Curios of the week #34

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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The week started in Perth where I presented at an researchED education conference. On the flight back, I had the rare privilege of an empty seat next to me. From 7D, I nodded knowingly at the bloke in 7F who nodded back. We were know forever united as the brotherhood of the spare seat. You have to savour these moments.

I stayed in The Vibe, a hotel in Subiaco, a suburb of Perth I haven’t visited before. It’s all low-rise bars and eateries. It seems strange to me that there is a time difference — three hours — between Perth and Ballarat. It speaks to the size of this country and is just enough to trouble the traveler, without causing jetlag.

This week’s Curios include a new hope, a neologism, a McGuffin, all sorts of behaviour and much more.

Blog post of the week

Old Andrew is finally moving on from WordPress to start his own Substack. I applaud this move. However, in the meantime, he has been writing about an extraordinarily bad example of education research.

Writing about a paper with a title that leaves no doubt about the authors’ views — Students’ experience of isolation room punishment in UK mainstream education. ‘I can’t put into words what you felt like, almost a dog in a cage’ — Old states:

“I know it’s nothing new to comment on the quality of education research, but every so often I find something that still scrapes the bottom of the barrel. This has pretty much all the flaws you could hope for. As well as a quotation in the title that would be more appropriate for a tabloid newspaper; statistics quoted from websites; citations that cannot be found, and a complete lack of objectivity…”

The point that Old would acknowledge is that this is probably not the worst example of educational research. I’m sure we could find many other papers with similar flaws. If education wishes to be taken seriously as a discipline then we need to become serious about our approach to scholarship.

Long read of the week

It is rare that we are treated to in-depth education journalism. The vast majority of articles are feel good stories about an inspirational teacher or school, or ‘school shaming’ stories about a school that enforces its rules on uniform and so on. The few Australian journalists who take education seriously and who write articles that enlighten the general reader on theories and evidence, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.