School of Education Research Blog

Philosophy of Education Society, Oxford Branch Meeting Educational Purposes, Ethics and Beliefs Research Group, School of Education, Oxford Brookes University Tuesday 28th May, 5pm – 6.30 pm Board Room B1/10, Harcourt Hill Campus OX2 9AT Exposed in Time: realism and judgement in the education of teachers Professor Paul Standish (Institute of Education) The purpose of this discussion is to examine ways in which aspects of the experience of teaching, particularly for the novice teacher, tend not to be adequately acknowledged. This is the case both in initial teacher education and in the ongoing experience of teachers in schools and other institutions. Put simply, the nub of this experience is that the teacher in the classroom is exposed – exposed to the class in circumstances that are dynamic and in part unpredictable, and exposed in relation to what is taught. Realism demands that we take this more seriously, and doing so, it turns out, enables us to see better the importance o...

5th International Conference in association with CAPRI, the internationalisation stream of the Centre for Social and Educational Research across the Life course (SERL) Hosted by Centre for Curriculum Internationalisation (CCI) Date:  Friday 7 June and Saturday 8 June 2013. Venue:  Harcourt Hill Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford. Early bird rates apply until 3 May 2013, normal rates from 4 May 2013. We see this conference as a shared adventure that will allow us all to come out of it with something that matters. For this reason there are deliberately few papers, all offering quite unconventional and challenging perspectives on global citizenship and internationalisation. The purpose of this is to provide intellectual space to articulate participants’ voices – their perspectives, issues, concerns and ideas – within the context of local institutions, communities and wider social, economic and historical forces. A distinctive feature of the conference is therefore c...

Ivan Mitchel (Dept. of Business & Management) & Math Noortmann (dept. of Social Sciences & School of Law) Wednesday May 8th, 2013, 12-1.30pm  Room E212 at Wheatley Campus. How should we make sense of the way the social world is? How should we consider how the social world should be? Since the mid-twentieth century, the debate around the ontological status of the social world and what we can know about it has continued to garner significant attention in social science and management studies. However, until fairly recently this debate has predominantly been focused on the competing paradigms of ‘empirical realism’ and a range of perspectives which might loosely be termed as ‘postmodernism’. In this seminar, therefore, we invite people to contemplate the value of an alternative philosophy that is concerned with deeper conceptualisations of ‘reality’ and being ‘critical’ – namely, ‘critical realism’. We will introduce and contextualise the main tenets of the philosophy a...