European Educational Research Journal
ISSN 1474-9041

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Cities: a window into larger and smaller worlds

SASKIA SASSEN Columbia University, New York, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.1

Cities are complex systems. But they are incomplete systems. In this incompleteness lies the possibility of making – making the urban, the political, the civic, a history. The urban is not alone in having these characteristics, but these characteristics are a necessary part of the DNA of the urban. Every city is distinct and so is every discipline that studies it. And yet, if it is to be a study of the urban it will have to deal with these key features – incompleteness, complexity, and the possibility of making. This then also makes cities strategic sites for the exploration of many major subjects confronting society. But cities are not always a heuristic space – a space capable of producing knowledge about some of the major transformations of an epoch. Today, as we have entered a global era, the city is once again emerging as a strategic site for understanding some of the major new trends reconfiguring the social order. Each of those trends has its own specific contents and consequences. The urban moment is but one moment in their often complex multi-sited trajectories.

Why are Migrant Students Better Off in Certain Types of Educational Systems or Schools than in Others?

JAAP DRONKERS & ROLF VAN DER VELDEN Maastricht University, The Netherlands
ALLISON DUNNE GHK Consulting Ltd, Brussels, Belgium

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.11

The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and the extent to which these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track, or educational system in which these students are enrolled. In doing so, they examine the ‘sorting’ mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified, and comprehensive education systems. They use data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) wave. Compared with previous research in this area, the article’s main contribution is in explicitly including the tracks-within-school level as a separate unit of analysis, which leads to less biased results concerning the effects of educational system characteristics. The results highlight the importance of including factors of track level and school composition in the debate surrounding educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that analyses of the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis only uses a country level and a student level and ignores the tracks-within-school-level characteristics. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational systems are neither uniformly ‘good’ nor uniformly ‘bad’, but they can result in different consequences for different migrant groups. Some migrant groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while others are better off in moderately stratified systems.

Urban Education and Segregation: the responses from young people

ELISABET ÖHRN Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.45

This article takes as a starting point the segregation of urban areas and discusses schooling in the neighbourhoods typically associated with problems and challenges, in order to explore young people’s responses to their schooling and social positions. Such responses include individual acts, such as rejecting further schooling or dismissing the local school in favour of prestigious ones, as well as the development of shared understandings and collective formations. The article focuses in particular on young people’s responses through aesthetic practices, informal education and public political actions. Although research suggests that youths in poor areas are increasingly individualised and shows that schools provide them with little help to understand and act upon their circumstances in school, the analyses here also bring to light young people’s rather strong belief in collective actions; students’ formations of resistance groups and political knowledge appear as crucial resources, and, although scarce, teacher support and teaching about political actions appear as important.

Educational Research and Useful Knowledge: production, dissemination, reception, implementation

MARIT HONERØD HOVEID Department of Education, University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.58

The overall question which the three of us asked in this roundtable – ‘What counts as ‘useful knowledge’ in educational research?’ – is a question that can be interpreted in different ways. I have chosen to interpret it as a question to ourselves: What do we consider ‘useful’ as research on education – as researchers? This is asking for a self-evaluation by educational research(ers). Giving an answer to this requires a reflexivity; a reflexivity which places us in a position where we need to examine and re-examine, on different levels, what we say and do as researchers. This kind of reflexivity is not uncomplicated to perform and it could lead into a less fruitful self-absorption. Another reason for this being a difficult task to perform is that it asks each of us engaged in the field of educational research to reconsider what we value, what we count as knowledge and what we care about – although it should be noted that, according to the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt (1988), we do not always know what we care about. Under the main question, we have been asked to answer the following three questions: What counts as useful education knowledge, and under which conditions, context and criteria? For whom is it useful, and how do they assert their priority? What is the role of researchers in making their research useful?

Multiple Enactments of Educational Research

PAOLO LANDRI Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IRPPS), Rome, Italy

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.62

The article addresses the widespread claim to make educational research more relevant for practitioners, policy makers, potential users and stakeholders, and proposes a problematisation of the notion of ‘useful knowledge’. The article illustrates the conceptual, instrumental and legitimative relevance of knowledge and highlights empirically the need to develop detailed descriptions of the local constructions of educational research to understand the non-linear dynamics and the multiple enactments of relevant/useful networks of educational research.

An Exploration of Differences in Mathematics Attainment among Immigrant Pupils in 18 OECD Countries

MARINA SHAPIRA School of Applied Social Science, University of Stirling, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.68

This article presents findings from a comparative study of sources of educational disadvantage of immigrant children across 18 OECD countries, which is based the data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The findings show that disadvantaged family background and lack of host-country-specific cultural capital account for a large part of the attainment gap between immigrants and their non-migrant peers. The findings also show that school characteristics in terms of their size, quality of teachers and educational resources contribute to the understanding of the further part of the immigrant performance gap. Moreover, school characteristics mediate between the immigrant students’ family characteristics and their attainment, by reinforcing or diminishing the impact of the family characteristics. Furthermore, the institutional characteristics of immigration countries, such as type of education provision, type of welfare provision and type of immigration policy, also play a part in producing and maintaining educational disadvantage of immigrant pupils, by affecting the attainment level and mediating between the individual- and school-level characteristics and pupils’ attainment. It was found that the first generation of immigrant children perform particularly well in countries with a liberal type of welfare regime, more standardised educational systems and more selective immigration policies; there was also some evidence that institutional factors shape educational attainment of the second generation of immigrant children in a way which more closely resembles that of the children from non-immigrant backgrounds – the former perform better in countries with a more inclusive (social-democratic) type of welfare provision, but also in countries with less differentiated and more standardised educational systems.

Socioeconomic Gradients in Eastern European Countries: evidence from PIRLS 2006

DANIEL H. CARO & PLAMEN MIRAZCHIYSKI International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement – Data Processing and Research Center, Hamburg, Germany

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.96

This article analyses educational inequalities related to socioeconomic status (SES) in 12 Eastern European countries that participated in the International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. Economies and educational systems of these countries have undergone critical transformations since the fall of communism. The authors’ analyses, using data collected almost 20 years after this period, help explain how these transformations affected the equity and quality of educational outcomes in the region. For each country, overall inequalities as well as inequalities between schools and within schools are estimated with regression models and represented graphically with socioeconomic gradient lines. A possible trade-off between equity and quality of outcomes is explored, identifying countries that have been relatively successful at attaining both educational goals. The extent to which the school SES explains achievement gaps between rural and urban schools is analysed. The results point to country groupings that are reasonably consistent with regional classifications of educational systems postulated in the literature.

Universities and Knowledge Production in Central Europe

MAREK KWIEK Centre for Public Policy Studies, Poznan University, Poland

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.111

The article discusses an East/West divide in Europe in university knowledge production. It argues that the communist and post-communist legacies in the four major Central European economies studied (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic) matter substantially for educational and research systems. The differences in university knowledge production may be bigger than expected, and the role of historical legacies may be more long term than generally assumed in both social sciences and public policy studies on the region. The gradual convergence of both higher education and research systems in two parts of Europe cannot be taken for granted without thoughtful changes in both university funding (both modes and levels) and governance. The article discusses links between knowledge production, economic competitiveness and regulatory and other environments in which both universities and knowledge-intensive companies operate. The role of factors other than higher education and innovation systems is substantially more important for competitiveness and growth in Central Europe than in affluent Western economies. The international visibility of universities as knowledge production centres is low and the analysis of the geography of knowledge production at the level of regions may indicate that Central Europe is in danger of being effectively cut off from the emergent European Research Area.

A Case Study of Parents’ School Choice Strategies in a Finnish Urban Context

JAANA POIKOLAINEN Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.127

This article analyses how Finnish parents of sixth graders in a comprehensive school act in the local ‘school markets’ of the case city. The parents’ subject positions as choosers are reflected on and explored in relation to the discourses and resources they use when discussing their school choices. The data were gathered in 2009 by administering a questionnaire (n = 374) and by conducting interviews with 76 of the respondents. The main data used here were thematic interviews, which were analysed using the discoursive approach. The analysis revealed that the parents used three different types of subject positions and discourses when having conversations about their choices and when considering their options. These discourses used were partly overlapping and unexpectedly social, and cultural resources were capitalised on less than previously assumed. Contrary to earlier European research on school choices, most parents in this study were not eager to choose any other school than their allocated local school, because they trusted the quality of Finnish comprehensive schools. The parents’ thoughts and actions were notably guided and governed by the local school authorities, according to whom the local school is good enough.

School Children’s Visualisations of Europe

RACHEL MASON, MARY RICHARDSON & FIONA M. COLLINS University of Roehampton, London, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2012.11.1.145

‘Images & Identity’ was a two-year curriculum development project in which citizenship and art educators in the Czech Republic, England, Ireland, Germany, Malta and Portugal collaborated on the production of teacher education materials. The article begins with a critical analysis of educational policy for European citizenship and of the potential contribution visual art and citizenship education might make to understanding what it means to be European. The main body of the article reports on a small-scale survey of school children’s visual representations of Europe carried out in advance of the curriculum development. This survey elicited received, recreated and created representations. Whereas many were totemic symbols of European identity downloaded from the Internet, a surprising number were personal artworks in which children explored and developed their personal feelings and ideas. This article describes and analyses the images the children selected, remixed and/or created, focusing on the subject matter, metaphorical meanings and interpretative themes. Findings about their orientation to European citizen identity were that it was dominated by physical and social perceptions, and whilst largely positive, these perceptions varied according to nationality, ethnicity and age.

© SYMPOSIUM JOURNALS Ltd
PO Box 204, Didcot, Oxford OX11 9ZQ, United Kingdom
info@symposium-journals.co.uk
www.symposium-journals.co.uk