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This article draws on recent research (2017–20) into the livelihoods and imagined futures of rural youth in four communities in southern Nigeria. The research involved observations, sex-segregated focus group discussions and individual interviews. Taking up insights from sociologists of education and work, our analysis shows how rural youth simultaneously navigated schooling, farming, low-paid vocational work and family obligations in ways that were highly gendered. We show the gulf between youth's daily lives and their imagined futures, and how their desires for better lives, whether through 'white-collar' work or expanded farming activities, often involved moving to more 'civilised' or 'developed' contexts. Commitment to family nevertheless ran through youth's narratives, in ways that reflected a deeply gendered, sexual economy. We conclude by highlighting the relevance of a connected sociology that embraces postcolonial and feminist scholarship to advance future studies of rural youth, gender and work in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A central finding was that gender is not a category of analysis in higher education policy, research or statistical data in the region. Our interview data suggest that leadership was frequently not an object of desire for women. Being associated with particular types of masculinities, leadership often carried a heavy affective load for those women who transgressed patriarchal socio-cultural norms and disrupted the symbolic order of women being led by men. Leadership was frequently perceived and experienced by women in terms of navigating a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on empirical research on youth as active citizens in Senegal with specific reference to their education and their sexual and reproductive health rights. In a context of postcoloniality which claims to have privileged secular, republican understandings of the constitution, the authors seek to illuminate how youth activists sustain patriarchal, metropolitan views of citizenship and reinforce ethnic and locational (urban/rural) hierarchies. Their analysis is based on a case study of active youth citizenship, as reflected in youth engagement in the recent presidential elections in Senegal. This included involvement in youth protests against pre-election constitutional abuse and in a project monitoring the subsequent elections using digital technologies. The authors compare how youth activists enacted different notions of citizenship, in some instances involving a vigorous defence of Senegal's democratic constitution, while in others dismissing this as being irrelevant to youth concerns. Here the authors make an analytic distinction between youth engagement in politics, seen as the public sphere of constitutional democracy, and the political, which they relate to the inherently conflictual and agonistic processes through which (youth) identities are policed, in ways which may legitimate or marginalise. Despite the frequent construction of youth as being agents of change, this analysis shows how potentially productive and open spaces for active citizenship were drawn towards conformity and the reproduction of existing hegemonies, in particular through patriarchal gender relations and sexual norms within which female youth remained particularly vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positioning of theory in relation to educational practice has provoked much recent debate, with some arguing that educational theory constrains thinking in education, while others dismiss 'theory' out of hand as belonging to the world of the 'academic', abstracted from the 'realities' of the classroom. This paper views theory as necessarily implicated in all practices, but argues that depending on the theories embraced, and the understanding of theory itself, education can be understood in very different ways. Resisting the separation of theory from practice, the paper takes up the call to consider the entanglement of theory with practice, or how theory matters. It takes formative assessment as a particularly fertile case for this discussion. Formative assessment has been considerably developed in schooling across different national education systems. Its aspiration is for assessment to support learning, rather than only to credentialise learning. Having first emerged as a concept when behaviourism held sway, it has been considered through different theoretical lenses. Drawing upon empirical studies of classroom assessment practices, the paper draws out the different 'mattering' implicated in the different languages of assessment used by practitioners, raising questions about the practices this produced. The paper concludes by asking if formative assessment could become 'educational' in a more radical sense, if opportunities to focus on the contingencies and politics of our meaning-making were sometimes taken up more openly and dialogically with students, as opposed to formative assessment sitting in a instrumental relationship to a given curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to recent UK proposals on measuring and recording student achievement (Universities UK 2007) to highlight issues that are relevant across different higher education contexts, which are increasingly intertwined through the expansion of the Bologna process. Drawing from wide-ranging literature on assessment and sociology, this paper argues that the introduction of new assessment technologies cannot be seen from a purely technical perspective but instead requires a deeper appreciation of assessment as a social practice, which contributes powerfully to the construction of learner subjectivities in ways that are not necessarily benign. Although not suggesting this leads to any easy solutions, the concept of 'meta-social' awareness may be useful in better supporting a diverse student body in confronting the complexities of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if knowledge is a form of doing, an engagement between a knowing subject and what is known? What if learning is a contextualised performance involving students engaging with prospective and current social identities, and therefore an ontological as well as an epistemological accomplishment? What then becomes of formative assessment within different disciplinary pedagogies? In this paper, we open up the possibility of formative assessment as encompassing a disciplinary meta-discourse within the context of teaching as response. We draw on data from a postgraduate context to illustrate how the identities of teachers and learners may be brought into play. Formative assessment is seen to involve movement across a concrete-procedural-reflective-discursive-existential continuum, and between the convergent and divergent. We suggest that by asserting the centrality of disciplinary knowledge and identities, the frameworks presented may be used heuristically to entice academics into thinking more specifically and organically about pedagogies which are more appropriate to the changing nature of twenty-first-century higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a small-scale in-depth research study investigating formative assessment enacted and theorised from a sociocultural perspective within a part-time Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme in an English university. Going beyond its conventional conceptualisation within psychological and motivational frameworks, formative assessment here encouraged students to view their learning as entailing the development of identities as researchers. The research adopted a case study approach, drawing upon participant observation, discourse analysis of online discussion forum and email feedback, and two series of student interviews. Although the practice of formative assessment remains problematic, students' responses suggest the value of tutor feedback, including its ontological dimension. Given the wide-ranging backgrounds of the learners who participated in this study, our findings suggest the relevance of a sociocultural view of formative assessment for supporting a more diverse doctoral student population. This leads us to argue for doctoral supervision to be conceptualised more firmly as a pedagogic relation in which formative assessment has a key role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on empirical research into formative assessment conducted in a blended learning environment within a professional doctorate in education (EdD.) programme in an English university, focusing primarily on peer discussion forum activity. This was conceptualised within sociocultural learning theories, where learning entails processes of identity formation. The data presented suggests the usefulness of online environments for supporting students' development of subject positions as researchers, thereby constructing new relations between peers, as well as tutors and students, in addition to providing shared textual resources upon which the tutor's feedback can then build. The paper discusses how this might contribute towards more collective forms of doctoral supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]