The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2021

BERA Blog end of year highlights

Yuletide greetings and festive cheer to all our readers and authors, wherever you may be. In these challenging times we thank all of you for your continued support of and engagement with the BERA...

Positioning ‘play’ purposefully in the adult language learning classroom

The playful academic

Times are tough for university students and teachers alike in this pandemic world. ‘Play’ could offer an easy antidote to the soulnessness of digital overload. Incorporating ‘fun’ and...

Loneliness and collegiality in the academy: Isolated by a neoliberal ideology

The problems of loneliness and isolation are often raised in academia. How can we understand loneliness and respond to it within the academic community of our time? I suggest that the ideology of...

New series of the BERA podcast

This autumn we have launched a new series of the BERA podcast. Over the next few weeks we will continue to feature emerging research which connects to policy and practice.  Already we have...

Learning to be alone: How positive solitude can benefit international students

International students experience loneliness regularly when living and studying abroad (Wawera & MacCamley, 2020), and the situation appears to have worsened during the pandemic. Since loneliness...

How can we teach for transformative disciplinary learning in history and social studies in a high autonomy curriculum?

New Zealand’s 2007 curriculum reform has received international attention for its high level of curricular autonomy, learner-centred ideologies and adoption of 21st-century skills, competencies...

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

This series celebrates our one-thousandth BERA Blog post by republishing some of our favourites from among the posts that have proven most popular since the blog began in 2015. The collection both...

BERA Blog post #1,000

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

It hardly seems possible, six years after its creation of the BERA Blog, that this is its one-thousandth post. The brainchild of BERA CEO Nick Johnson, in 2015 the BB set out to provide...

Social justice through non-violence: Not purely an intellectual endeavour

The issue of ‘violence-based inequality’ is a philosophical one that translates into more practical issues. In using this term, I borrow from Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence (2020)...

The Chinese language classroom as a pedagogic emancipatory space: Cultural capital in multilingual Australia

Languages education plays a central role in constructing hegemony and boundaries, while also being commodified as a technical skill with symbolic added value in the globalised new economy (Heller...

Autumn 2021

International perspectives on the curriculum Implications for teachers & schools Research Intelligence issue 148 The internationalisation of curriculum, and the effects of globalisation and...

Open educational resources offer promise for more equitable teaching and learning

The past year and the pivot to online learning has highlighted and exacerbated inequities in education systems around the world. It is more apparent than ever that our schools must do better at...