Active learning is a pedagogical construct widely appealed to within the global discourse of lifelong learning. However, an examination of the literature reveals a lack of clarity and consensus as to its meaning. This paper provides a critical analysis of a range of dimensions underpinning the concept of active learning including policy discourses, definitions, interpretation and enactments in educational settings, and resultant pedagogical implications. A more robust theoretical framework is presented to support educator understanding which synthesises and extends current constructs and which bridges the divide between active learning considered as either theory of learning or pedagogical strategy.

Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics – both data and algorithms – are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about learning and learners – and indeed the tendency not to theorize learning explicitly – that underpin such implementations. Finally, we describe an attempt to devise our own analytics, grounded in a sociomaterial conception of learning. We use the data obtained to suggest that the relationships between learning and the digital traces left by participants in online learning are far from trivial, and that any analytics that relies on these as proxies for learning tends towards a behaviorist evaluation of learning processes

Purpose – In recent years, there has been considerable interest within education policy in collaborative professional enquiry/inquiry methodologies, both as an alternative to top-down implementation of change and for the purpose of fostering educational improvement. However, researchers have been critical of this approach, pointing to various concerns: these include the risk of reducing a developmental methodology to an instrumental means for delivering policy, as well as issues around sustainability of practices. The purpose of this paper is to describe a Scottish university/local authority partnership, which developed an approach entitled Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry, designed to address some of these concerns. The paper also reports on empirical outcomes related to the partnership project. Design/methodology/approach – This interpretivist study generated qualitative data from multiple sources, utilising a range of methods including semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders, evaluation surveys and analysis of artefacts developed during the inquiry phases of the project. Findings – This programme exerted a powerful effect on the teachers who participated. The research suggests that teachers developed better understandings of the curriculum, and of curriculum development processes. There is evidence of innovation in pedagogy, some sustained and radical in nature, and further evidence of changes to the cultures of the participating schools, for example, a shift towards more democratic ways of working. Originality/value – This paper reports upon an original approach to curriculum development, with considerable potential to transform the ways in which schools approach innovation.

This paper offers a new way of exploring some of the complexities inherent in attempts by policy makers and others to promote educational change. The focus of this study is on the current drive in education policy to alter the basis of teacher professionalism through the application of principles of lifelong learning to teachers’ professional development. Drawing upon data from two studies of the Chartered Teacher initiative in Scotland the paper examines the formation of successive transmission points as material relays of relations during the process of implementing this policy objective. It explores how three key discursive elements of a professional standard for accomplished teaching: collaborative action, critical reflection and enquiry, and teacher leadership, were progressively recontextualised during the introduction of Chartered Teacher status in schools. The findings indicate some of the conceptual and political struggles involved at the critical junctures where policy implementation requires the movement of a discourse from one social context to another. The paper suggests that a discursive analysis of how a centrally mandated initiative is transmitted can help to promote an understanding of the complexities of this process and increase critical awareness of the issues at stake for those involved

Recent constructions view leadership as a process of social influence which coordinates processes of change. Moreover, such processes are not necessarily linked to role hierarchy but may be emergent and distributed within teams. However, the micro-processes through which this occurs are not well understood. The significance of the paper lies in its contribution to an understanding of the emergence of leadership in teams, and in particular how humour and laughter are drawn on as a resource by which to exert social influence.Here, we use the construct of the play frame, 'non serious' talk in which participants jointly construct extended humorous sequences as improvisations, to analyse how team members manoeuvre in order to accomplish influence, decision-making and leadership. In taking this approach we are not concerned with considerations of how managers use jokes to exercise control, or workers use humour to subvert management. Rather, we examine how humour, and particularly the laughter it engenders, can contribute to an understanding of organizations as centred on communication and founded on the precept that organizations are 'talked into being'. Here we show how talk in a play frame institutes a context which can be utilised by participants to exert influence and we demonstrate the highly contingent and contextual nature of the emergence of leadership within teams.