Promoting inclusive school cultures and, more specifically, addressing inequality of opportunity is high on the European education agenda. Equipping teachers to be able to identify and address inequality of opportunity requires them to develop sensitivity, multi-perspectivity and agency, and these are complex attributes that require personal experiences and deep reflection. Following the principles of design research, five Dutch teacher-researchers developed IQ110 - a game that does just that. It helps both beginning and experienced teachers reflect on the hidden mechanisms of inequality, particularly on the effects of socio-economic status (SES), and it stimulates them to ad-dress these mechanisms. In the card game, that is played by 3-5 teachers, each teacher first draws a persona card: each player becomes a pupil with a given SES-background. Then the players, in turn, draw situation cards. These situations have three possible outcomes, each resulting in getting green (positive) or red (negative) chips. For each situation the other players discuss the most likely scenario and thus determine the pupil’s score. The persona cards are based on Bourdieu’s ideas on economic, cultural and social capital. The situation cards and scores are informed by SES research.The impact of the card game, both in terms of outcomes and its driving mechanisms, is now the subject of a study, funded by the Centre of Expertise Urban Education of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. To this end, the canvasses on which the individual participants record their learning outcomes are analyzed, and there is a retrospective questionnaire that is filled in after having played the game.The preliminary results are promising: especially identifying with low SES pupils and feeling the accu-mulation of negative experiences raises teachers’ awareness. The participants report that through the individual and collective reflections afterwards they are better equipped to address the issue.In our presentation we would first like to briefly demonstrate the game and then discuss the results and possible implications and applications. As we are now working on an international version of the game, we would also like to discuss with you the game’s potential outside of the Dutch context.
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Inequality of opportunity is high on the European education agenda. Equipping teachers to be able to identify and address inequality requires them to develop sensitivity, multi-perspectivity and agency, and these are complex attributes that require personal experiences and deep reflection.Recognizing this complexity, five Master’s students chose this challenge for their collective graduate research project. Following the principles of design research and inspired by Bourdieu’s ideas on different forms of capital, they developed a card game that helps both beginning and experienced teachers reflect on the hidden mechanisms of inequality, particularly on the effects of socio-economic status (SES), and it stimulates them to address these mechanisms.The impact of the card game – both in terms of outcomes and its driving mechanisms – is now the subject of a study, funded by the Centre of Expertise Urban Education of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The preliminary results are promising: especially identifying with low SES pupils and feeling the accumulation of negative experiences raises teachers’ awareness.In our presentation we first play the game with you and then discuss the results and possible implications and applications.
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Are the so-called “new” business models focused on “sharing” actually promoting new behaviour or are they simply using old behaviour of the provider/consumer in a new technological environment? Are the new tech companies in the sharing economy with their “new” business models grabbing too much power, unnoticeably?
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The field of applied linguistics is increasingly adopting open science practices. As open access publication gains traction, ethical issues emerge that need to be addressed by the field. This viewpoint paper addresses the concern that open science is not equally open for everyone. This paper describes how open access publication is increasingly being commercialized and explains how open access publication coincides with systemic inequality. We offer the following viewpoints for the field to consider:1.) We are morally obligated to make our research output accessible.2.) Hybrid, Gold, and Green open access publishing lead to systemic inequality in open access publishing, benefiting commercial publishers and those working in research-intensive universities and rich countries.3.)Diamond open access publication removes the systemic inequalities; hence, Diamond open access should be prioritized over Hybrid, Gold, and Green open access publication models.4.)We should move away from publish-and-read agreements and Green open access publishing, because they prevent system change.5.)Through our choices in our work as researchers, editors, reviewers, authors and teachers, we can contribute to the transition towards truly equitable open access publishing practices.6.)Senior researchers are in the position and have the moral obligation to be drivers of these changes.
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Cross-border commuting might be a way to improve an efficient allocation of labour resources, improve the economic performance of border regions and reduce economic and territorial inequality. This study explores the impact of a set of socio-economic, infrastructural or cultural explanatory variables that drive cross-border commuting in the EU and Switzerland for all outgoing commuters from living countries and for all incoming commuters towards their working countries. We find that cross-border commuters respond in general in the theoretically expected way to wages, unemployment, accessibility, language similarity and distance. But besides these general findings we also find that, in the end, cross-border commuting is a result of push and pull factors that seem to work out differently for different groups of commuters. This may reduce the inequality at the region level both between countries and within countries, although the effects are most likely small given the relatively small number of commuters. However, the results by gender, age, education and sector show substantial differences indicating that at the level of individuals and specific groups the reduction in inequalities might be very limited and may even increase.
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The current study investigates the effects of the school lockdowns during school years 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 on the achievement scores of primary school students during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed scores for spelling, reading fluency (i.e., decoding speed), reading comprehension, and mathematics from standardized student tracking systems for 5125 students from 26 primary schools in the urban region of The Hague, the Netherlands. Results showed that students in grades 1 through 3 had significant learning delays after the first lockdown. However, results after the second lockdown showed that most students were able to catch up, compared to students from corresponding grades of cohorts before COVID-19. The magnitude of these positive effects was mostly close to the negative effect of the first lockdown. Apparently, during the second lockdown, schools seemed better prepared and able to deliver more effective home schooling and online instruction. The hypothesis that students’ learning from a low SES home environment will suffer most from the school lockdowns could only partly be confirmed. SES effects at the individual level tended to be mitigated by negative effects of SES at the school level, making SES-related differences between schools less profound. The findings of this study offer a broader perspective to evaluate the effects of long-term school closures. Implications for educational practice and issues of inequality between students are discussed.
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Promoting inclusive school cultures and, more specifically, addressing inequality of opportunity is high on the European education agenda. This is reflected in the policies and ambitions of many teacher training institutes. As inequality is part of a ‘wicked problem’, simply adding the theme to the curriculum is hardly a solution. Equipping teachers to be able to identify and address inequality of opportunity requires them to develop sensitivity, multi-perspectivity and agency, for instance, and these are complex attributes that require personal experiences and deep reflection.Recognizing this complexity, five master’s students chose this challenge for their collective graduate research project. Following the principles of design research, they developed a game that helps both beginning and experienced teachers reflect on the hidden mechanisms of inequality, particularly on the effects of socio-economic status (SES), and it stimulates them to address these mechanisms. In the card game, that is played by 3-5 teachers, each teacher first draws a persona card; each player ‘becomes’ a pupil with a given SES-background, and then gathers positive and negative experiences.This article reports on the impact of the game – both in terms of outcomes and in its driving mechanisms. To this end, the canvasses on which the individual participants recorded their learning outcomes were analyzed, as well as a retrospective questionnaire that was administered. The respondents (n = 90) were students in either initial teacher training programmes or post initial (master’s) programmes.The results are promising, especially on (a) identifying with low SES pupils and (b) feeling the accumulation of negative experiences which raises teachers’ awareness. The participants report that through the individual and collective reflections afterwards, they are better equipped to understand and address the issue.
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Cooperation is more likely upheld when individuals can choose their interaction partner. However, when individuals differ in their endowment or ability to cooperate, free partner choice can lead to segregation and increase inequality. To understand how decision-makers can decrease such inequality, we conducted an incentivized and preregistered experiment in which participants (n=500) differed in their endowment and cooperation productivity. First, we investigated how these individual differences impacted cooperation and inequality under free partner choice in a public goods game. Next, we calculated if and how decision-makers should restrict partner choice if their goal is to decrease inequality. Finally, we studied whether decision-makers actually did decrease inequality when asked to allocate endowment and productivity factors between individuals, and combine individuals into pairs of interaction partners for a two-player public goods game. Our results show that without interventions, free partner choice, indeed, leads to segregation and increases inequality. To mitigate such inequality, decision-makers should curb free partner choice and force individuals who were assigned different endowments and productivities to form pairs with each other. However, this comes at the cost of lower overall cooperation and earnings, showing that the restriction of partner choice results in an equality-efficiency trade-off. Participants who acted as third-parties were actually more likely to prioritize inequality reduction over efficiency maximization, by forcing individuals with unequal endowment and productivity levels to form pairs with each other. However, decision-makers who had a ‘stake in the game’ self-servingly navigated the equality-efficiency trade-off by preferring partner choice interventions that benefited themselves. These preferences were partly explained by norms on public good cooperation and redistribution, and participants’ social preferences. Results reveal potential conflicts on how to govern free partner choice stemming from diverging preferences ‘among unequals’.
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Cooperation is more likely when individuals can choose their interaction partner. However, partner choice may be detrimental in unequal societies, in which individuals differ in available resources and productivity, and thus in their attractiveness as interaction partners. Here we experimentally examine this conjecture in a repeated public goods game. Individuals (n = 336), participating in groups of eight participants, are assigned a high or low endowment and a high or low productivity factor (the value that their cooperation generates), creating four unique participant types. On each round, individuals are either assigned a partner (assigned partner condition) or paired based on their self-indicated preference for a partner type (partner choice condition). Results show that under partner choice, individuals who were assigned a high endowment and high productivity almost exclusively interact with each other, forcing other individuals into less valuable pairs. Consequently, pre-existing resource differences between individuals increase. These findings show how partner choice in social dilemmas can amplify resource inequality.
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PurposeAll entrepreneurs interact simultaneously with multiple entrepreneurial contexts throughout their entrepreneurial journey. This conceptual paper has two central aims: (1) it synthesises the current literature on gender and entrepreneurship, and (2) it increases our understanding of how gender norms, contextual embeddedness and (in)equality mechanisms interact within contexts. Illustrative contexts that are discussed include entrepreneurship education, business networks and finance.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper draws upon extant literature to develop its proposed conceptual framework. It provides suggestions for systemic policy interventions as well as pointing to promising paths for future research.FindingsA literature-generated conceptual framework is developed to explain and address the systemic barriers faced by opportunity-driven women as they engage in entrepreneurial contexts. This conceptual framework visualises the interplay between gender norms, contextual embeddedness and inequality mechanisms to explain systemic disparities. An extra dimension is integrated in the framework to account for the power of agency within women and with others, whereby agency, either individually or collectively, may disrupt and subvert the current interplay with inequality mechanisms.Originality/valueThis work advances understanding of the underrepresentation of women entrepreneurs. The paper offers a conceptual framework that provides policymakers with a useful tool to understand how to intervene and increase contextual embeddedness for all entrepreneurs. Additionally, this paper suggests moving beyond “fixing” women entrepreneurs and points towards disrupting systemic disparities to accomplish this contextual embeddedness for all entrepreneurs. By doing so, this research adds to academic knowledge on the construction and reconstruction of gender in the field of entrepreneurship.
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