(Un)veiling Desire: Re-defining relationships between gendered adult education subjects and adult education programmes

This paper challenges constructions of the ‘gendered illiterate Indian villager’ as a homogenous group of people who are empowered through acquiring literacy. I strive to displace homogeneous representations of gendered ‘illiterate’ subjects through ethnographic accounts of diverse people's realities in different villages in Bihar, India. I argue that the circumstance under which a relationship between gendered adult education subjects and adult education programmes gets constructed impinges on notions of: norms, interpreting and translating Others, networks and empowerment within and outside the context of adult education programmes.     

成人教育服务培训应融入和谐社会发展之中

和谐社会的构建对成人教育服务培训提出新的发展与要求,社会现实赋予了成人教育服务培训鲜明的时代特征。本文通过对成人教育服务培训功能定位的再思考,从成人教育的功能创新、成人教育的运作模式、以实用技术为重点的职业技能培训等方面,探索成人教育培训办学的规律,将以人为本、以和谐教育为理念的成人教育服务培训融入和谐社会发展之中。     

Neoliberalism, Social Darwinism, and Consumerism Masquerading as School Reform

Education reform policies harvested from neoliberalism, social Darwinism, consumerism, and free-market ideologies have begun to replace the pragmatic progressivism of the pre-World War II era. In this article, I use three federal and state education reform policies and programs—No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core State Standards Initiative, and national standardized testing—as examples of market-oriented ideologies embedded in the reforms. Further, I rely on Critical Social Theory, following Freire, as a framework to examine how the education policies and programs intersect to potentially impede access to quality education opportunities for children from impoverished backgrounds. I use Freire’s conception of Critical Social Theory because of his focus on how education should be used as a transformational mechanism to improve lives rather than a tool to train and inculcate children to imitate and be subservient to the dominant culture. I argue that some federal education policies enacted since 2002 provide examples of the confluence of ideologies that are creating a new meritocracy-based system. The meritocracy-based system will disproportionately penalize poorer students who have less access to out of school experiences that prepare them for formal schooling. Based on punishment triggers embedded in state and federal education policies, a cycle of educational austerity ensues when a student does not achieve a mandatory achievement benchmark. The cycle of austerity can doom some students to under-achievement in the short term and to becoming under-educated in the long term.     

The new youth sector assemblage: reforming youth provision through a finance capital imaginary

The language of austerity has been widely used to characterize policy-making in post-industrial nations since the financial crisis. Youth services in England are a noted example of the effects of austerity, having suffered rapid and severe cuts following a period of record investment prior to 2008. In this article, I argue that ‘austerity’ is an inadequate conceptual basis for critical analysis of policy-making since 2008, and that youth services are better understood as an exemplar case of the reforming effects of a ‘late neoliberal regime’. The late neoliberal regime describes a regulation of production through a finance capital imaginary, as distinct from the productive capital imaginary of the quasi-marketising neoliberal regime. I argue that late neoliberalism has effected the disassembly of quasi-marketised youth services and simultaneously the emergence of a new youth sector founded on norms of investment and return. I trace the reforming force of this regime through the productive relations of capital distributions, policy discourse, and organizational forms.     

The new evangelisation and adult religious education in Slovenia: challenges and possibilities

The Catholic Church in Slovenia is facing the challenge of the new evangelisation in the area of religious education which, at present, is mainly confined to the parish catechesis. She recognises the urgent need to pass from the religious education of children to adult catechesis. The latter is already being implemented in various forms by a number of movements and new realities, which are mostly addressed to adults, indicating new catechetical approaches in a dechristianised environment.     

Netcourses and netseminars: Current practice and new designs

Netcourses—courses delivered primarily over digital networks—promise to provide learners with quality, low-cost learning opportunities anywhere and anytime. While having implications throughout education, adult professionals may be the first to make extensive use of netcourses. By increasing the quality and timeliness of teacher professional development while reducing its costs, netcourses could have a major impact on the quality of teaching. In order to understand the realities of this promise, we have reviewed in detail all netcourses for teachers in mathematics and science. As a result of this analysis, we have developed new designs for the effective use of this medium with mathematics and science teachers.     

Beyond Philanthropy: Recognising the value of alumni to benefit higher education institutions

Tertiary Education and Management - As austerity measures become a reoccurring theme, higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide are examining diverse sources of funding, such as philanthropy,...     

Should Students Have to Borrow? Autonomy,Wellbeing and Student Debt

The orthodox view on higher education financing is that students should bear some of the costs of attending and, where necessary, meet that cost through debt financing. New economic realties, including protracted economic slowdown and increasing austerity of the state with respect to the public funding of goods and services has meant that the same generation who have to borrow the most in order to attend face significantly fewer employment prospects upon graduation. In this context, is the current approach of shifting the costs of post‐secondary education from the general public to individual students justified? Most debate on the issue has focused on the demands of distributive justice within the modern higher education system and on the whole accepts the idea that students ought to pay. I argue that distributive arguments alone are insufficient because they tacitly endorse the provision of higher education as being much like a consumer's choice. As an alternative, I explore the place and importance of higher education in supporting personal autonomy as a central liberal democratic value. I then argue that debt financing of higher education places unreasonable constraints on student's choices with respect to the kind of democratic citizens that they would otherwise aspire to be. This constraint has negative implications for the wellbeing of individual students and the larger society.     

The 1923 Egyptian Constitution – vision and ambivalence in the future of education in Egypt

The 1923 Constitution prepared the legal framework for Egypt’s semi-independence from British imperial control under a newly established liberal monarchy. This Constitution carried a promise for a significant change in setting the ground for a nascent national system of mass elementary education for boys and girls that would also be free of charge and compulsory. As I discuss in this article, this vision hardly matched Egyptian socio-economic and cultural realities of the time. I explore this gap through a study of the deliberations of the Constitutional Commission that first drafted and later debated the various articles of the Constitution. I argue that the Constitutional Commission followed a consensus, in both Egypt and abroad, over the necessity of establishing a national system of mass education as a means for a broader social reform. Setting high expectations, this consensus would simultaneously enhance national education and the future setbacks that would beset its implementation.     

The impact of austerity on Irish higher education faculty

Given the impact of austerity on higher education systems, an intellectual concern with the impact of austerity on faculty seems appropriate. In this article, austerity is explored through the everyday lived experience of faculty and its impact on both their personal and professional contexts. This aspect has been under-researched in the higher education literature and addresses the complexities and contradictions that the austerity can create for faculty. The study located in the Republic of Ireland provides an interesting context as the global financial crisis in 2008 resulted in 9 years of austerity measures that impacted on all aspects of the economy and particularly on the higher education sector. A social realist approach using Archer’s morphogenetic framework was employed. The framework facilitated an in-depth understanding of the relationship between structure, culture and agency and how austerity was experienced by faculty within their institutions.     

海西建设成为闽北成人教育发展的新契机

本文以海西建设为背景阐述了海西建设为闽北的成人教育注入了活力,带来了新的发展契机,促进了闽北各种人才的需求和培养,也让闽北成人教育的质量上了一个新的台阶。     

Reviews

In Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination: Autobiography, Conversation, and Narrative, Florio‐Ruane and deTar present an account of their investigation of the use of autobiography and the role of conversation in teacher education. To facilitate rich autobiographically‐focused teacher‐to‐teacher conversations, Florio‐Ruane draws on a book‐club format. As a veteran primary‐grade teacher who has worked hard to enact culturally‐informed, child‐responsive literacy practices in the classroom, as a teacher educator who advocates the use of autobiography as a site for teacher learning, as a curriculum theorist who sees autobiography as a rich source of both curriculum theory and curriculum practice, and as a researcher who witnessed first hand the power and potential of the ‘book‐club’ model for teacher professional development, I found Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination both engaging and informative. In the essay that follows, I discuss the significance of this new book in terms the enduring realities in US education. I also situate the book within the educational literature concerning autobiographical‐based curriculum inquiry, and, finally, I link Florio‐Ruane's new book to my own research on the professional lives of teachers working under intensified conditions of educational accountability.     

Global pressures,local reactions: higher education and neo‐liberal economic policies

As a summary piece, this essay describes more fully the wider globalizing context in which both students and institutions of higher education are now located. It explores three transitions that signal this new configuration: the creation of new information and media technologies; the transformation of time and space; and the expansion of the culture of consumption and the consumption of culture. The essay then discusses the four ethnographic articles in light of these new social realities.     

Lebanese youth narratives: a bleak post-war landscape

To identify the themes that define the lives of a generation living in a conflict-ridden post-war society, I explore the changing views of Lebanese students through an analysis of the personal narrative texts that they created during my creative writing workshops over a 16-year period (1997–2012). Increasingly, young Lebanese feel trapped in a violent past, a threatening present and a hopeless future. As traditional forms of stability and loyalty (family and state) become more dysfunctional, modern alternative sources of education, employment, security and public discourse remain absent, creating an ever-widening disjunction between expectations and disheartening lived realities. Since 1998, student texts have focused on three salient thematic groupings: Idealism (1998–2005), Activism (2005–2008) and, most recently, Disillusionment (2008–present). In an atmosphere of escalating intolerance and hostility, it is hardly surprising that students are currently escaping to spaces of indulgence and personal gratification. As ongoing regional conflicts fuel local sectarian rivalries, I argue that reengaging educated young Lebanese in non-confrontational narratives that challenge dysfunctional systems can play a vital role in disrupting a dangerous sectarian narrative that is fast threatening to entangle Lebanon in yet another brutal war.     

开放教育在农村成人教育中的适应性分析

发展农村成人教育是建设社会主义新农村的需要,也是提高农民素质,培养农村实用人才,加快农村社会经济发展的需要。目前,传统的成人教育模式已经不能适应当前农村发展的需要。开放教育作为一种新的成人教育模式,对农村实用人才的培养有着独特的优势。文章主要阐述了传统的教育模式在农村成人教育中存在的问题,并对开放教育在农村成人教育中的适应性进行了分析。     

Class strategies and stealth policies in adult education

Class strategies, how individual members of class fractions tactically gain advantage in fields including education, have been used to analyse schooling and initial post‐compulsory education. In this paper, class strategies are applied to adult education in considering participation across social classes. Using empirical data from a biographical study of adult education I show how different notions of ‘positionality’ are employed in three cases. Uniquely, I consider ruling class strategies in adult education and why the consideration of a ruling class might alter our perspective on differences between working‐ and middle‐class learners. Finally, I apply these perspectives to the policy arena and discuss how pernicious class strategies might actually be enhanced by new ‘stealth’ policies in adult education.     

Conveying Respect and Empathy: Becoming a relational teacher educator

This is the second of two self-studies of my efforts to prepare preservice teachers for the practical realities of the classroom while being respectful of their personal practical knowledge. I coined the term “relational teacher education” to convey my approach, which is informed by Rogers' “helping relationships” and Hollingsworth, Dybdahl, and Minarik's “relational knowing.” In this paper, I share “A Letter to Preservice Teachers” before exploring the final four characteristics of relational teacher education: respect and empathy, conveying respect and empathy, helping preservice teachers face problems, and receptivity to growing in relationship.     

论高校思想政治教育的网络载体

网络的发展使高校思想政治教育出现了新的载体，网络逐渐成为高校思想政治教育的新的重要的载体。网络载体给高校思想政治教育带来了千载难逢的机遇，但同时也带来了严峻的挑战。高校要充分利用好网络这一载体，在思想政治教育观念、内容及方法上不断改革与创新，以提高高校思想政治教育的时效性。     

A new space for a new science: the transformation of the JAE Campus after the Spanish Civil War

This article explores the way in which different concepts of education are expressed through architecture. It analyses the case of the transformation of the campus of the Colina de los Chopos in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War. The victor’s vision for education was captured physically in a new space that expressed the opposite values to those of the precedent democratic period. Francoism aspired to erase every physical trace of the Spanish liberal and democratic culture. Thus, a new campus was designed to stress physically new scientific, cultural and educational values. Aesthetically the former austerity and rationalism were substituted by monumentality and historicism; symbolically, the submission of any kind of knowledge to religion was highlighted through the transformation of the former Auditorium into a church and the erection of several religious monuments.     

INSURING THE FUTURE OF CENTRAL AGENCIES

The future, like greatness, is rarely planned for. It is thrust upon us. As I write, two supplementary schools in the community have announced they are closing their doors. A bank crisis has rocked the state and the local Federation campaign is limping toward closure. The new economic realities are the first issue a central agency must grapple with.