Self-representations of International Women Postgraduate Students in the Global University 'Contact Zone'

This article explores some aspects of the role of race and gender in shaping women postgraduate students' experience of intercultural study. It focuses on various social and cultural aspects of their sojourn. These were suggested by data from two small pilot research projects investigating the experiences of two cohorts of international women postgraduate students, the one studying in an Australian university and the other, a Canadian. The authors focus particularly on the intersections between the students' representation of themselves as women and the way they see themselves represented by their host cultures. In other words, they are interested in the students' understandings of themselves as 'other', and how this impacts on their representations of 'self'. The authors suggest that these representations reflect a process of negotiation of identity that occurs in what they call the globalising university 'contact zone'. The concept of contact zones derives from post-colonial theory. A further goal of this article, then, is to examine how such data appear when viewed from a post-colonial perspective.     

Critical thinking in education: a review

National governments and employers have argued that it is important for all sectors of education to prepare individuals who are able to think well and for themselves. 'Good thinking' and 'thinking well' are commonly used terms bound up with what is called 'critical thinking' in the research literature. Evidence is presented in this paper, however, which suggests that not all students may be good at critical thinking; nor do some teachers appear to teach students 'good thinking' skills. A review of the research literature in this area was undertaken and the methods and conceptions of teaching likely to inhibit and enhance critical thinking are outlined, as well as what is required to improve students' thinking skills. Ways forward in teaching critical thinking, and in helping students to learn to think well and for themselves, are described and discussed.     

A Brave New World: Imagining Faculty Development in the Global Era

What might globalization and the demographic shift in Christianity mean for faculty development programs? What faculty members need most is the ability to imagine globalization as Christians. This article surveys and critiques the most powerful and persistent accounts in the current contest of narratives within the field of global education. These are national security, economic success, missionary or humanitarian impact, and cultural appreciation. Each of these has constructive elements, but all are liable to reductionism and narcissism.

Christian global education needs a different narrative: Christian cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings belong to a single world community. Christianity grounds cosmopolitanism in the belief that all human beings share an identity as special creations of God, formed in God's image to be God's children. Humans are also created to dwell in relationship with each other. This narrative framework helps Christian learners unmask their cultural assumptions and see how even their Christian faith has been colored by such assumptions. Cosmopolitanism helps them work through their cultural limits and gain an appreciation of the contributions of many cultures, including what it means to be a Christian.

The article suggests four ways to build Christian cosmopolitanism via faculty development: sharing stories about cross-cultural encounters and how they induced fresh learning; generating new encounters via traveling seminars; convening reading groups that address issues of cosmopolitan identity, global Christianity, and human connection; and creating new campus events and liturgies to enact commitment to Christian cosmopolitanism.     

Reading the Local and Global: Teaching Literature in Secondary Schools in Australia

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia’s place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions are reflected in the recently published Australian Curriculum: English, which requires students to read texts of ‘enduring artistic and cultural value’ that are drawn from ‘world and Australian literature’. No indication, however, is given as to how the reading and literary interpretation that students do might meaningfully be framed by such categories. This essay asks: what saliences do the categories of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ have when young people engage with literary texts? How does this impact on teachers’ and students’ interpretative approaches to literature? What place does a ‘literary’ education, whether conceived in ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘global’ terms, have in the twenty-first century?     

The impact of migration on national identity in a globalized world: a comparison of civic education curricula in England,France and Ireland

This article examines the extent to which citizens of migrant origin are included within discourses of national identity in civic education curricula in England, France and Ireland. We explore how much space is given to citizens of migrant origin in discourses of national identity in civic education curricula and how they fit with central values normalized by a higher degree of recognition in schools. Although early immigration systems assumed that incorporation of migrants into the national polity would take place via socialization in education, the failure to include citizens of migrant origin in the contemporary ‘imagined community’ articulated in civic education discourses risks marginalizing some citizens which gives rise to a sovereignty gap. The disparity between legal and cultural belonging of some individuals in Western Europe presents a major challenge for education systems which are tasked with making national identity discourse resonate with a globalized citizenry. The study found that despite commonalities around the promotion of human rights and democracy, civic education curricula diverge with regard to representation of religion. Moreover, nationalistic aspects of the French model contrast with a multicultural, and recently global, approach to citizenship education in England and the promotion of European citizenship in Ireland.     

Internationalization in the Asian Pacific: The Case of Handong Global University Facing New Challenges in a Global,Digital, and Unequal World

As Korean, Japanese, and Australian universities see declining birthrates and a tapering off of the percentage of national age cohorts heading to universities, increased enrollments of international students are being pursued. As demographic changes force these universities to attract students from abroad, the globalization trend is also an incentive to modify their educational paradigms to prepare students to become global citizens. This paradigm shift is needed given that peace and prosperity depend on increasing the capacity of people to think and work on a global and intercultural basis. Furthermore, with digital advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), student learning will be integrated through ICT confluence to bring about innovations in products, services, contents, and processes. Thus, the educational environment is changing fast and the challenges are mounting for higher educational institutions, especially for Christian universities.     

Educational policy for citizenship in the early years in Australia

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to ‘be a good citizen’. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.     

Children's perceptions of national identity in Wales

The project forms part of a larger doctoral study which examines children's perceptions of national identity and its construction and importance in the world of the child in Wales. The research took place in a primary school class in the South Wales valleys, in a class of 27 children aged 7–8 years. Following an introductory activity, children drew a picture of a ‘Welsh person’. They were then interviewed with their artwork about their ideas of national identity in Wales. The initial findings revealed that the young children in this study, contrary to cognitive development theory (Piaget, J., and A.M. Weil. 1951. The development in children of the idea of the homeland and relations to other countries. International Social Science Journal 3: 561–578; Aboud, F., and M. Amato. 2001. Developmental and socialization influences on intergroup bias. In Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes, ed. R. Brown and A. Gaertner, 65–85. Oxford: Blackwell), had a complex and well-developed view of their own national identity. The children were able to consider in some depth, what characterises their concept of the national identity. Children categorised themselves using a range of parameters such as place of birth, parental nationality and current and previous residences. These findings contribute to previous studies in the Welsh context, which have been conducted with older children. The largest self-categorisation group was Welsh but a further interesting factor was that there were more children who categorised themselves as English rather than British.     

The identity game: constructing and enabling multicultural identities in a Finland–Swedish school setting

This study, building on previous studies stressing the bond between positive sense of ethnic identity and school belonging, puts at its center the very process of ethnic identity construction. Thus, identity is viewed as co‐constructed, within a social–constructionist perspective on learning. The study is two‐folded. It starts out by describing how participants in a Finland–Swedish preschool setting orient to ethnic identity in everyday interactions. Video recordings are analyzed using conversation analysis, a relatively recent approach to the exploration of how ethnicity is accomplished in interaction. It shows that the different ethnic backgrounds of the children were considerably more prominent in the informal self‐initiated interactions between themselves than in situations where adults were present. The children mainly used ethnicity as a resource to investigate themselves in relation to others to negotiate status and construct in‐ and out‐groups. The second part focuses on how to create a more inclusive school‐setting by more actively supporting students' ethnic identity construction. It discusses the experiences from a teacher–researcher collaboration, where the way children constructed ethnic identity in the first part of the study was taken as the starting‐point for the development of new practices. The study suggests the ongoing ethnic identity construction in everyday educational settings to be a fertile area for further research. We need to know more about how these processes can be supported in a manner that is sensitive to the students' needs to decide for themselves whether, and how, they wish to orient to their own ethnic backgrounds.     

Negotiating global citizenship,protecting privilege: western expatriates choosing local schools in Hong Kong

We examine school choices made by western expatriate parents in post-colonial Hong Kong in order to understand the essence of imagined global citizenship and its implications for existing ethnic and class inequalities in the education system. Responding to changes in the global job market, a small but increasingly visible group of parents are seeking to challenge what they see as the constraints of expatriate life by developing global opportunities for their children through Cantonese language acquisition in the local education system. Drawing on the sociological literature on school choice and middle-class identity, we argue that these parents are negotiating for themselves a global imaginary in which cultures can easily be traversed and social class is levelled. But such global desires, we suggest, can also replicate colonial privilege in a way that marginalises poorer schools and other ethnic minorities in the education system.     

Advocacy and Involvement: The Role of Parents in Western Islamic Schools

Muslim parents share many of the same ideals that other religious parents do when considering comprehensive religious schools. For those who see Islamic schooling as a viable option, supporters claim that these schools help to (1) preserve the culture and customs passed down from generation to generation, and (2) provide Muslim children with a proper identity consonant with one's home environment, thereby ensuring a positive sense of self. In this article the author will explore the role that Muslim parents play in Islamic schooling; in particular the author will examine the reasons why those parents who favor Islamic schools do, and what they hope to gain either for themselves or their children by enrolling them.     

Locating Self in the World: Elementary school children in Japan,Macau and Hong Kong

In the so-called 'global age', the issue of how children learn to locate themselves in the world is an important one. Working from a foundation of theories related to globalisation, identity development and citizenship education, this paper describes the findings of a research project which explored elementary school children's geographical and affective location of the self in Japan, Macau and Hong Kong. Analysis and discussion of Japanese education policy is then presented in an attempt to explain the finding that Japanese children are far less likely than their counterparts in Hong Kong and Macau to locate themselves in an international sphere.     

Australian Students’ democratic values and attitudes towards participation: indicators from the IEA civic education study

In September 1999, over 3000 Australian students in 115 schools representing all schooling sectors participated in the Australian component of the IEA Civic Education study. In this paper, the focus in particular is on Australian students’ democratic values and on their attitudes towards participation and social action. The results suggest that while Australian students have a well-developed set of democratic values, they adopt a passive rather than an active style of engaging in conventional citizenship activities. They will participate formally through voting and they will pursue issues where they see some community benefit but they do not see themselves exercising an effective presence in the formal political system. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to the characteristics of citizens needed in a democratic society and the role that schools can play in adopting curriculum and pedagogy that will engage young people in the development of their civic knowledge.     

Drawing out the value of the visual: children and young people theorizing time through art and narrative

This article examines the role that drawing can play in enabling children and young people to theorize concepts of time. In two, independent Australian research projects, children aged between 5 and 8 years were asked to respond to the question, ‘What might the future be like?’, while 12–14 year olds were asked, ‘What does history look like?’ There are points of connection and convergence in the analysis of the drawings and the ways in which the children articulate their visual representations of temporality to demonstrate deep and philosophical insights. This research illuminates possibilities for both the value of art practices in learning and the capacity for such approaches in schools. It disrupts narrow visions of neoliberal policy that privileges the teaching of literacy and numeracy in schools and seeks to transform children and youth into particular citizens for the future. We argue that expanding our view of the use and value of visual forms of learning and expression can contribute to a more layered and complex understanding of the capacities of children and young people. Further, this research contributes to better understanding of how students navigate challenging local curriculum and school terrain as they are increasingly posited as global citizens.     

Transnationalism in the Australian Curriculum: new horizons or destinations of the past?

Educationally, it is arguable that transnationalism has been primarily framed around course delivery by educational institutions within international contexts. However, it is a more complex notion, incorporating ideas such as global citizenship and intercultural understanding. Consequently, if the Australian Curriculum is the national substantiation of Australia's educational priorities, designed to prepare young Australians for a globalised future, it should reflect such transnationalist elements. This paper contends that, despite contrary impressions, the Australian Curriculum is more of a protective reinforcement of older conceptions of a ‘Western’ community than one centred on forward-looking global principles. Its codifications dominate at the cost of acknowledging other points of reference that represent a collective transnational sensibility, and thus it embodies a lost national opportunity. Recent criticisms that the Australian Curriculum fails to adequately reflect ‘Western’ civilisation are ill-founded, as they ignore the strong presence of ‘Western’ intellectual constructs throughout the Australian Curriculum's design and content.     

Globalisation, identity, and nation: Australian and American undergraduates abroad

In this essay, I explore how two groups of undergraduates — Americans and Australians — participate in the reformulation of the “global imagination” through their experiences of studying abroad. Specifically, I question the assumption that the global imagination constitutes one shared, common experience that is the same across nations. In contrast, I demonstrate that though American and Australian students are certainly among the elite in global terms, their shared economic position does not necessarily correspond to a common global imagination. Instead, they have markedly different notions of both national and global identities. American students’ strong national identity often prevents them from exploring the possibilities of global affiliation. Australian students’ relatively weak national identity allows for a robust global sense of place, but is sometimes constrained by a limited tolerance for racial and ethnic diversity. In conclusion, I argue that the global imagination has not one, but numerous manifestations, which have the potential to both enable and constrain the enhancement of justice and democracy in a global context.     

Evaluation of education in the European Union: Policy and methodology

Given the new European institutional environment for education and training, policy and methodology for evaluation have become closely interwoven and stakes have been raised. This emerging situation calls for a robust reappraisal of existing comparative evaluation data and systems in the light of the perceived needs of European countries and of the specificity of European policies. Educational evaluation in Europe is not meant to compare results in the usual sense of the word but rather to help set global policy objectives and provide data to see if those are reached within national contexts. Is it really possible to do this without developing a 'unified' European understanding and methodology of evaluation? To what extent can existing national and international data be used for the purpose, knowing that in some instances they measure aspects of education which are either not relevant for or are contrary to the educational objectives of the construction of the Union? What are the alternatives? What are the consequences for education and for assessment research in Europe?     

The Absence of Knowledge in Australian Curriculum Reforms

This article draws on a study of Australian curriculum shifts between 1975 and 2005 to take up two themes of this special issue: the question about what conceptions of knowledge are now at work; and the consideration of global influences and national specificities in the reformulations of curriculum. It discusses two important approaches to curriculum in Australia in recent times, the 'Statements and Profiles' activity of the early 1990s, and the 'Essential Learnings' formulations of the past decade. The global tendencies we see at work in these two major approaches are, first, an increasing emphasis on externally managing and auditing student progress as a key driver of how curriculum policies are being constructed; and, secondly, a growing emphasis on approaching curriculum aims in terms of what students should be able to do rather than what they should know. We argue that in the contexts we discuss here, these approaches offered a way of marrying 1970s progressive views on child development and knowledge-as-process (views widely held by influential curriculum professionals in Australia) with late 20^th century technologies of micro-management and instrumental agendas favoured by politicians — but that many questions about knowledge were left off the agenda.     

公民教育目标的当代建构

公民教育当以培养时代公民为目标。公民是一个历史的概念,时代不同,公民的身份和素质要求不同。公民不是臣民,就在于他是一个权利主体;公民不是私民,就在于他参与公共生活。不同时代公民公共生活性质和范围不同,当代公民不仅生活在民族国家内,还生活在公民社会和全球社会中,因此,当代公民应当是权利公民、国家公民、社会公民和世界公民四重身份的统一。公民教育应该在个人生活、国家生活、社会生活、国际生活中培养具有公民知识、能力、德行、能力的复合型公民。     

Positioning Australian Universities for the 21st Century

Based on the assumption that corporate learning is a growing sector that will be serviced by companies providing learning opportunities and services quickly and efficiently on a business-to-business (B2B) basis, using electronic technologies, the paper argues on the basis of Australian experience that higher education will undergo very considerable change. In Australia universities are being encouraged to become trading enterprises; they are forming cartels and partnerships; and they are increasingly focusing on the global market. However, they are at risk of competition from large, global, non-university sector players who see education as a market. This article explores the paradigm shifts that are driving change, and provides an insight into one company's vision of what the future might look like.