Understanding social transformation and school environments through social network analysis

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...

Deconstructing the SATs process: Resistance is futile?

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...

The value of recognising the school meal as a site for developing learning opportunities: Reflecting on experiences as a post-doc ECR

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...

BERA Blog highlights from 2018

BERA Blog end of year highlights

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...

Teaching as design: New research from technology-rich learning environments

  ‘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...

Researchers drawing on teachers’ tools: Picturebooks with migrant learners

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...

Optimising support for children with ADHD in schools

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...

Arresting ‘epistemic violence’: Decolonising the national curriculum for history

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...

The challenge of researching dialogic interactions in digital classroom contexts

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...

A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Young children and multimodal learning with tablets

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...

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment-aware schools to redefine the landscape

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...

Confusion, contradiction and exclusion: The problems of British values and the national curriculum in history teaching

From 2010, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition began to reassess the teaching of history in schools across the key stages of the national curriculum in England and Wales. After...