As a former music teacher and arts advocate, No Child Left Behind and the accompanying push for ‘back to basics’ education in the early 2000s felt like a direct attack on music education in US public schools. Recently, ‘STEM education’, ‘coding for all’ and ’21st century skills’ are being popularized as a way to expand…
Al terminar mis estudios de pregrado en Sociología, ingresé a trabajar en la Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles (JUNJI), una institución estatal que administra y financia programas de educación inicial. Esta institución forma parte de la “red pública”[1] de la educación inicial y busca focalizar el acceso a familias y niños de sectores desaventajados. Desde…
When I finished my undergraduate studies in Sociology, I started working for the National Board for Early Childhood Education Centres (Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles or JUNJI), a state institution which administers and finances programmes of early childhood education. This institution forms a part of the ‘public network’ [1] of early childhood education and seeks…
If you analyze school systems from a comparative perspective, the Chilean case stands out for its accelerated and high level of privatization. To understand this distinctiveness, you need to put the changes to the regulation of state-financed private education from the beginning of the 1980s into historical perspective. Although private education [1] was recognized as educational…
Si se analizan los sistemas escolares desde una perspectiva comparada, el caso chileno destaca por su acelerado y alto grado de privatización. Para comprender esta particularidad, es necesario poner en perspectiva histórica los cambios en la regulación de la educación particular [1] que es financiada por el Estado, desde inicios de la década de 1980.…
When I started working as a teacher, I was keen to develop my pupils’ knowledge. But I often asked myself: what is ‘knowledge’ in a school context? I realized quickly that this wasn’t an easy question to answer. Even so, thinking about knowledge was important. It made me assess what needed to be prioritized in terms of my teaching…
It has been nearly twenty years to the day since I graduated from the University of Nottingham (for the first time) with a BA Hons in Modern Language Studies. I was in one of the first cohorts to study three languages to degree level – two from A-level and a third ab initio. We were a…
I’m a PhD student in Education and the focus of my research is the reforms to Swedish upper secondary schools during the 1960s. The big issue at that time was the change from teacher-centred teaching to more independent work for pupils and this is a subject I want to discuss in the blog. I teach at…
One of the most interesting aspects of researching teacher professionalism in England and Sweden has been trying to understand what a collective voice sounds like. Who are the collective? How do they organise themselves? Do they speak louder together or, despite their number, only in a whisper? What I have discovered is that, in the teaching…
A voice that I would like to raise in education is that of teachers. Often the loudest voices in education discussions are those of law makers, policy makers and celebrities. Perhaps we hear from school leaders, maybe from parents or governing boards. But the people who have the most experience to draw on are teachers.…
Raising Voices in Education 