This book examines early modern Mito, today an ordinary provincial capital on the outskirts of the Tokyo commuter belt, but once the headquarters of Mito Domain, one of the most consequential places in all of Japan. As one of just three senior branches of the Tokugawa family—which ruled over Japan for 260 years—Mito’s ruling family enjoyed unparalleled status and exerted enormous influence throughout its history. In the seventeenth century, its scholars produced some of early modern Japan’...

Artist, Researcher, Teacher explores the relationship of three professional identities that often intersect in the lives of art practitioners, educators, and students.Challenging conventional wisdom about specialization and professional identity, Alan Thornton shows that many individuals have complex, varied, and evolving relationships with visual art—relationships that do not fit into any single category. Against the backdrop of an expanding research culture and current e...

Do the arts improve academic achievement? What does it mean to ‘teach’ art? What should the balance of classic and pop be in the music curriculum? Should we encourage young children on the stage? How do we judge whether what a child produces is good? How do we justify the arts in the curriculum? What should be the balance between form and content when teaching art?The arts in education inspire considerable commitment and passion. However, this is not always matched by clarity of un...

Since its first publication, Action Research: Principles and Practice has become a key text in its field. This new updated edition clearly describes and explains the practices of action research and its underlying values, and introduces important new ideas, including:all professionals should be reflective practitionersthey should produce their personal theories of practice to show how they are holding themselves accountable for their educational influences ...

In this book Julian Edge explores the construct of reflexivity in teacher education, differentiating it from, while locating it in, reflective practice.Reflexivity is the key concept underpinning a view of teacher education that binds together the orientations of action research and personal development in a way that establishes common ground, common purpose, and common experience between teachers and teacher educators.Augmenting the field in important ways, The Reflexi...

As interest grows in theories of lifelong learning not only across society but also as an area of serious academic study, the need has arisen for a thorough and critical study of the phenomenon. This distillation of the work of renowned writer Peter Jarvis addresses this need, looking at the processes involved in human learning from birth to old age and moving the field on from previous unsystematic and mainly psychological studies. Instead, Jarvis argues that learning is existential, and ...

In Management Research the authors provide a stimulating and critical overview of the key theoretical debates on research paradigms and methodologies, demystifying the process and providing invaluable insights into the politics and practice of research.Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ‘Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap’ series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on it...

Practice-led research is a burgeoning area across the creative arts, with studio informed doctorates frequently favoured over traditional approaches to research. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry is specifically designed as a training tool and is structured on the model used by most research programmes. A comprehensive introduction lays out the book's framework and individual chapters provide concrete examples of studio-based research in art, film and video...

This is a companion volume to the editors’ Insights into Teachers’ Thinking and Practice (Falmer Press, 1999) and seeks to carry the discussion on further illustrating that there is a continuing intensity of thought, activity and debate on how to conceptualise research on teacher thinking, and thus generate knowledge for further understanding and action. The ethical questions on undertaking research on the inner lives of teachers remain unresolved.The international team present cha...

Governments around the world spend millions on art and cultural institutions, evidence of a basic human need for what the author refers to as 'creating aesthetic significance.' Yet what function or purpose does art satisfy in today’s society? In this thorough and accessible text, Hickman rejects the current vogue for social and cultural accounts of the nature of art-making in favor of a largely psychological approach aimed at addressing contemporary developmental issues in art education. B...

This sane and insightful discussion explores the nature of identity in late modern societies to criticize the way in which psychotherapy has become an ideology of late modernity and to emphasize the importance of `negative' messages in psychoanalytic theory.

Using Narrative in Research by Christine Bold provides an accessible, easy-to-understand guide to the theory and practice of the use of narrative in research. Written with those new to narrative in mind, this book will enable readers to understand the origins of narrative traditions and to plan and carry out a narrative study of their own.Christine Bold′s book examines narrative approaches across a range of research contexts and disciplinary boundaries and will be of equal value to...