository reading comprehension. Three classes including 140 Chinese 8th grade EFL students participate in this study, and these classes are randomly assigned into two experimental groups and one control group: VR-assisted multimodal text group, video-assisted multimodal text group and print-based monomodal text group. This study adopts mixed methods methodology and triangulates pre-post-retention tests, questionnaires and interview data to compare three modes of text input on learners’ reading performance and explore learners’ cognitive processing in the multimodal learning environment. This study is the first attempt to integrate VR technology with input presentation and cognitive processing in second language reading comprehension and offered a new line of theorisation of VR-assisted multimodal learning in the cognitive field of SLA.
• How Does Sociolinguistic Theory Contribute to Insights About Second Language Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Two Empirical Studies
• Turning Friends into Research Participants: Rationale, Possibilities and Challenges
• Assessing formal written ability in Mathematics 
• Celebrating 5 years of CORERJ
• A Curriculum of Contradictions: State-Sponsored Children's Literature in Egypt (1954-2011)
• ‘Gender’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Female’: Gender Minorities’ Exclusion in Development Education as Ontological Violence
  This paper explores the intersections of gender, education, and international development, specifically noting the spaces in which gender minorities are either highlighted or discounted. It begins by providing a basic introduction to the history of conceptualizations of gender in education for international development settings as a way of foregrounding how the term ‘gender’ has become ubiquitous within the field to mean ‘female.’ It uses this background to explore both the invisibilization of gender minorities and the intersectional ways in which systemic violence is perpetuated against them. The sources analysed in this paper range from the past 20 years of academic findings from major journals across educational fields, Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals policy documents, and the GEM Report 2020 (which focused on gender equality in education). Because the explicit inclusion of non-cisgender identities in education settings is defined as a crucial tool in preventing violence against gender minorities (Meyer & Keenan, 2018), this paper argues that the decision to ignore and exclude gender minorities in international education development research therefore 1) contributes to the systemic forces of violence that they face and 2) is itself an act of ontological violence as well.
• ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ Staff turnover in secondary schools – voices from four case studies in Cambridgeshire
  This is a dual-purpose paper. It is both a work-in-progress report as well as the expansion of a presentation to be given at the forthcoming Kaleidoscope 2023 conference. It therefore addresses one of the Kaleidoscope 2023 themes, resilience in education. The paper uses qualitative data extracted from my ongoing PhD research project that investigates the relationship between the everyday lives of all school staff, their working conditions, and their wellbeing. The aim of that project is to see if there are policies and design interventions that might improve the working lives of all school workers. The Introduction summarises the problem of recruitment and retention, both locally and globally. By reference to recent post-Pandemic research and current (April 2023) industrial unrest it suggests the importance of continuing research in this area. The Methodologies section details the theories underpinning the mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods that have been used in my PhD research and the way in which I have extracted the ‘voices’ that form the body of this paper. The Results are selected quotations from the interviews conducted with 12 members of staff in the 4 schools that were studied. My Discussion focusses on the interviewees’ feelings about themselves, and sheds light on sources of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The article concludes with ideas about what these voices tell us about resilience and suggests possible future work based on employee experience design.
• The Role of Digital Media in Empowerment Education: Conceptualizing Participatory Methodology
  This paper provides an overview of advantages and issues surrounding fictional digital media in empowerment education and participatory action research involving youth. Following theoretical underpinnings of Freire expanded by Nicholl’s Pedagogy of the Privileged, the discussions first consider digital media as alternative mental spaces for pedagogy, engagement, and dissemination of knowledge. First, for oppressed youth, digital media can be employed as a Safespace in which some level of mental health respite is offered amidst forces of oppression in an individual's physical context of marginalization. Second, digital media can provide a Non-Safespace in which privileged and oppressed youth are engaged towards collaborative discourse. Social justice themes which lead to incongruent perspectives between different youth can be presented as less confrontational by digital media - which can be utilized to offer multiple, iterative chances of collaborative learning. Thirdly, digital media can be applied in research engagement as Experimental Space, in which youth access opportunities to take on the perspectives and lived experiences of characters in both privilege and oppression classes alike. This immersion in the lived experiences of the other can lead to greater understanding and potential empathy towards future action against oppression. These three spaces offered by digital media may help overcome the need to self-censor that oppressed youth face in classroom and research settings. Negative emotions associated with living in oppression can be perceived as what Stephen Kemmis identifies as society’s “unwelcome truths”, often silenced, but given potential outlet via the digital realm. The complex interplay between reimbursement in research, social mobility, and societal expectations of oppressed youth to self-help are discussed in relation to inequitable power structures. Here, digital media presents an additional interrogation of inequality, as it allows youth to be creators - who amplify their own voice without needing approval from society.