The BERA Annual Conference goes digital

The year 2020 will be remembered as one that brought many changes to both our personal and professional lives. It also gave us the opportunity to reflect on what is important to us: visits to our...

Why open educational resources are failing to widen access to education

Open educational resources (OERs) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that are freely available in the public domain. Current discussions about OERs are...

The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2020

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A warm and wintery ‘welcome’ to all our readers, wherever you may be. This time last year I wished all of you a seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’, blissfully unaware of how 2020 would play out. Today,...

Who is Australian? Textbooks continue to exclude Black, Indigenous and people of colour from Australianness

Both the explicit and implicit messages that schoolchildren receive from their textbooks matter. My research focuses on race and national belonging and how these have changed from the 1950s to the...

National curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil

In an article recently published in the Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, we compared how national curriculum policy, in Norway and Brazil, adopted the global logic of...

Evaluation of an immersive virtual learning environment for operator training in mechanical and plant engineering using video analysis

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) refers to computer-generated real-time, three-dimensional and interactive environments. Their use is associated with diverse potentials, such as spatially and...

Curriculum integration can support the development of powerful knowledge in education

On 20th March 2015, an article published by the Independent (Garner, 2015) claimed that Finnish schools had scrapped school subjects and replaced them with topics. Ever since then Finland has been...

Empathy and engagement from a distance: Three learning delivery options in an uncharted terrain

Uncharted terrain: Teaching and learning in higher education for times of uncertainty

My understanding of the uncharted terrain that ensued from January 2020 in China and March 2020 the world over is that human in-person mobility and interaction outside homes has been completely...

Engaging international students in the UK: The experiences of Christian churches

International student mobility has been increasingly affected by politics, culture, economics, natural disasters and public health. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic this year, we have witnessed the...

Prioritising micro-level experiences of schooling: A policy prospect for addressing inequality in basic education access?

Ghanaian and Sub-Saharan African (SSA) governments are successfully implementing universal policy solutions to expand basic-school opportunities for children. Yet, a vital component of the basic...

Applications of learning analytics in Latin America

In Latin America (LATAM), socioeconomic inequality and lack of resources shape the context of educational institutions in particular ways. Programme quality and dropout rates preoccupy...

Editorial: Education, #BlackLivesMatter and racial justice in the UK and beyond

Education, #BlackLivesMatter and racial justice in the UK and beyond

The structural inequalities faced by Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities have been deepened by a decade of austerity. We are in the midst of a global pandemic and, following yet further...