The post ‘The best time to be alive’ explains edtech entrepreneur appeared first on The PIE News.
Tag: time
-
6 steps to transforming parent engagement, one message at a time
Key points:
When you open the doors to a brand-new school, you’re not just filling classrooms, you’re building a community from the ground up. In August 2023, I opened our Pre-K through 4th grade school in Charlotte, North Carolina, to alleviate overcrowding at several East Charlotte campuses. As the founding principal, I knew that fostering trust and engagement with families was as essential as hiring great teachers or setting academic goals.
Many of our students were transitioning from nearby schools, and their families were navigating uncertainty and change. My top priority was to create a strong home-school connection from the very beginning–one rooted in transparency, inclusivity, and consistent communication, where every parent feels like a valued partner in our new school’s success. Since then, we’ve added 5th grade and continue to grow our enrollment as we shape the identity of our school community.
Up until two years ago, our district was primarily using a legacy platform for our school-to-home communication. It was incredibly limiting, and I didn’t like using it. The district then switched to a new solution, which helped us easily reach out to families (whose children were enrolling at the new elementary school) with real-time alerts and two-way messaging.
The difference between the two systems was immediately obvious and proved to be a natural transition for me. This allowed us to take a direct, systematic, and friendlier approach to our school-home communications as we implemented the new system.
Building strong home-school bonds
Here are the steps we took to ensure a smooth adoption process, and some of the primary ways we use the platform:
- Get everyone on board from the start. We used comprehensive outreach with families through flyers, posters, and dedicated communication at open-house events. At the same time, our teachers were easily rostered–a process simplified by a seamless integration with our student information system–and received the necessary training on the platform.
- Introduce the new technology as a “familiar tool.” We framed our ParentSquare tool as a “closed social media network” for school-home communication. This eased user adoption and demystified the technology by connecting it to existing social habits. Our staff emphasized that if users could communicate socially online, they could also easily use the platform for school-related interactions.
- Promote equity with automatic translation. With a student population that’s about 50 percent Hispanic and with roughly 22 different languages represented across the board, we were very interested in our new platform’s automatic translation capabilities (which currently span more than 190 languages). Having this process automated has vastly reduced the amount of time and number of headaches involved with creating and sharing newsletters and other materials with parents.
- Streamline tasks and reduce waste. I encourage staff to create their newsletters in the communications platform versus reverting to PDFs, paper, or other formats for information-sharing. That way, the platform can manage the automatic translation and promote effective engagement with families. This is an equity issue that we have to continue working on both in our school and our district as a whole. It’s about making sure that all parents have access to the same information regardless of their native language.
- Centralize proof of delivery. We really like having the communication delivery statistics, which staff can use to confirm message receipt–a crucial feature when parents claim they didn’t receive information. The platform shows when a message was received, providing clear confirmation that traditional paper handouts can’t match. Having one place where all of those communications can be sent, seen, and delivered is extremely helpful.
- Manage events and boost engagement. The platform keeps us organized, and we especially like the calendar and post functions (and use both a lot). Being able to sort specific groups is great. We use that feature to plan events like staggered kindergarten entry and separate open houses; it helps us target communications precisely. For a recent fifth-grade promotion ceremony, for example, we managed RSVPs and volunteer sign-ups directly through the communications platform, rather than using an external tool like Sign-Up Genius.
Modernizing school-family outreach
We always want to make it easy for families to receive, consume, and respond to our messages, and our new communications platform helps us achieve that goal. Parents appreciate receiving notifications via email, app, voice, or text–a method we use a lot for sending out reminders.
This direct communication is particularly impactful given our diverse student population, with families speaking many different languages. Teachers no longer need third-party translation sites or manual cut-and-paste methods because the platform handles automatic translation seamlessly. It’s helped us foster deeper family engagement and bridge communication gaps we otherwise couldn’t–it’s really amazing to see.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
Teaching Critiques in an Unsettled Political Time (opinion)
As a university professor, I recently found myself in an awkward spot. I teach a large survey course called Introduction to Cultural Anthropology that enrolls some 350 students. As part of the course, I usually spend one class period every semester lecturing on the anthropology of development. This is a field in which the dominant strains have involved critiquing development projects, most frequently for two sorts of reasons: either for ignoring local cultural practices and priorities, or for exacerbating the very things that development projects are meant to ameliorate.
In the spring semester of 2025, after I had already finalized and posted the course syllabus, something unprecedented happened in the United States: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was dismantled by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). From the standpoint of the standard critiques of development, some of the rationales the Trump administration provided for this unprecedented move were eerily familiar. “Musk and the Right Co-Opt the Left’s Critique of U.S. Power,” The New York Times proclaimed.
Development isn’t the only topic on which such a critique of power has suddenly shifted politically. Science, another topic on which I spend some class sessions, is similarly fraught. For a long time, many researchers in the anthropology of science argued that the values and beliefs of scientists shape the sciences. The attacks on scientific authority that began during President Trump’s first term and have intensified since amplify these very same sorts of arguments. So how do we broach these topics today, as university professors?
In pondering this question in the context of my own class, I came to view the common refrain that the right is “coopting” or “appropriating” the critiques made by the left with some curiosity and a bit of suspicion. Both of these terms carry some connotations of misuse and bad faith. Don’t get me wrong: There certainly is truth to the view that some Republican politicians in the United States have recently lifted and re-deployed arguments simply because they justify a desired end (and achieve a little trolling as an added benefit). But, educationally, “appropriation” in this context is not always a useful refrain. It sidesteps the arguments themselves by drawing pre-determined boundaries around their fair use.
Further, the view that these migrating arguments are cases of “cooptation” does not always stand up to historical scrutiny. Take, for example, questions concerning the power vested in experts. Today, the right is waging more of a battle against experts and the institutions that house them than the left. This battle is undergirded by several arguments, including claims of insufficient “viewpoint diversity” and elite capture, themselves logics that have migrated.
This battle against experts is most vociferously waged in the name of a populist view: that the people know what’s best for them. A couple of decades ago, the left was more invested in critiquing the ways that expertise was used to exert control over people who understood their own circumstances and their own needs better than many experts.
But before that, a similar argument sat at the core of the neoliberal right. The famed neoliberal theorist Friedrich von Hayek made this sort of argument against expertise as part of his case for unfettered markets, which, he argued, aggregated and responded to the locally informed decisions of large numbers of individuals better than any expert ever could. It’s also a mistake to think about the migration of these ideas in terms of a stable divide between left and right: MAGA has instilled in the “right” in the guise of the current Republican party a new hostility toward the free market while the “left” of today’s Democratic party has embraced elements of neoliberalism.
Instead of simple “appropriation,” the migration of arguments across an array of worldviews should be interpreted as zones of agreement where the depth of that agreement—superficial or comprehensive?—has to be scrutinized. Why and how are different implications drawn from these zones? This entails continuing to think about and teach these critical perspectives rather than shying away from them for fear of exacerbating the attacks they now authorize.
Ultimately, recognizing that similar critiques cross-pollinate with disparate ideological positions is an invitation to engage even more deeply with the substance of these arguments, both in the classroom and beyond.
-
The disagreements on REF cannot go on forever – it may be time for a compromise
The submission deadline for REF is autumn 2028. It is not very far away and there are still live debates on significant parts of the exercise without an obvious way forward in sight.
As the Contributions to Knowledge and Understanding guidance makes clear there are still significant areas where guidance is being awaited. The People, Culture and Environment (PCE) criteria and definitions will be published in autumn this year. Undoubtedly, this will kick off rounds of further debate on REF and its purposes. It feels like there is a lot left to do with not much time left to do it in.
Compromise
The four UK higher education funding bodies could take a view that the levels of disquiet in the sector about REF, and what I am hearing at the events I go to and from the people I speak to it does seem significant, will eventually dissipate as the business of REF gets underway.
This now seems unlikely. It is clear that there are increasingly entrenched views on the workability or not of the new portability measures, and there is still the ongoing debate on the extent to which research culture can be measured. Research England has sought to take the sector toward ends which have broad support, improving the diversity and conditions of research, but there is much less consensus on how to get there.
The consequences for continuing as is are unpredictable but they are potentially significant. At the most practical level the people working on REF only have so much resource and bandwidth. The debate about the future of REF will not go away as more guidance is released, in fact the debate is likely to intensify, and getting to submission where there is still significant disagreement will drain resources and time.
The debate also crowds out the other work that is going on in research. All the while that the future of REF is being debated it is time taken away from all of the funding which is not allocated through REF, all of the problems with research that do not stem from this quinquennial exercise, and the myriad of other research issues that sit beyond the sector’s big research audit. The REF looms large in the imagination of the sector but the current impasse is eclipsing much else.
If the government believes that REF does not have broad support from the sector it could intervene. It is faulty to assume that the REF is an inevitable part of the research landscape. As Chancellor, Gordon Brown attempted to axe its predecessor on the basis that it had become too burdensome. Former advisor to the Prime Minister Dominic Cummings also wished to bin the REF. UCU opposed REF 2014. Think Tank UK Day One also published a well shared paper on the argument for scrapping the current REF.
The REF has survived because of lack of better alternatives, its skilful management, and its broad if not sometimes qualified support. The moment the political pain of REF outweighs its perceived research benefits it will be ripe for scrapping by a government committed to reducing costs and reducing the research burden.
The future
The premise of the new REF is that research is a team sport and the efforts of the team that create the research should be measured and therefore rewarded. The corollary of identifying research as a product of a unit rather than an individual is that the players, in this case researchers and university staff, have had their skills unduly diminished, hidden, or otherwise not accounted for because of pervasive biases in the research landscape.
It is impossible to argue that by any reasonable measure there aren’t significant issues with equality in research. This impacts the lives and career prospects of researchers and the UK economy as whole. It would be an issue for any serious research funder to back away from work that seeks to improve the diversity of research.
It is in this light where perhaps the biggest risk of all lies for Research England. If it pushes on with the metrics and measures it currently has and the result of REF is seen as unfair or structurally unsound it will do irreversible harm to the wider culture agenda. The idea of measuring people, culture, and environment will be put into the “too hard to do” box.
This work is too important to be done quickly but the urgency of the challenge cannot be dropped. It is an unenviable position to be in.
REF 2030?
If a conclusion is reached that it is not feasible to carry the sector toward a new REF in time for 2029 there only seems to be one route forward which is to return to a system more like 2021. This is not because the system was perfect (albeit it was generally seen as a good exercise) but because it would be unfeasible to carry out further system changes at this stage. Pushing the exercise back to 2030 would mean allocating funding from an exercise completed almost a decade prior. It seems untenable to do so because of how much institutions will have changed in this period.
The work going on to measure PCE is not only helpful in the context of REF but alongside work coming out of the Metascience Unit and UKRI centrally, among others, part of the way in which the sector can be supported to measure and build a better research culture and environment. This work within the pilots is of such importance that it would make sense to stand these groups up over a long time period with a view to building to the next exercise, while improving practice within universities more generally on an ongoing basis.
As I wrote back in 2023 complexity in REF is worthwhile where it enhances university research. The complexity has now become the crux of the debate. If Research England reaches the conclusion that the cost and complexity of the desired future outstrips the capacity and knowledge of the present, the opportunity is to pause, pilot, learn, improve, and go again.
Tactical compromise for now – with the explicit intention of taking time to agree a strategic direction on research as more of a shared and less of an individual endeavour – is possible. To do so it will require making the political and practical case for a different future (as well as the moral one) ever more explicit, explaining the trade-offs it will involve, and crucially building a consensus on how that future will be funded and measured. Next year is a decade on from the Stern Review; perhaps it is time for another independent review of REF.
A better future for research is possible but only where the government, funders, institutions, and researchers are aligned.
-
Confidence in higher education increases for the first time in a decade
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.Dive Brief:
- Americans’ confidence in higher education has increased for the first time in a decade, according to research released Wednesday by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation.
- Among those surveyed, 42% of adults expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the sector, compared with 36% in 2023 and 2024. The percentage of respondents with little to no confidence declined from 32% last year to 23% in 2025.
- However, the share of adults with high confidence in higher education is still well below 57%, the share who held those views when Gallup first posed the question in 2015.
Dive Insight:
Along with breaking a decadelong trend, Wednesday’s findings are noteworthy because they come amid increasing conservative attacks on the sector and continued questioning of the value of college.
Researchers polled just over 1,400 adults via phone from June 2 to 26.
When asked to explain their responses, 30% of participants confident in higher education pointed to the value of being educated. And 24% said colleges provide good training, with some respondents citing learning to think for oneself and others citing the ability to appreciate different viewpoints.
Other reasons were named more frequently than they were in previous years. Last year, 5% of surveyed adults cited the innovations higher education fosters as inspiring confidence. This year, that share jumped to 15%. And 14% said U.S. colleges are some of the best in the world, up from 7% last year.
In contrast, the share of respondents who pointed to the strength of college instructors and administrators declined from 7% last year to 4% in 2025. And just 1% of adults said college is available to anyone who wants to further their education, down from 2% the previous year.
More than a third of respondents who said they lacked confidence in higher ed, 38%, cited concerns about political agendas, up from 28% in 2024. Those who had little confidence in the sector also expressed concerns about the cost of college and institutions not focusing on and teaching the “right things,” though mentions of both reasons declined from 2024 to 2025.
When researchers asked all participants what would increase their confidence in higher education, they said colleges could focus more on practical job skills, lower their costs, and remove politics from the classroom.
Confidence increased among respondents across the political spectrum, researchers found. But Republicans — who drove much of the decline in confidence in the sector over the past decade — continue to hold more negative views of higher education.
Among Democrats, 61% expressed confidence in higher ed, up from 56% last year. By comparison, 26% of Republicans said the same, an increase from 20% in 2024.
About 2 in 5 respondents who identified as politically independent, 41%, expressed confidence in higher ed. That’s up from 35% last year.
Republicans are more likely to express confidence in two-year colleges than four-year colleges, the research found. Almost half of surveyed adults in the party, 48%, expressed confidence in two-year institutions, while just over a quarter, 26%, said the same of four-year colleges.
A majority of surveyed Democrats had high confidence in both institutional types.
-
It’s time we moved the generative AI conversation on
- By Michael Grove, Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education Policy and Academic Standards) at the University of Birmingham.
We are well beyond the tipping point. Students are using generative AI – at scale. According to HEPI’s Student Generative AI Survey 2025, 92% of undergraduates report using AI tools, and 88% say they’ve used them in assessments. Yet only a third say their institution has supported them to use these tools well. For many, the message appears to be: “you’re on your own”.
The sector’s focus has largely been on mitigating risk: rewriting assessment guidance, updating misconduct policies, and publishing tool-specific statements. These are necessary steps, but alone they’re not enough.
Students use generative AI not to cheat, but to learn. But this use is uneven. Some know how to prompt effectively, evaluate outputs, and integrate AI into their learning with confidence and control. Others don’t. Confidence, access, and prior exposure all vary, by discipline, gender, and background. If left unaddressed, these disparities risk becoming embedded. The answer is not restriction, but thoughtful design that helps all students develop the skills to use AI critically, ethically, and with growing independence.
If generative AI is already reshaping how students learn, we must design for that reality and start treating it as a literacy to be developed. This means moving beyond module-level inconsistency and toward programme-level curriculum thinking. Not everywhere, not all at once – but with intent, clarity, and care.
We need programme-level thinking, not piecemeal policy
Most universities now have institutional policies on AI use, and many have updated assessment regulations. But module-by-module variation remains the norm. Students report receiving mixed messages – encouraged to use AI in one context, forbidden in another, ignored in a third, and unsure in a fourth. This inconsistency leads to uncertainty and undermines both engagement and academic integrity.
A more sustainable approach requires programme-level design. This means mapping where and how generative AI is used across a degree, setting consistent expectations and providing scaffolded opportunities for students to understand how these tools work, including how to use them ethically and responsibly. One practical method is to adopt a ‘traffic light’ or five-level framework to indicate what kinds of AI use are acceptable for each assessment – for example, preparing, editing, or co-creating content. These frameworks need not be rigid, but they must be clear and transparent for all.
Such frameworks can provide consistency, but they are no silver bullet. In practice, students may interpret guidance differently or misjudge the boundaries between levels. A traffic-light system risks oversimplifying a complex space, particularly when ‘amber’ spans such a broad and subjective spectrum. Though helpful for transparency, they cannot reliably show whether guidance has been followed. Their value lies in prompting discussion and supporting reflective use.
Design matters more than detection
Rather than relying on unreliable detection tools or vague prohibitions, we must design assessments and learning experiences that either incorporate AI intentionally or make its misuse educationally irrelevant.
This doesn’t mean lowering standards. It means doubling down on what matters in a higher education learning experience: critical thinking, explanation, problem-solving, and the ability to apply knowledge in unfamiliar contexts. In my own discipline of mathematics, students might critique AI-generated proofs, identify errors, or reflect on how AI tools influenced their thinking. In other disciplines, students might compare AI outputs with academic sources, or use AI to explore ideas before developing their own arguments.
We must also protect space for unaided work. One model is to designate a proportion of each programme as ‘Assured’ – learning and assessment designed to demonstrate independent capability, through in-person, oral, or carefully structured formats. While some may raise concerns that this conflicts with the sector’s move toward more authentic, applied assessment, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. The challenge is to balance assured tasks with more flexible, creative, or AI-enabled formats. The rest of the curriculum can then be ‘Exploratory’, allowing students to explore AI more openly, and in doing so, broaden their skills and graduate attributes.
Curriculum design should reflect disciplinary values
Not all uses of AI are appropriate for all subjects. In mathematics, symbolic reasoning and proof can’t simply be outsourced. But that should not mean AI has no role. It can help students build glossaries, explore variants of standard problems, or compare different solution strategies. It can provoke discussion, encourage more interactive forms of learning, and surface misconceptions.
These are not abstract concerns; they are design-led questions. Every discipline must ask:
- What kind of skills, thinking and communication do we value?
- How might AI support, or undermine, those aims?
- How can we help students understand the difference?
These reflections play out differently across subject areas. As recent contributions by Nick Hillman and Josh Freeman underline, generative AI is prompting us to reconsider not just how students learn, but what now actually counts as knowledge, memory, or understanding.
Without a design-led approach, AI use will default to convenience, putting the depth, rigour, and authenticity of the higher education learning experience at risk for all.
Students need to be partners in shaping this future. Many already have deep, practical experience with generative AI and can offer valuable insight into how these tools support, or disrupt, real learning. Involving students in curriculum design, guidance, and assessment policy will help ensure our responses are relevant, authentic, and grounded in the realities of how they now learn.
A call to action
The presence of generative AI in higher education is not a future scenario, it is the present reality. Students are already using these tools, for better and for worse. If we leave them to navigate this alone, we risk widening divides, losing trust, and missing the opportunity to improve how we teach, assess, and support student learning.
What’s needed now is a shift in narrative:
- From panic to pedagogy
- From detection to design
- From institutional policy to consistent programme-level practice.
Generative AI won’t replace teaching. But it will reshape how students learn. It’s now time we help them do so with confidence and purpose, through thoughtful programme-level design.
-
It is high time higher education adopted a harm reduction approach to drug use among students
While Gen Z is showing less interest in the normalised alcohol and drug excess that dogged their preceding generations, England and Wales’ most recent stats confirmed that 16.5 per cent of people aged between 16 to 24-years-old took an illegal drug in the last year.
Additionally, a 2024 report by Universities UK found that 18 per cent of students have used a drug in the past with 12 per cent imbibing across the previous 12 months. With a UK student population of 2.9m, this suggests the drug-savvy portion is around 348,000 to 522,000 people.
It’s prudent, therefore, for anyone involved within student safety provision to know that the UK is currently mired in a drug death crisis – a record 5,448 fatalities were recorded in England and Wales in the most recent statistics, while Scotland had 1,172, the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe.
In an attempt to ameliorate some of this risk, seven UK universities recently took delivery of nitazene strips to distribute among students, facilitated by the charity Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK). These instant testing kits – not dissimilar to a Covid-19 lateral flow test in appearance – examine pills or powders for nitazenes: a class of often deadly synthetic opioids linked with 458 UK deaths between July 2023 and December 2024.
While these fatalities will have most likely been amongst older, habitual users of heroin or fake prescription medicines, these strips form part of a suite of innovative solutions aimed at helping students stay safe(r) if they do choose to use drugs.
The 2024 Universities UK report suggested drug checking and education as an option in reducing drug-related harm, and recommended a harm reduction approach, adding: “A harm reduction approach does not involve condoning or seeking to normalise the use of drugs. Instead, it aims to minimise the harms which may occur if students take drugs.”
With that in mind, let’s consider a world where harm reduction – instead of zero tolerance – is the de facto policy and how drug checking or drug testing plays a part in that.
Drug checking and drug testing
Drug checking and drug testing are terms that often get used interchangeably but have different meanings. Someone using a drug checking service can get expert lab-level substance analysis, for contents and potency, then a confidential consultation on these results during which they receive harm reduction advice. In the UK, this service is offered by The Loop, a non-profit NGO that piloted drug checking at festivals in 2016 and now have a monthly city centre service in Bristol.
Drug testing can take different forms. First, there is the analysis of a biological sample to detect whether a person has taken drugs, typically done in a workplace or medical setting. There are also UK-based laboratories offering substance analysis, that then gets relaid to the public in different ways.
WEDINOS is an anonymous service, run by Public Health Wales since 2013, where users send a small sample of their substance alongside a downloadable form. After testing, WEDINOS posts the results on their website (in regards to content but not potency) normally within a few weeks.
MANDRAKE is a laboratory operating out of Manchester Metropolitan University. It works in conjunction with key local stakeholders to test found or seized substances in the area. It is often first with news regarding adulterated batches of drugs or dangerously high-strength substances on the market.
Domestic testing is also possible with reagents tests. These are legally acquired chemical compounds that change colour when exposed to specific drugs and can be used at home. They can provide valuable information as to the composition of a pill or powder but do not provide information on potency. The seven UK universities that took delivery of nitazene strips were already offering reagents kits to students as part of their harm reduction rationale.
Although the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 specifies that certain activities must not be allowed to take place within a university setting, the Universities UK report argued that universities have some discretion on how to manage this requirement. Specifically, it stated: “The law does not require universities to adopt a zero tolerance approach to student drug use.”
How to dispense testing apparatus
The mechanisms differ slightly between SUs but have broad similarities. We spoke with Newcastle and Leeds (NUSU and LUU) who both offer Reagent Tests UK reagent testing kits, fentanyl strips and now nitazene strips. Reagent’s UK kits do not test for either of these two synthetic opioids. They vary in strength compared to heroin – and there are multiple analogues of nitazene that vary in potency – but an established ballpark figure is at least 50 times as strong.
All kits and tests are free. Newcastle’s are available from the Welfare and Support centre, in an area where students would have to take part in an informal chat with a member of staff to procure a kit. “We won’t ask for personal details. However, we do monitor this and will check in with a welfare chat if we think this would be helpful,” says Kay Hattam, Wellbeing and Safeguarding Specialist at NUSU. At Leeds, they’re available from the Advice Office and no meeting is required to collect a kit.
Harm reduction material is offered alongside the kits. “We have developed messaging to accompany kits which is clear on the limitations of drug testing, and that testing does not make drugs safe to use,” says Leeds University Union.
Before the donation, kits were both paid for by the respective unions and neither formally collected data on the results. Both SUs both make clear that offering these kits is not an encouragement of drug use. Kay Hattam draws an analogy: “If someone was eating fast food every day and I mentioned ways to reduce the risks associated with this, would they feel encouraged to eat more? I would think not. But it might make them think more about the risks.”
You’ll only encourage them
In 2022, in a report for HEPI, Arda Ozcubukcu and Graham Towl argued, “Drug use matters may be much more helpfully integrated into mental health and wellbeing strategies, rather than being viewed as a predominantly criminal justice issue.”
The evidence backs up the view that a harm reduction approach does not encourage drug use. A 2021 report authored by The Loop’s co-founder Fiona Measham, Professor in Criminology at the University of Liverpool, found that over half of The Loop’s users disposed of a substance that tested differently to their intended purchase, reducing the risk of poisoning. Additionally, three months after checking their drugs at a festival, around 30 per cent of users reported being more careful about polydrug use (mixing substances). One in five users were taking smaller doses of drugs overall. Not only does this demonstrate that better knowledge reduces risk of poisoning in the short-term, but it also has enduring positive impacts on drug-using behaviours.
SOS-UK has developed the Drug and Alcohol Impact scheme with 16 universities and students’ unions participating. This programme supports institutions in implementing the Universities UK guidance by using a variety of approaches to educate and support students in a non-stigmatising manner.
Alongside them is SafeCourse, a charity founded by Hilton Mervis after his son Daniel, an Oxford University student, died from an overdose in 2019. The charity – which counts the High Court judge Sir Robin Knowles and John de Pury, who led the development of the 2024 sector harm reduction framework, among its trustees – is working to encourage universities to move away from zero tolerance.This is through various means, including commissioning legal advice to provide greater clarity on universities’ liability if they are not adopting best practice, and checking in one year on from the Universities UK report, to ascertain how they’re adapting to the new era of harm reduction.
SafeCourse takes the view that universities must not allow themselves to be caught up prosecuting a failed war on drugs when their focus should be student safety, wellbeing and success. A harm reduction approach is the best way of achieving those ends.
-
Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy
by Fadia Dakka
The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-making pressures, technologies and relations that are changing university missions and academic practices in both research and teaching, altering not only forms of knowledge production but also academic identities (Lewis et al, 2022). These corporate, competitive systems operate in and through regimes of time acceleration and compression (Rosa & Trejo-Mathys, 2013; Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017) that enable capitalist accumulation via a proliferation of calculative practices and surveillance techniques driven by instrumental logics. In essence, the timescapes of the ‘accelerated academy’ (Vostal, 2016) have come to be not just dominated but defined by the linear rhythms of knowledge production, accumulation, consumption, and distribution.
In this context, ever-present tensions continue to pit institutional time scarcity/pressure against the often non-linear times, rhythms and practices that characterise the craft of intellectual work. These are acutely visible in doctoral education, which is considered both a liminal space-time of profound transformation for students and a rite of passage through which doctoral candidates enter the academic community.
Doctoral students in the accelerated academy experience tremendous institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are pressed to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to secure a positional advantage in a hyper-competitive, precarious job market.
In such a climate, pressures to develop core academic skills such as academic writing abound, as a quick glance at the vast literature available to both novice and accomplished researchers to help them improve the quality and quantity of writing reveals (eg Sword, 2017, 2023; Murray, 2025; Wyse, 2017; Moran, 2019; Young & Ferguson, 2021; Thomson, 2023; Sternad & Power, 2023).
Much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency and speed (Fulford & Hodgson (eds) 2016; Boulous Walker, 2017).
Doctoral students are taught to tackle the volume of readings by deploying selective, skim and speed-reading techniques that ‘teach’ them a practical method to ‘fillet’ publications (Silverman, 2010 p323) or ‘gut(ting) an article or book for the material you need’ (Thomas, 2013 p67). Without dismissing the validity of these outcome-oriented techniques, I argue that reading should be approached and investigated as research, which is to say as a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking (meditation and contemplation) and writing (as a method of inquiry) constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid, 2013; Dakka & Wade, 2018). [RC1] [FD2]
In 2024, I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme grant that allowed me to examine, in collaboration with Norwegian colleagues, the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms and practices among doctoral students in two countries, the UK and Norway, characterised by a markedly different cultural political economy of higher education. The project set out to explore how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of, and engaged with reading as a practice, intellectually and emotionally. Through such exploration, the team intended to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education, supervision, and, more generally, higher education through a distinct spatiotemporal lens.
The project experimented with slow reading (Boulous Walker, 2017) as an ethico-political countermovement that invites us to dwell with the text and reflect on the transformations it can produce within the self and the educational experience tout-court. Examining the practice of reading is, therefore, vital to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform the students’ thinking and, ultimately, their writing, helping to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.
As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a dearth of literature in educational research focused explicitly and directly on reading as a research practice. Conversely, Reading Theory and Reader-Response criticism (Bennett, 1995) are well-established strands in literary studies.
Two contributions inspired the project in the cognate fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and education ethics, underpinning the theoretical and methodological framework adopted: Aldridge (2019), exploring the association between reading, higher education and educational engagement through the phenomenological literary theorisations of Rita Felski (2015) and Marielle Macé (2013). Reading here is considered as a phenomenological ‘orientation’ with ontological character: the entanglement of body, thought, and sense makes reading an ‘embodied mode of attentiveness’ with ‘rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation’ (Felski 2015, p176). Lastly, Boulous Walker (2017) introduces the concept of ‘slow reading’, or reading philosophically against the institution. This practice stands in opposition to the institutional time, efficiency, and productivity pressures that prevent the intense, contemplative attitude toward research that is typical of active educational engagement. The author calls, therefore, for slow reading, careful reading, and re-reading as antidotes against institutional contexts dominated by speed and the cult of efficiency.
Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, the project combined Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Schutz, 1972; Ricoeur, 1984) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making, and spatiotemporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students.
The complementarity of these frameworks enabled a richer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective. The rhythmanalytical dimension drew on the oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Conceived as both a sensory method and a philosophical disposition, Rhythmanalysis (2004) foregrounds the question of the everyday and its rhythms, offering insightful takes on repetition, difference, appropriation and dwelling. Lefebvre’s analysis of the conflicting rhythms of the social and the critical moments that revive/subvert the humdrum of the quotidian pivot on the experience and resonance of bodies in space-time, their imbrication with the fabric of the social and the multiplicity of their perceptual interrelations with human and more-than-human environments. Methodologically, Rhythmanalysis enabled a closer look at the students’ reading habits, rhythms and practices in relation to their doctoral studies. The emphasis on spatio-temporality and (auto-)ethnographic observations made it possible to register and grasp the tensions that derive from clashes between meso institutional constraints and demands (eg set timeframes for completion; developmental milestones), micro individual responses and circumstances (eg different modes of study, private and/or professional commitments) and macro societal context (eg cognitive, extractive capitalism).
The phenomenological facet of the project drew on the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological dimensions found in Ricoeur’s and Schutz’s philosophy, which are concerned with grasping experiential meanings and understanding the complexity of human lifeworld. Acknowledging the entanglement of being and Dasein as an ontological standpoint, human lived experiences are situated within a contingent spatiotemporality and understood through an interpretivist epistemology founded on intersubjectivity, intentionality and hermeneutics.
This phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry was therefore designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfolded in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involved two groups of doctoral candidates based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham, UK), and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim).
The first phase of data collection involved Focus Groups and Reflective Diaries. It foregrounded the times, places, and rhythms of reading, considering reading modalities and patterns of doctoral students in the context of institutional demands vis-à-vis personal and professional constraints. Rhythmanalysis was employed both as a method (reflective diaries) and as an interpretive, diagnostic tool to uncover and critically reflect on arrhythmias (ruptures) and/or eurythmic pockets in the reading patterns of doctoral students.
The second data collection phase relied on hermeneutic phenomenological techniques, such as Episodic Narrative Interviews (Mueller, 2019), to delve deeper into the affective, material, and cognitive experience that connects and transforms students and their readings.
The final stage of data collection involved an experiment in collective slow reading and re-reading against the institution, inspired by Boulous Walker’s philosophical reading and Felman’s description of the interpretative process as a never-ending ‘turn of the screw’ (Felman, 1977) that generates a hermeneutical spiral of subsequent, ever richer, and different textual interpretations.
Initial findings point to a complex and layered reading time experience, captured in its nuanced articulation by a rhythmic analysis of the students’ everyday practices, habits and affective responses.
Commonsensical as it may sound, reading takes time. Engaging with a text to interpret and understand it is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discussed this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.
Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time appear to be juxtaposed in the reading process, creating conflicts and productive tensions for most of the PhD students in the project. For example, the students often welcome writing deadlines, as they create a linear rhythm that provides structure to their reading time. At the same time, the idea that reading should be done quickly and targeted to extract material for their thesis hovers over many participants, generating performance-related pressure and anxiety. Procedural aspects of reading, particularly managing volume and note-taking, are treated as a sign of success or failure, reinstating Rosa’s neoliberal equation of fast-winner, slow-loser in the accelerated, competitive academy (Rosa, Chapter 2 in Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017).
However, a deeper engagement with reading both opposes and coexists with this tendency, evoking the notion of Barthes’ idiorrhythmy (Dakka, 2024) to describe the process of discovering and imposing one’s own rhythm. This rhythm typically resists linearity and dominant structure, requiring slowness as a disposition or a mode of intense attention to oneself and the world through the encounter with text. Even more intriguingly, slowness as heightened focus and immersion often occurs within short and fragmented bursts of reading, strategically or opportunistically carved into the students’ everyday lives, resulting from an incessant act of negotiation over and encroachments with personal, professional, and institutional times.
The project explored, examined, and interpreted the rhythms and practices of reading in contemporary doctoral education along three axes: times (institutional, personal, inner, tempo, duration); spaces (physical, digital, mental); and affects as ways of relating (joy, guilt, anxiety, surprise, fantasy, etc). Together, these elements combine in unique and shifting configurations of dominant rhythms and idiosyncratic responses (rhuthmόs or idiorrhythmy), exposing the irreducibility of students’ experiences to harmful binaries (eg fast versus slow academia) while revealing the pedagogic affordances of a rhythmic and phenomenological analysis for contemporary universities. Spotlighting different approaches to reading, thinking, and writing enhances awareness of and attunement to developing one’s voice, listening and resisting capacity.
Fadia Dakka is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education at Birmingham City University. Her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She is currently working toward theorising Rhythm as a form of ethics underpinning critical pedagogy in higher education. She recently received a BA/Leverhulme small grant (2024-25) to examine doctoral reading habits and practices in the UK and Norway.
-
Many students decide they’re not a ‘math person’ by the end of elementary school, new study shows
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Roughly half of middle and high schoolers report losing interest in math class at least half the time, and 1 in 10 lack interest nearly all the time during class, a new study shows.
In addition, the students who felt the most disengaged in math class said they wanted fewer online activities and more real-world applications in their math classes.
Those and other findings published Tuesday from the research corporation RAND highlight several ongoing challenges for instruction in math, where nationwide student achievement has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and the gap between the highest and lowest-performing students in math has continued to grow.
Feeling bored in math class from time to time is not an unusual experience, and feeling “math anxiety” is common. However, the RAND study notes that routine boredom is associated with lower school performance, reduced motivation, reduced effort, and increased rates of dropping out of school.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that the students who are the most likely to maintain their interest in math comprehend math, feel supported in math, are confident in their ability to do well in math, enjoy math, believe in the need to learn math, and see themselves as a “math person.”
Dr. Heather Schwartz, a RAND researcher and the primary investigator of the study, noted that the middle and high school years are when students end up on advanced or regular math tracks. Schwartz said that for young students determining their own sense of math ability, “Tracking programs can be a form of external messaging.”
Nearly all the students who said they identified as a “math person” came to that conclusion before they reached high school, the RAND survey results show. A majority of those students identified that way as early as elementary school. In contrast, nearly a third of students surveyed said they never identified that way.
“Math ability is malleable way past middle school,” Schwartz said. Yet, she noted that the survey indicates students’ perception of their own capabilities often remains static.
The RAND study drew on data from their newly established American Youth Panel, a nationally representative survey of students ages 12-21. It used survey responses of 434 students in grades 5-12. Because this was the first survey sent to members of the panel, there is no comparable data on student math interest prior to the pandemic, so it doesn’t measure any change in student interest.
The RAND study found that 26% percent of students in middle and high school reported losing interest during a majority of their math lessons. On the other end of the spectrum, a quarter of students said they never or almost never lost interest in math class.
There weren’t major differences in the findings across key demographic groups: Students in middle and high school, boys and girls, and students of different races and ethnicities reported feeling bored during a majority of math class at similar rates.
Dr. Janine Remillard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and expert in mathematics curriculum, said that in many math classes, “It’s usually four or five students answering all the questions, and then the kids who either don’t understand or are less interested or just take a little bit more time — they just zone out.”
Over 50% of students who lost interest in almost all of their math classes asked for fewer online activities and more real-world problems, the RAND study shows. Schwartz hypothesizes that some online math programs represent a “modern worksheet” and emphasize solo work and repetition. Students who are bored in class instead crave face-to-face activities that focus on application, she said.
During Remillard’s math teacher training classes, she puts students in her math teacher training class into groups to solve math problems. But she doesn’t tell them what strategy to use.
The students are forced to work together in order to understand the process of finding an answer rather than simply repeating a given formula. All of her students typically say that if they had learned math this way, they would think of themselves as a math person, according to Remillard, who was not involved in the RAND study.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on STEM learning, visit eSN’s STEM & STEAM hub.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all) -
For women athletes, world recognition is a long time coming
Last year was arguably the best year for women’s sports yet.
According to data analysis company S&P Global, in-person attendance and viewership were higher, with women’s professional sports sponsorships increasing by 22% since 2023. According to UN Women Australia, globally, there has been a lack of interest in women’s sports. But it seems that they might finally be getting the attention they deserve.
To find out what is driving this change in attitude towards women’s sports, I interviewed 10 women athletes across high school, university, and coaching.
Historically, women’s sports have not gotten the recognition that they deserve. However, during 2024, women’s collegiate basketball had a significant increase in viewership compared to the previous year. The Final Four game in 2024 was a showdown between two players from two U.S. universities: Caitlin Clark of the University of Iowa and Paige Bueckers of the University of Connecticut. The game drew in a peak audience of 16.1 million, according to an article in Sports Illustrated.
Women’s media coverage has tripled since 2019. At this rate, if coverage trends continue, women’s share of coverage could reach 20% by the end of this year, according to Women.org, an organization within the United Nations devoted to gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Gender parity in sports
The Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games were officially the first to see 50:50 coverage in gender equality.
Avery Elliot, a track and field athlete from the University of Pennsylvania, attended the Paris Olympics as a spectator and said she noticed the change – more social media presence and sponsorships, particularly highlighting women of color, especially in women’s gymnastics, spurred by the popularity and success of U.S. athletes Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles and Brazilian Rebeca Andrade.
The lack of media coverage of women has always played a role in the lack of recognition that they receive. Lanae Carrington, a track star at Lehigh University in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, said that in the past, women athletes would get dismissed for getting a low number of views or for the belief that women’s games were not as entertaining as those of men. “Overall, women are making a stronger impact in the entertainment industry, whether that’s more highlight reels on TikTok or screen time on TV,” Carrington said. “It’s finally becoming normalized.”
One of the hardest things to deal with as an athlete is a lack of support, whether from the media, in person or on the sidelines.
Brianna Gautier, a volleyball and basketball sensation at Neumann University in Pennsylvania, said it is hard to play a game where you’re not going to have a full house. “But it’s kind of helped me learn to just play for myself instead of waiting for people to show up and relying on that to bring some type of energy because I feel like it starts within you and your teammates,” she said.
Play for yourself first
As a track and field athlete, I have seen this firsthand. It is unfortunate to see people walk away after the men are finished competing. But I found that when you start showing up for yourself with energy, success comes rolling in. Gautier has embraced the idea of playing for herself and nobody else.
It used to be that at Neumann, people would attend the men’s basketball games but never stay afterward to support the women. She also expressed the importance of the support of NBA players such as Steph Curry, who came out to watch several women’s Stanford basketball games in 2023. Gautier said that people think to themselves that if their favorite male basketball players are tuning in to watch women’s sports, it must be worthwhile.
Carrington said parents also need to support their daughters in athletics. “This is important because many girls don’t have parents who encourage them to play more traditionally masculine sports, such as basketball and soccer,” she said.
Most of the women I interviewed commented on the change in the WNBA as the catalyst for the change in women’s sports..
Liz Spagnolo is a soccer player at Tower Hill High School in the U.S. state of Delaware who appreciates the opportunities she now has. “Women in sports is big for us because based on women 100 years ago, we wouldn’t be expected to play sports, or be expected to do something like cheer,” Spagnolo said.
The Caitlin Clark effect
Arianna Montgomery, an athlete at The Tatnall School, the private school in Delaware that I also attend, said she appreciates the change in women’s basketball.
“It’s gotten a lot more fame, definitely more college sports have gotten a lot more fame,” Montgomery said. “I think women’s games are starting to become more popular. People are starting to look more towards women’s sports as well as men’s sports, and even since before, instead of men’s sports now, a decade ago, that wasn’t the case.”
Many of the women I spoke to said that a big contributor to the success of women’s sports is due to the Catlin Clark effect. The Caitlin Clark effect is a term that was created after her record-breaking seasons playing women’s basketball at the University of Iowa during the years of 2023-2024.
As a result, she has become the all-time leading scorer in college basketball before entering the WNBA, and has reportedly signed sponsorship deals worth more than $11 million.
Ruth Hiller, a lacrosse coach at my school said that are a number of successful women athletes that young women can now look up to, including tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams and Alex Morgan, the former captain of the U.S. women’s soccer team, women’s tennis pioneer Billie Jean King and Charlotte North, a professional lacrosse player who broke the all-time goals record in college lacrosse.
Women now rack up medals and points
Daija Lampkin, my track and field coach, pointed to Alison Felix, who won more medals than any other U.S. track and field athlete, and tennis superstar Serena Williams.
It is important, Lampkin said, that women support women. “Our body is critical, and some women are self-conscious that they are going to be muscular,” Lampkin said. “It can tear down your confidence. It’s not talked about in sports how women look at their bodies. People tear down Serena Williams and her body all the time, but look at where she is and how much she has accomplished”.
I have been participating in sports since I was 3 years old, when my parents signed me up for gymnastics. I run track and field and am a runner, jumper and hurdler. I began training for track and field competitions at the age of 8, and my dad has been my coach since the very beginning.
In my experience, my father was instrumental in encouraging me to participate in dance and gymnastics growing up, while also encouraging me to run track and play basketball and soccer for fun.
With opportunity comes pressure, and Gautier said it is important for girls not to put too much pressure on themselves. “When you are an athlete, you tend to feel that you have to perform a certain way to be successful or please everyone else, but I feel you kind of get blinded by the fact that you are doing it for yourself,” she said.
Questions to consider:
1. Why have women not gotten the same recognition and pay as male athletes in sports?
2. What does “parity” mean when it comes to gender in sports?
3. Should there be any differentiation when it comes to gender in sports and why?