A plea for improved education about ‘the Other' in Israel and Palestine

This study outlines the current and recent ‘state of play’ in Israeli and Palestinian schools concerning the education of students about ‘the Other’. This is seen to be far from satisfactory. An examination of the complexities involved in learning about ‘the Other’ and of education programmes in other countries that have been afflicted by internal conflict show the need for a properly developed peace education programme to be developed in Israel and Palestine if real peace in the region is to be promoted.     

Symmetric peace education and Unesco's potential for promoting it

Peace education activities, widely contrasting and often mutually inconsistent, may be understood as constituting a dialectic in which each step is based on fundamental human reaction patterns mobilized as incentives. Although neither thesis, ‘Sounding the Alarm’, nor anthithesis, ‘Identifying Causes’, is adequate on its own for building peace, each is a necessary stage in development towards the synthesis, ‘Symmetric Peace Education’. According to this concept, peace can only be achieved through co-operation between the parties threatening or threatened by each other; and the task of symmetric peace education is to bring both sides and involved neutrals together to work out a basis of common values and joint activities while protecting the identity and integrity of all participants. On the micro-level, in schools, appropriate exercises can be designed to enable pupils to learn, from their own experiences of conflict, symmetrical and constructive habits in communication. Extension to the macro-, international, level may be achieved by representative groups of educators working together without destructive confrontation to produce common peace education packages: these would be used symmetrically by mutual agreement in countries currently rearming against each other. A different approach is proposed for bringing together groups of other professional people in ‘prepared, constructive confrontations’ in order to reduce distrust and increase mutual understanding. The express purpose for the foundation of Unesco was to build peace; and by virtue of this mandate and the nature of its constitution, the organization is uniquely placed to promote symmetric peace education in the ways described.     

Developing agency through peacebuilding in the midst of intractable conflict: The case of Israel and Palestine

This paper discusses the presence of ‘peacebuilding islands’ within civil society as potential agents of transformation in the midst of intractable conflict. Focusing on the particular case of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, the argument stems from a deconstruction of the legacy of national myopia perpetuated through social and political institutions and the capacity of individuals to impact them. Inspired by feminist organisations and the personal experience of feminist peace activists in Israel and Palestine, the author discusses the intersection of a variety of peacebuilding and educational initiatives as paramount to the building of a culture of peace in the region. The study embraces strategies that challenge the structural, socio‐cultural and inter‐personal status quo as part of a multi‐layered effort at transforming conflict in the Middle East.     

Reproducing peace? A CRT analysis of Whiteness in the curriculum and teaching at a University of The UN

Peace and conflict studies (PACS) higher education is a blossoming field. Literature (both conceptual and conjectural) and research (theoretical and empirical) has proliferated in recent decades. This paper details case findings from an ethnographic study with university-based PACS educators completed at one University of The United Nations in 2015. The six-month ethnography involved document analysis, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with 25 peace scholars and 108 postgraduate students. Data was thematically coded and analyzed using concepts from critical race/critical Whiteness studies. This paper outlines the study and explores the theme of Whiteness that emerged from data. Findings point toward the cultural reproduction of Whiteness in the faculty, pedagogy, and institution. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications concerning global equity and ‘post-structural violence’ in PACS education, as well as a call for further research into the role of peacebuilding education in broader social change.     

教育领域不同文化间的对话:比较教育的角色

本文倡导通过不同文化间的对话来促进国际领域教育家、实践者和哲学家们在一起分享彼此的知识、智慧,维护世界和平,促进相互理解.本文概述作者从事不同文化间对话的一些经验,然后探讨比较教育学术界对理解全球化时代文化传统和教育的影响,指出教育交流有赖于技术和市场经济的推动,也需要本土的、边缘文化群体以及贫困国家的参与,这些群体或因国家资源贫乏而无法跟上全球化的发展进程.世界比较教育学会联合会应该在保持文化的完整性,减少不同文化间冲突中发挥重要作用.     

Education in the twenty‐first century: Conflict,reconstruction and reconciliation1

This paper is an attempt to map out an emerging, and increasingly important field of study concerning the relationship between education and conflict. The field has two main parameters. The first involves the variety of contexts within which education systems are required to operate. Distinctions are drawn between education that is provided within relatively peaceful and stable environments; during times of violent conflict; as part of reconstruction following conflict or political transition; and as part of longer term peace and reconciliation processes. Educational priorities and concerns may be quite different depending on each of these circumstances. The second parameter concerns different levels of action within an education system. These include the political and policy environment, administrative and structural features and various aspects of educational practice. The paper argues that actions through various ‘entry points’ at each of these levels carry the potential to exacerbate or ameliorate conflict and suggests that a systemic analysis of investments in education systems from a conflict perspective should be a routine part of educational planning.     

Community and Collectivism: the role of parents’ organisations in the education system

This paper outlines the theoretical and empirical starting‐points for a research project addressing the role of parents’ organisations in the education system. It argues that a study of relationships conducted between homes, schools and parents’ groups and organisations has the potential to illuminate key concepts in education, considering as examples ‘citizenship’ and ‘community’. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first briefly describes the study's background, its scope and methodology. The second section considers the use of some of Antonio Gramsci's work in providing a theoretical starting‐point with which to explore the construction and maintenance of hegemonic discourses surrounding parenting. The concluding section of the paper widens the discussion to consider two key concepts, community and citizenship. It is argued that the discursive positioning of these concepts, in other words, how they are understood and defined, influences the ways in which relationships between parents and the education system are perceived and construed. This is illustrated with reference to readings of'citizenship’ and ‘community’ which emphasise, not consensus and homogeneity as in traditional definitions, but conflict, difference and multiplicity. The paper concludes that there is a continued need for empirical data focusing on everyday citizen and citizen‐state interactions which reveal how individuals live within, and understand and experience these relationships.     

Emerging learning environments in higher education: Implications for institutional change and academic developers

Abstract

Wright and O'Neil's (1995) international survey of promising teaching improvement practices in higher education (HE) placed the existence of teaching support centres close to the top of the thirty‐six item scale. One conclusion that may be drawn from their findings is that many of the responding institutions see the role of academic developer as significant in helping to monitor trends and planning activities that can lead to quality of educational provision. This paper outlines several scenarios relating to learning environments potentially emerging in HE, describes implications for institutional change, and defines key assumptions for bringing about a development culture. Additionally, the paper reviews how these contextual factors may impact on the role of academic developer and concludes with a suggestion for a ‘developers’ curriculum’ that may merit consideration by members of the International Consortium for Educational Development in Higher Education (ICED).     

Progressive education and the case of a bilingual Palestinian-Arab and Jewish co-existence school in Israel

The purpose of this paper is to exemplify a ‘grass-roots’ change based on Dewey's experimental progressive education model employed in the ‘Bridge over the Valley’ bilingual school, a Palestinian-Arab and Jewish school in Israel. In order to identify the progressive ‘approach' underlying this change, the ‘method' that guided the implementation of a bilingual school, it's evaluation and then its dissemination to other schools, we used a qualitative case study method to understand whether John Dewey’s theory of education for peace was able to effect change in Palestinian-Arab and Jewish school education in Israel. The case findings describes the use of the progressive approach of education for peace in the ‘Bridge over the Valley’ bilingual school, as it is expressed in the school’s pedagogy, the implementation of the progressive method and in the accompanying discourse. Reciprocal teacher–child relations are considered an important factor to create fertile conditions for learning. The case findings contribute to our introduction of democratic education in a spatial reality. Underlying this approach stood a pedagogical method and conceptualization for conflict resolution and the opening of a space for empowering dialog for co-existence.     

Peace and human rights education: Dilemmas of compatibility and prospects for moving forward

This article addresses the dilemmas emerging from efforts to integrate human rights values within a peace education programme being carried out in a conflict situation. Although the article is largely theoretical, it is grounded in the author’s reflections on a series of teacher workshops and his overall experiences conducting ethnographic research on issues of human rights and peace education in conflict and post-conflict situations, especially in his home country, Cyprus. The article outlines several interpretations and critiques of the human rights framework, offers an overview of human rights education and peace education, and then discusses two dilemmas that emerge from efforts to integrate human rights values within peace education programmes. Finally, it argues that an approach to human rights that is based on values and oriented towards praxis, with an emphasis on cross-cutting principles such as non-discrimination and equality, could perhaps be more compatible with peace education efforts.     

Degrees of value: comparing the contextual complexities of UK transnational education in Malaysia and Hong Kong

This paper reveals the complex diversity that underpins ostensibly similar transnational education programmes (TNE), through a comparison of UK TNE in Malaysia and Hong Kong. It draws on data from two different yet cognate studies on the role of UK universities in delivering higher education in Asia. Some fine-grained and informative differences between the ways in which ‘value’ in TNE is constructed in different host contexts is revealed. The paper brings to light the ‘voices’ of TNE students and graduates, which are very seldom heard. The arguments adapt and extend the concepts of education as a positional good, and as cultural capital. For various instrumental, intrinsic and personal reasons the authors discuss in detail, UK TNE is more highly valued in Malaysia than in Hong Kong. The paper makes a wider contribution to knowledge on the changing landscape of international higher education and the impact on social and personal (dis)advantage.     

Education,nation‐building and modernization after World War I: American ideas for the Peace Conference

The First World War ended with the collapse of the Austro‐Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman Empires. In planning for the peace negotiations the allied governments considered not only the European boundaries but especially the national aspirations and future development of the peoples of the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Africa and East Asia. American President Woodrow Wilson created a secret commission of academics and experts to prepare studies that would inform and support the American peace negotiators. Almost all of the studies on education, covering education in Austria, Prussia, Albania, the Ottoman Empire, Central Africa, Japan, and the education of minorities in Western Europe, were prepared by Paul Monroe, professor of history at Teachers College, Columbia University, with various assistants. There was a certain logic to Monroe's selection, since he had edited the five‐volume Cyclopedia of Education, published 1911–1913, and was connected to a worldwide network of educational experts who had contributed to that project. Monroe's reports, like most of the expert reports prepared for the American commission, are in part compilations of ‘objective’ information, such as educational statistics, legislation and policies. But at crucial points they develop critical analyses of existing structures and define a proposed role for education—a kind of educational self‐determination—in what we might call nation‐building in parts of the collapsed empires and in the preliminary steps towards de‐colonization in other parts. While Monroe's ideas about the role of education could play only a small part in contributing to the plans for the Treaty of Versailles, they had a continuing impact in shaping American efforts in international education in the 1920s. Monroe himself played a large part in bringing American educational ideas to bear on modernization efforts in China, the Middle East and other developing areas in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper is part of a larger biographical project on Paul Monroe and the spread of American influence in international education.     

School leadership during violent conflict: rethinking education for peace in Nepal and beyond

This paper outlines the impact and professional tensions created by the decade-long armed conflict (1996–2006) on school leadership in Nepal. Drawing on qualitative interviews and discussions with school heads and teachers (n?=?92), the study reveals that the onerous pressure of pupils’ safety during crisis ultimately fell upon teachers and school leaders who faced direct violence on school grounds and communities they lived in. It was found that school heads were traumatised by consistent pressures, as manifested in the form of financial extortion, physical threats and abductions by the Maoists while the security forces frequently harassed them as Maoist sympathisers or confederates. Maintaining relational equilibrium with warring parties in order to ensure their personal and school survival was a traumatic experience. Despite the enormity of effects on education during conflict, the post-conflict educational debates largely undermine the voice of those who were at the frontlines during crisis. These findings provide useful insights into the ‘experiential dimension’ of civil conflict at schools in conflict zones and implications for educational programming.     

Undergraduate students who are required to withdraw from university: The role of ethnicity

A large body of international research focuses on identifying reasons why students do not ‘persist’ (Tinto, 2006 ) within higher education. Little research has focused on students whose leaving is non‐voluntary and where narratives of ‘persistence’ are therefore not as pertinent. This paper seeks to refocus some of the attention onto the distinct group of students who do not elect to leave their studies but who are, instead, required to withdraw; such students leave under ‘Academic fail’ and ‘Exclusion’ categories. More specifically, it explores the relationship between student leavers’ ethnicity and their likelihood of being required to withdraw. Utilising a large dataset comprising UK‐domiciled undergraduate students enrolled to take a degree within an English higher education institution in 2010/11, it finds that most groups of Black and Minority Ethnic students are more likely to be required to withdraw than White students. Ethnicity exerts an independent impact on a student's likelihood of being required to withdraw, when other background and on‐course characteristics are controlled for, but this impact varies by disciplinary area. It is suggested that these findings implicate factors within the higher education sector itself as key drivers in the process that leads to students being required to withdraw. Lessons are drawn out for those tasked with managing the student experience within higher education.     

The emerging professional: an investigation into teacher education students’ developing conceptions of the relationship between theory and classroom practice before,during and after a postgraduate teaching programme

This article brings together two studies which contribute to the examination of the nature of professionalism in education by focusing on the perspectives of two under-researched groups namely ‘teaching assistants’ and teacher educators working ‘either side’ of the school teacher. The projects were conducted in, and framed by, the UK policy context of public sector modernization and cuts, and raise issues of relevance to international debates on notions of professionalism in education in a context of neo-liberal policy and austerity. The studies drew upon different approaches including autoethnography, life history and discourse analysis. The authors examine the formation and representation of professional identity in education through the discourses of ‘professionalism’ of teaching assistants and teacher educators. Professionalism is articulated through three themes in the accounts; ‘non-standard’ professional transformations, role ambiguity, and the role of classroom experience and higher education in the development of professional identities. Through these themes the perspectives of teaching assistants and teacher educators locate the notion of ‘teacher professionalism’ within a broader concept of professionalism in education providing alternatives to the discourse of imposed policy, and the authors reflect upon the ways in which these voices contribute to the wider international debate on professionalism in education.     

Missed opportunities: the IEA’s study of civic education and civic education in post‐communist countries

This article argues that the opportunity in Phase I of the IEA’s Civic Education Study to include the new democracies’ experiences of citizenship education have not been sufficiently exploited. ‘Borrowing’ citizenship education from abroad and citizenship education for ‘civil society’ have been chosen as examples of problems in the new democracies which have not been exploited. The final section focuses on the question of why new and recurring problems in citizenship education, which occurred in post‐communist Europe, have not been identified, described or analysed in the IEA’s publication New paradigms and new recurring paradoxes in education for citizenship: an international comparison. The paper also points to some of the circumstances that seem to have had an impact on which problems were analysed in the study and which problems were largely ignored.     

Data entry: towards the critical study of digital data and education

The generation and processing of data through digital technologies is an integral element of contemporary society, as reflected in recent debates over online data privacy, ‘Big Data’ and the rise of data mining and analytics in business, science and government. This paper outlines the significance of digital data within education, arguing for increased interest in the topic from educational researchers. Building on themes from the emerging sub-field of ‘digital sociology’, the paper outlines a number of ways in which digital data in education could be questioned along social lines. These include issues of data inequalities, the role of data in managerialist modes of organisation and control, the rise of so-called ‘dataveillance' and the reductionist nature of data-based representation. The paper concludes with a set of suggestions for future research and discussion, thus outlining the beginnings of a framework for the future critical study of digital data and education.     

The construction of ‘age difference’ and the impact of age‐mixing within UK further education colleges

‘Age’ is an important social category used to define individuals and groups within our society and, often, to structure access to power, prestige and status. However, within educational research, age has been relatively neglected when compared with other social categories such as gender, class and ethnicity. In an attempt to begin to explore the impact of age within schools and colleges, this paper focuses on students' and teachers' experience of mixed‐age learning groups within the UK further education sector. First, the paper outlines various assumptions about the distinctiveness of age groups that underpin much sociological theorizing as well as current educational policy within the United Kingdom. It then draws on an empirical study of six further education colleges in Yorkshire and the south‐east of England to suggest that the ways in which students and members of staff construct notions of ‘age’ and ‘age difference’ bear little resemblance to the models adopted by policymakers. Nevertheless, the paper goes on to argue that, although there was little consensus about where the boundary between ‘younger’ and ‘older’ learners should be drawn, most respondents were able to identify specific age‐related differences that they believed affected the process of learning. In particular, mixed‐age classes were believed to offer considerable advantages over more age‐homogeneous groups. The final part of the paper explores some of these putative advantages and discusses their significance in the light of current debates about the ‘postponement’ of adulthood and the nature of inter‐generational relationships.     

Implications of the Introduction of the Doctor of Education Degree in British Universities: can the EdD reach parts the PhD cannot?

Abstract

At a time of continuing concern about the nature and meaning of doctoral education in the United Kingdom, this paper outlines the moves by an increasing number of universities towards ‘part‐taught’ doctorates. Focusing on the new degree of Doctor of Education now offered by over seven British universities, the paper outlines the differences between EdD and PhD in education, and questions the need for any differentiation. Arguing that the ‘statistics of failure’ in doctoral education in the United Kingdom continue to mount a challenge to universities in the United Kingdom, the paper argues for a refocus on process as well as product, where the goal should be on learner empowerment and transformation, rather than on the misassumptlons that doctoral study is primarily an ‘academic apprenticeship’. Finally, the paper indicates an agenda to establish doctoral programmes and structures capable of developing and fostering creative talent whether the individuals undertaking doctoral study are going to become professional researchers or researching and scholarly professionals.     

The violence of peace and the role of education: insights from Sierra Leone

Research on peacebuilding has mushroomed over the last decade and there is a growing interest in the role of education in supporting peacebuilding processes. This paper engages with these debates, UN peacebuilding activities and the location of education initiatives therein, through a case study of Sierra Leone. In the first part, we explore the complex and multi-dimensional nature of violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone. In the second, we critically address the role of education in the conflict and post-conflict period, highlighting education’s centrality as a catalyst to conflict, and then reflect on the failure of the post-conflict reconstruction process to adequately transform the education system into one that could support a process of sustainable peacebuilding. Finally, we conclude by exploring the ways that greater investment and focus, both financial and human, in the education sector might, in the long term, better contribute to a sustainable and socially just peace.