Leadership in inclusive education: a professional development agenda for special education

Leadership roles in special education have changed dramatically over recent years. Stephen Powers, Stephen Rayner and Helen Gunter, all of whom are lecturers and researchers in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, conducted a questionnaire survey of the perceived professional development needs of heads, deputies and senior staff working in specialist contexts. The results reveal a significant concern with organisationally focused issues; support for school- and LEA-based courses and higher education provision; but a perceived lack of Government-funded training addressing the needs of those in leadership roles in special education. The authors conclude this article with a call for interested readers to become involved in further research in this important area.     

Public education matters: Reclaiming public education for the common good in a global era

This article argues that public education needs to be reclaimed to fulfill its role as a “democratising force” to address social and economic inequality and to respect and recognise diversity and difference. By analysing historical developments in federal policy, funding and economic contexts a case is developed to demonstrate that the role of the state has been dismantled and the public nature of education has been reduced. The factors responsible are articulated and discussed with particular reference to the impact of neo-liberal policy, the “marketisation” of education and new public management. Measures such as those taken by Education Queensland that support the development of school leaders and teachers to engage in research, development and critical debate are supported. International examples of how systems have revitalised and supported the public nature of education are discussed. These include more intelligent accountability systems that respect the professionalism of teachers and collaborative curriculum development strategies that engage with all, including those who are least powerful such as the students.     

自我教育：方法与模式的探讨

自我教育作为一种教育方法的理解限制了对自我教育本身的研究。本文从教育思想的深层次理解出发,提出了自我教育作为一种教育模式所蕴含的深义：传递“自我”文化,发展个体自我,实现大自我。据此又对自我教育与人格教育、主体性教育和终身教育的关系试作考察。     

Stress among higher education students: towards a research agenda

This article has two primary aims. Firstly, it provides a critical review of previous studies into student stress and identifies several important issues that, as yet, have not been explored. There has been no consideration of the effect of students maturing during their studies on the stress that they experience and how they cope with that stress. Secondly, the article highlights limitations in the past and present literature base, where there has been a concentration on a quantitative approach, and focus on a narrow range of subject groups. There is also a need to undertake longitudinal research to investigate individuals’ stress experiences during the period they study at university. Overall the key assertion here is that thus far research into student stress has not offered a complete account and explanation of students’ stress experiences.     

Education and poverty in the global development agenda: Emergence,evolution and consolidation

The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of education and poverty in the current global development agenda. It intends to analyse the emergence, evolution and consolidation of a global agenda, which attributes a key role to education in the fight against poverty. With this objective, the paper addresses four main issues: first, it analyses the context in which the emergence of the agenda must be placed, analysing specifically the changes generated by globalisation; second, it focuses on the role of the actors, and especially on the role of the World Bank in setting the agenda; third, it explains the consolidation of the agenda by the Education for All Conferences and the Millennium Development Goals; finally it presents some of the main limitations of the hegemonic agenda.     

Higher education and its communities: Interconnections, interdependencies and a research agenda

Universities everywhere are being forced to carefully reconsider their role in society and to evaluate the relationships with their various constituencies, stakeholders, and communities. In this article, stakeholder analysis is put forward as a tool to assist universities in classifying stakeholders and determining stakeholder salience. Increasingly universities are expected to assume a third mission and to engage in interactions with industrial and regional partners. While incentive schemes and government programmes try to encourage universities to reach out more to external communities, some important barriers to such linkages still remain. To fulfil their obligation towards being a socially accountable institution and to prevent mission overload, universities will have to carefully select their stakeholders and identify the ‘right’ degree of differentiation. For the university, thinking in terms of partnerships with key stakeholders has important implications for its governance and accountability arrangements. For the future of the universities we foresee a change towards networked governance and arrangements to ensure accountability along the lines of corporate social responsibility. In order to further explore some of these concepts and to empirically investigate the tendencies suggested here, this article proposes an ambitious research agenda for tackling the emerging issues of governance, stakeholder management and higher education’s interaction with society.     

Women and gender studies and multicultural education: Building the agenda for 2000 and beyond

Abstract

Multicultural education has always been contested terrain, yet within the last five years a significant consensus about its scope and function has evolved. The discourse about multicultural education has not adequately attended to the debates surrounding the terms “gender” and “sex” or the multiple feminist theories that focus on the more critical aspects of a social change agenda. This article focuses on some of the tensions between women and gender studies and multicultural education such as: understanding gender as a category of analysis, theoretical constructions of feminism, and building an educational agenda for social justice in an effort to further the agenda for 2000 and beyond.     

Rethinking the internationalisation agenda in UK higher education

Internationalisation of higher education (HE) affords an opportunity to engage in critical reflection on practices across the sector and to pursue a programme of widespread reform based on outcomes of practitioner dialogue and debate. This opportunity is, however, being largely shunned thanks to the prominence of a marketisation discourse that has claimed the internationalisation agenda as its own, redefining it narrowly in commercially expedient terms. Adopting a broadly Foucauldian perspective on discourse, this article offers a critique of HE internationalisation in the UK. It begins with an analysis of the global trade in HE courses on international markets, arguing that it is inappropriate to treat curricula as though they were merely commodities reducible solely to exchange value. Having questioned the marketisation discourse, the article proceeds to expose the inadequacies of a piecemeal 'infusion approach' to curriculum internationalisation. Simply flavouring curricula with 'international' or 'global' elements fails to address more fundamental issues of the educational process posed by multicultural recruitment and teaching. The critique is founded on a questioning of the cross-cultural validity of purchaser/provider models in general and the student-as-customer metaphor in particular. A 'learning as eating' conception of education finds its apogee in Ritzer's McDonaldised university, with its programmatic reduction of HE, casualisation of teaching labour and 'product' standardisation. The article ends with a polemical call for a reclamation of the internationalisation agenda on the part of practitioners who are interested in creating culturally inclusive, fair and genuinely educational forms of multicultural HE teaching and assessment.     

Interrogating discourses of intercultural education: from indigenous Amazon community to global policy forum

This article investigates discourses of intercultural education, taking as its starting point two ‘encounters’ in 2010 with contrasting aims and expectations of intercultural education. One is the launch of the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, where intercultural education is viewed as a means of overcoming marginalisation and promoting inclusion, and the other is in a rural Amazonian community context, where intercultural education serves to actively compound processes of exclusion. The article examines these discourses of intercultural education, locating them socially, culturally, politically and historically, and draws distinctions between educational analyses of diversity that emphasise identity and difference and those that prioritise interculturalism. It exposes complex and intersecting dynamics of social change and political contestation in the Amazonian ‘encounter’, which question the viability of globalised (technical-adaptive) strategies for inclusion of people whose intercultural lives are characterised by abjection and marginalisation.