We are delighted to announce the new issue of the IOE's flagship journal, the London Review of Education, with contributions from many colleagues here at the IOE as well as from researchers based elsewhere in Europe and in Canada.  Just over half the world’s population live in urban areas, with projections from the United Nations that the proportion will grow to 66% by 2050. So it is crucial that we should analyse educational practices in large cities and understand the experience of learning in socially complex environments. The London Review of Education presents two features - on education in London and on multilingualism in cosmopolitan cities - that address this important area of inquiry.

LONDON REVIEW OF EDUCATION

The open-access education journal based at the UCL Institute of Education

NEW ISSUE, vol. 14, no. 2, LEARNING IN GLOBAL CITIES

Education in London: Challenges and opportunities for young people, edited by Tamjid Mujtaba

London is Europe’s largest city, presenting both opportunities and challenges to young people and those who educate them. These are explored here. Three articles investigate specific strategies used in London schools, with a focus on supporting teachers, reducing disaffection and increasing subject knowledge. Pete Wright reports on action research showing that innovative classroom activities can enhance students’ engagement with mathematics, while Alex Standish et al. demonstrate how 17 months of support for geography teachers enhanced their knowledge and teaching practices. Research into student transitions by Chris Brown et al. demonstrates how partnership-working can develop pedagogical approaches that improve students’ transitions to secondary school. The remaining papers explore students’ self-reporting of their education and how that relates to equity issues. Mujtaba and Reiss show that girls in London with high aspirations in mathematics found their education to be more equitable than girls elsewhere in the UK, reflecting the positive ‘London effect’ on educational experience and outcomes. Quantitative methods were used by Jerrim and Wyness to benchmark London in the PISA rankings, and a study by Cajic-Seigneur and Hodgson focuses on how research in London can contribute to the structure of education for 14 to 19 year olds.

Multilingualism in education in cosmopolitan cities: Insights into LUCIDE network research, edited by Dina Mehmedbegovic

The Languages in Urban Settings for Inclusion and Diversity in Europe (LUCIDE) network conducted studies on multilingualism in 13 European cities and two non-European cities (Ottawa and Melbourne). Regarding education, LUCIDE’S aim was to look at multilingualism as a resource for developing intercultural skills, including language support for acquiring the host country’s language and learning other languages. The papers in this feature present findings on four very different aspects of this research: a multilingual crèche in Strasbourg (Caporal-Ebersold and Young); education of adult immigrants in Canada (Ellyson et al.); and multilingualism and language learning in Rome (Menghini) and in Limassol (Nicolaou et al.)

In a separate article, Hamlin and Davies explore the tensions in educational policy and practice across the city of Toronto.

The issue also features three book reviews:

• Rose Cook reviews Gender, Education and Employment: An international comparison of school-to-work transitions, edited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Jan Skopek, Moris Triventi, and Sandra Buchholz
• Tom Haward reviews Doing Research in Education: Theory and practice, edited by Ioanna Palaiologou, David Needham, and Trevor Male
• Ke Lin reviews Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship, edited by Edward Vickers and Krishna Kumar

The London Review of Education is free to write for and free to read. Please do contact Pat Gordon-Smith (below) with any queries relating to this or any other issue of the London Review of Education or any other UCL IOE Press journals.

Best wishes

... for eclectic, challenging research journals 

+ London Review of Education

+ International Journal of Development Education & Global Learning

+ International Journal on School Disaffection

+ Research for All