Tackling food waste on campus through a design-based approach

By IOE Blog Editor, on 3 October 2024

Credit: gpointstudio via Adobe Stock

By Andrea Gauthier, Mina Vasalou, Yang Yang and Team FoodWiser: Sanya Bajaj, Enying Chen, Xinyue Dong, Thi Huyen Mi Nguyen on 3 October 2024

As the new academic year begins, we reflect on our ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2024 the student team ‘FoodWiser’ worked with UCL’s caterer, Gather and Gather, to develop a new digital tool for tackling food waste in the UCL halls of residence cafeteria. Food waste isn’t just an annoying problem of dealing with leftovers: each discarded plate of food means wasted resources and unnecessarily inflated greenhouse gases. Read the rest of this entry »

School education needs major surgery too

By IOE Blog Editor, on 24 September 2024

Credit: WavebreakMediaMicro via Adobe Stock.

By John White on 24 September 2024

‘Major surgery, not sticking plasters.’ What Keir Starmer said recently about NHS reforms applies also to school education in England. For nearly 40 years we have been blighted by a National Curriculum whose main rationale is as the central pillar of a selective system as indefensible as the eugenics-based binary system of the post-war years but all the more effective for being less visible. Read the rest of this entry »

EdTech. A solution looking for a problem?

By IOE Blog Editor, on 17 September 2024

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By Wayne Holmes on 17 September 2024

This commentary is adapted from Wayne’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, More or less technology in the classroom – the value and purposes of technology use in schools. Watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Technologies have long been designed for use in education. However, the ‘potential’ of this EdTech, especially AI-enabled EdTech, has been frequently overstated and its limitations underexplored. In any case, while EdTech offers ‘solutions’ to a variety of educational problems, not only do they rarely actually ‘solve’ the problems that they target, it isn’t even clear whether they are the ‘right’ problems in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

The death of ‘differentiation’ and why it matters for inclusion

By IOE Blog Editor, on 10 September 2024

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By Joseph Mintz on 10 September 2024

Government policy for the schools system in England has moved away from using the term ‘differentiation’, replacing it with what they have called ‘adaptive teaching’. This is an idiosyncratic term in this context, and it seems that by adaptive teaching the Government means to refer to an emphasis on direct instruction and mastery learning. I argue here that this shift risks the individual learning needs of children with special educational needs being ignored, and that this has not been given enough attention in policy, practice or teacher education. Read the rest of this entry »

How do we know what young children think about their playtime outdoors?

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 6 August 2024

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By Emily Ranken on 6 August 2024

At a time when one in ten primary school-age children is thought to have a probable mental health disorder, there are related concerns that opportunities for young children to engage in outdoor play and physical activity are declining, to the detriment of their mental as well as physical wellbeing. If we are to design effective interventions to address these problems, we need measures that take into account children’s own views. Unable to find an existing example of such a tool, we have created our own. We hope this new means of capturing young children’s feedback on the immediate wellbeing impacts of play interventions will be of wider utility to projects aiming to improve outcomes for children. We are keen to hear from people interested in developing the tool and related measures. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence, Sapience and Learning, part 3 – Testing for intelligence

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 26 July 2024

By David Scott and Sandra Leaton Gray on 26 July 2024

This blog post is Part 3 of a series relating to our newly published book: Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices.

Credit: Metamorworks via Adobe.

A number of claims about human intelligence are made by the neurobiological community. The first of these is that the brains of some people seem to be more efficient than those of other people. In addition, a claim is made that specific genes have been identified which generate cellular properties associated with intelligence. These cellular properties have been found to be more in abundance in people who have been shown to be more intelligent. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence, Sapience and Learning, part 2: Dark Science – the deathly (mal)practice of Francis Galton and Cyril Burt

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 25 July 2024

By Sandra Leaton Gray and David Scott on 25 July 2024

This blog post is Part 2 of a series relating to our newly published book: Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices.

Sir Francis Galton in 1912 (left) and Sir Cyril Burt (right). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971) were two pioneers of differential psychology who had close connections to UCL and IOE respectively. They worked at a time when a theistic philosophy in education was on the decline, and the new discipline of Psychology was in the ascendancy. The lives of Galton and Burt provide us with a cautionary tale about the dangers of working unchallenged in the field of science, with little accountability. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence, Sapience and Learning, part 1: making sense of our world

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 24 July 2024

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By David Scott and Sandra Leaton Gray on 24 July 2024

We have just published a book about some key educational concepts, with the title: Intelligence, Sapience and Learning: Concepts, Framings and Practices. These concepts are a central consideration for educators at IOE or at least we feel that they should be. In a companionate book – Women Curriculum Theorists: Power, Knowledge and Subjectivity – we looked in a similar way at the relations and connections between the concepts and practices of ‘woman’, ‘learning’ and ‘curriculum’. Social categories of gender, race, religion, dis-ability, sexuality and class are other examples of key life-defining concepts. Our new book seeks to shed light on the workings of these social categories because a proper examination of them is an essential starting point for understanding how the world and objects in that world are arranged and ordered. Read the rest of this entry »

Changing the narrative on youth violence and knife crime: turning evidence from young people into policy change

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 19 July 2024

The Knife Angel sculpture, made from over 100,000 seized blades. Photo credit: Ian Livesey.

By Rachel Seabrook on 19 July 2024

Throughout the Labour Party’s 2024 general election campaign, tackling antisocial behaviour and youth violence were central themes. Amongst other commitments, Labour pledged to put 13,000 more neighbourhood police and community support officers on the beat and crack down on knife crime, including by introducing mandatory action plans for young people carrying knives, and bringing in tougher sanctions for the possession and sale of machetes, zombie knives and swords. Read the rest of this entry »

Teacher education, research and practice: addressing the recruitment and retention crisis through the reassertion of professional judgement

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 9 July 2024

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By John Yandell on 9 July 2024

This commentary is adapted from John’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, ‘Education after the election: Priorities for change’, which you can watch back, along with commentaries from speakers covering early years, schools, skills and higher education.

There is a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention in England. This is a long-term problem and there is no sign of it abating, or of any of the measures taken by the last government having had a long-term, meaningful impact in addressing it. In the current year, there is a significant projected under-recruitment of teachers in the primary sector and in the majority of secondary subject areas. Meanwhile, teacher attrition rates have risen back up to pre-pandemic levels. And there is worrying evidence that teaching has become less attractive because it conspicuously lacks the flexible working patterns that are available to graduates in most comparable jobs. Read the rest of this entry »