Games have been used in schools since the 1970s. Currently, the games most commonly used in classrooms are ‘edutainment’ games such as Math Blaster (Boyle et al., 2016). These games are...
Some decades ago, several studies advanced an unexpected answer to an age-old question: schools do not help students improve their social positions (see for example Coleman et al., 1966). This...
In April 2016, a mother voiced her concerns on the English Local Schools Network website (Secret Parent, 2016) about withdrawing her 10-year-old from the new key stage 2 SATs. Her main concern was...
Food is an important factor in a number of social spheres, and one of the sites in which food is used to feed future citizens and leaders is the school dining hall. New meanings have been given to...
A seasonal welcome to all our BERA Blog readers in the UK and around the world in this, our third end-of-year-highlights special edition. And what a year this has turned out to be. (I really will...
‘We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for...
This blog post springs from a symposium I convened at BERA Conference 2018 entitled ‘Using creative methods to explore complex topics with young participants’. The symposium reflected my...
The school environment can be particularly challenging for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Pupils diagnosed with ADHD are typically restless, act without thinking...
A renewed call to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum has marked a shift in thinking about education and what should form the canon of curriculum content (le Grange, 2016). It has been amplified...
Language is the most ubiquitous and flexible of the meaning-making tools. As such, it is a teacher’s main pedagogic tool (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). ‘Classroom dialogue’ can be thought of as...
It has become increasingly apparent that being literate is a fundamental skill for citizens of the 21st century, just as it was in previous times, but also that new conceptualisations of what it...
The starting point for our article (Parker & Levinson, 2018) was the apparent contradiction in current government policy between an essentially top-down, ‘zero tolerance’ behaviourist model of...