Forthcoming Education Research Seminars

The research clusters at the School of Education hold regular research seminars often featuring guest speakers of national and international significance.

This page features details of forthcoming seminars. If you would like to attend please use the contact details at the end of the page to get in touch.

The Education for Social Inclusion and Social Justice Cluster

The Global Economy, Race and Education

A Presentation by Professor Sally Tomlinson

• Date: Monday 21 June 2010
• Time: 1.00-2.00pm
• Room: WN110

Policy-makers around the world have assigned education a major role in improving the competitiveness of their national economies, although the role of national governments in planning their own systems remains important.

However the classic liberal assumption that education is an investment that increases returns in the labour market can now be seen as over-optimistic in situations where labour markets can disappear as capital moves, leaving what Beck (1997) described as 'jobless capital'.

The winners and losers in a globalised world are becoming more apparent on national and international levels. In developed countries with long established racial and ethnic minorities and more recent economic migrants, struggles for economic equality and social justice have taken on new dimensions.

The situation in England illustrates the effects of market policies in education, especially the creation of hierarchies of schools and universities on minorities. Despite high aspiration and some success, a 'majority of minorities' are still among school lower achievers, more likely subsequently to be in vocational programmes, and less likely to obtain higher credentials attractive to potential employers. In addition the 'ethnic penalty' described by Heath and McMahon (1997) still operates, as employers still discriminate between equally qualified applicants.

About Professor Tomlinson

Professor Sally Tomlinson taught for four years at what was then the West Midland College of Higher Education at Gorway Road, Walsall (now the University of Wolverhampton) and developed the first course there on “Teaching Immigrant Children".

Subsequently working at the Universities of Lancaster, and Goldsmiths College London University, and as a Senior Research Fellow in the Education Department, University of Oxford.

She has continued to teach, research and publish in the areas of race, ethnicity and education policy, and to try to understand the way mechanisms of exclusion work, despite a rhetoric of inclusion.

Her recent book, "Race and Education in Britain: Policy and Politics" (2008) Open University Press/McGraw-Hill), documents the contradictions and challenges facing educators in a multicultural society over the past forty years, and the current political and media denigration of the notion of multiculturalism and the search for community cohesion.

The Education for Social Inclusion and Social Justice Cluster

The Future of Educational Research: In Theory

A Presentation by Professor Ian Stronach Liverpool John Moores University

• Wednesday 30 June 2010
• 12.00-1.00pm
• Room WN101

The future of educational research will be examined from two rather different perspectives. Firstly, the problematic nature of the ‘knowledge economy’ will be considered in the light of the ‘Credit Crunch’. Secondly, the notions with which we are beginning to use research, in order to posit realities in the postmodern, will be considered. What new concepts? What new theories? What new possibilities?

Prof Ian Stronach is Professor of Educational Research at Liverpool John Moores University, having previously been Research Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, and at Stirling University. Recent publications include ‘Don’t touch. The educational story of a panic’ (with H. Piper, 2008), and Globalizing education, educating the local. How method made us mad’ (2010). He has interests in research methodologies and theories – often from a postmodernist perspective. He is a former Editor of the British Educational Research Journal (1995-2007).

Book Launch Seminar

The Oppositional Culture Theory by Paul C Mocombe and Carol Tomlin

• Monday 5 July 2010
• 3.00-5.00pm
• Room WP015

Mocombe and Tomlin explore the black/white achievement gap in America and Great Britain, gaining understanding through black bourgeois living and the labeled pathologies of the black underclass. Within the class dualism of capitalist social relations, blacks throughout the Diaspora attempt to exist in the world. Furthermore, blacks must construct their identities and be in the world by choosing between the discursive practices of the Protestant and capitalist ideology of the black Protestant bourgeoisie, or the beliefs of the black underclass, which appear to dismiss these practices as "acting-white" (John Ogbu's term).

Presently, the practical consciousness (constituted as hip-hop culture) of the black underclass, supported by finance capital, have dominated the American and global social structure, and one of its (dys)functions is the black/white achievement gap, which is a global phenomenon emanating from black America and affecting blacks around the globe. Although the histories of blacks in America and in Great Britain are fundamentally different, Mocombe and Tomlin argue in this work that during the age of globalization, the social functions of the dominating black consciousness (hip-hop culture) coming out of America are the locus of causality for the black/white achievement gap in America and Great Britain. Tomlin highlights this problematic by analyzing effective strategies employed by high achieving blacks in Great Britain, and Mocombe does the same through an analysis of an effective reading curriculum in an American inner-city after-school program.

To book your place please contact Julie Richmond-Lunn on 01902 32 3006.