The vocational turn of adult education in Denmark – an analysis of adult education policy from the late 1990s

ABSTRACT

Denmark has a strong and versatile tradition of adult education. Over a long historical period, adult education for public enlightenment and leisure, for continuing study and for vocational and professional competence have been developed, been made part of state policy and been used by citizens. But in recent years the public and political presence of Danish adult education has changed. While education policy issues generally abound in public and political debates, adult education is given much less attention than earlier. In this article, we trace the causes of this and conclude that it reflects a turn towards focusing on vocational types of adult education and a relocation of adult education policy to networks linking the state and the social partners. Drawing on theories of policy streams, policy networks and the competition state, we provide a historical analysis of Danish adult education reforms during the past two decades and document how the vocational turn has manifested itself.     

Accountability,control and freedom in teacher education in England: Towards a panoptican

This article presents a socio-historical analysis of teacher education in Britain, tracing the changing agents and nature of control of, and consequent levels of freedom in, the enterprise from its inception to the present day. It illustrates the evolution from church, through university to state control and the limited role of the teaching and teacher education professions in each. In doing so it identifies teacher education as a disputed territory of conflicting tendencies, which currently faces unprecedented and draconian central government control and identifies the major factors related to change. It further traces how in the period since the second world war the main source of control has shifted from institution to state, and the main object of control from the student, to teacher educators, to the content and nature of teacher preparation, to the present where all these are centrally controlled, in a fashion not only foreign to British education history but also its culture.     

A Collaborative Approach for Teachers' In-service Training

Abstract

To different degrees, Western industrial societies are both democratic and capitalist. In some respects, the tenets of democracy and the functional needs of capitalism are at odds. The state must try to manage the tensions between the two, particularly through its education policy, including that for teacher education. This paper analyses how teacher education policy since 1980 has been influenced by these tensions. It argues that current policy in teacher education is vulnerable to the objection that it is not democratic, but cautions that those calling for a more democratic basis for teacher education might be equally vulnerable to the objection that they focus too much on the democratic ends of education rather than on the technicalities of teaching. The analysis refers mainly to Britain and the United States.     

Graduate employability and educational context: a comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands

Within policy circles, graduate employability remains a problem. It is often understood as an individual phenomenon, overlooking the influence of the organisation of higher education on the competition for graduate jobs. This article explores and compares how graduate employability is socially constructed within Great Britain and the Netherlands. It provides an analysis of both Dutch and British systems of higher education and explains how they shape the positional competition for graduate jobs. In addition it shows how perceptions of employability of final year university students relate to these two educational systems. The article is based on an empirical study on graduate employability in both countries using both micro analysis as well as contextual analysis. The article shows a fit between educational structure and employability strategies. The educational context shapes graduates' understandings and expectations of the competition for graduate jobs.     

A tale of two countries – forty years on: politics and teacher education in Russia and England

Abstract

The relationships between politics and teacher education have become increasingly close over recent decades in many contexts around the world, often causing significant challenges as well as some opportunities. In this article, we draw on a project on the reform of teacher education in Russia and through a comparison with the development of teacher education policy in England – especially over the last forty years – we explore how the evolution of a new politics in both contexts has affected policy on teaching and teacher education. Looking, for example, at ‘post-communism’ and ‘neoliberalism’ and their respective impacts on political systems, a number of contradictions and paradoxes are identified, when comparisons are drawn between the two systems.     

Progress and the people: histories of mass education and conceptions of Britishness, 1870–1914

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the history of mass education as it was written in Great Britain between 1870 and 1914 became an important site for debating what it meant to be British and the nature of progress. In particular, it explores different perspectives on when and where to begin a history of mass education, whom or what to make central to it, and what guidance the past offered for the future. Disagreements over these seemingly narrow questions reflected broader disagreements about what it meant to be British (including whether there was a deep-seated national character at all); the nature of the union; and how and why progress happened.     

The Shifting Relationship between Vocational and Higher Education in France and Germany: towards convergence?

In Europe, the Bologna and Copenhagen Processes in higher education (HE) and vocational education and training (VET) are on the agenda, aiming to create a European educational area. Acknowledging important differences between countries, we compare the evolving relationship between HE and VET. We ask whether and how these two distinct organisational fields in France and Germany have changed in recent decades. Comparing institutional shifts, the article analyses whether long-standing differences in postsecondary education and training systems and the education/economy nexus in these two countries have remained stable. We argue that these countries’ skill formation systems have begun to converge, departing from their original institutionalisation paths. Thus, while the traditional typologies that contrast France and Germany have served as useful heuristic devices, they require revision to adequately represent incremental institutional change in these skill formation systems resulting from endogenous reforms and exogenous pressures due to Europeanisation.     

Reforming Technical and Technological Education

ABSTRACT

This paper examines selected reform efforts in technical and technological education from a comparative perspective. The similarities and differences between reforms in selected countries – Brazil, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden – are analysed to determine major world‐wide trends. Lessons are drawn which should be useful for nations contemplating reform of their education and training systems. Particular attention is focussed on the time taken to complete reforms effectively and the need for long‐term approaches, relationships between educational reforms and industrial development, the interdependence of reforms affecting general, technical and vocational education, regional co‐operation and the decentralisation of national decision‐making.     

Concepts,Curriculum and Classroom Practice: Some Issues for Consideration

Abstract

Scotland has been in the forefront of media education developments in Britain in recent years. Here, David Butts reflects on the research which he has been carrying out over the past three years into what is happening in the classroom and how teachers themselves perceive their work in this area. David Butts is a Research Fellow at the University of Stirling.     

高等教育大众化与制度创新

制度创新是美英德日四国高等教育大众化进程的共同特征 ,亦是我国实现高等教育大众化的一种必然选择。我国实现高等教育大众化的制度创新 ,应以办学模式的创新、管理体制的创新和投资体制的创新为重点。     

Mapping violence,naming life: a history of anti-Black oppression in the higher education system

Abstract

The article will provide a historical overview of anti-Black violence in the higher education system across three time periods: Colonial Era, Post-Civil War, and the mid-to-late twentieth century. Mapping violence demands a focus on how higher education historically has practiced anti-Black oppression coupled with how Black people have practiced resistance and life-making. Both the terms education violence (how systems of schooling limit and kill Black lives) and life-making (how Black people engage in alternative self-definition and self-care) are introduced to name pivotal moments in this history. Defining violence at structural, cultural, and direct levels, the paper accounts for how higher education has been an engine and reflection of racial hierarchy. The article ends with the implications history has for issues of anti-Blackness and movements for Black life-making in the higher education system today.     

International Collaborations in Teacher Education: a constructivist approach to using electronic mail for communication in partnership with schools

ABSTRACT

This article deals with collaborative projects carried out in co‐operation with teacher‐training/Higher Education institutions and schools around the world. Partners for these links included the University of Helsinki (Finland), City College (New York, USA), the Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia) and the University of Oldenburg (Germany). A rationale is offered for the use of telecommunications, especially electronic mail, in co‐operative projects of this kind and the potential is explored for further networks with research and development aspects. The article draws upon previous presentations and discussions at conferences in Germany, Australia, USA and the United Kingdom. Recent developments concerning links between initial teacher education and schools in Britain are examined briefly and suggestions offered for ways in which electronic mail can facilitate such links.     

The Videodisc in Classroom Teaching

Abstract

This article consists of a report on a research project set up in the Federal Republic of Germany to look into the potential applications of new systems and technologies in the field of education. The various functions and possible uses of videodiscs are considered in some detail before conclusions are outlined concerning the current position of the integration of the videodisc into the education system.     

Reading,engagement and higher education

ABSTRACT

This article explores the close association between higher education and reading. I draw on the resources of literary studies to illuminate the phenomenon of educational ‘engagement’. I explore the accounts of reading offered in the phenomenological literary theory of Rita Felski and Marielle Macé and extend their ‘stylistics of existence’ into higher education to elaborate engagement’s ‘eventful’ character: it is not in the power of teacher or student to ‘bring about’ engagement. In place of pedagogical ‘method’, I demonstrate how Padraig Hogan’s treatment of education as the ‘courtship of sensibility’ is consistent with this phenomenological treatment of engagement. I am thus able to illustrate how engagement is in tension with instrumental approaches to teaching and learning. I conclude by offering an ethical relation of mutual belonging to subject matter as a corrective to the centrality of ‘knowledge’ in recent attempts to unify the different degrees and objects of engagement.     

Young People in Vichy France and Forced Labour in Germany∗

Abstract

The focus in this article is not on the state‐university relationship itself but,

• (a) on the contribution which the way in which the university is governed makes to the political socialisation of its members to the values of a liberal democracy, and

• (b) on the extent, if at all, to which that contribution has been eroded in recent years in Britain and West Germany.

• It is assumed that universities are agencies of political socialisation and that because they educate future elites they are particularly important ones. The further assumption is made that the character of the university's internal and external governance constitutes an important part of such political socialisation.

• The main changes in the governing arrangements of West German universities, introduced over the last 15 years, as part of university reform, and of British universities, brought about in more recent years by financial retrenchment, are briefly investigated and their significance for the university as an agency of liberal democratic political socialisation suggested.

• Two main conclusions are reached. First, that no lasting structural change has so far been done to university autonomy in Britain, despite clear threats to that autonomy, or to the capacity of the universities in Britain to act as effective agencies of political socialisation in a liberal democracy. Secondly, the historical ambivalence in the structure of the German university between academic freedom à l'allemande and regulation by the state remains, despite some changes, essentially intact and inhibits the West German university's value as an agency of liberal‐democratic political socialisation.

     

Post mortem or post modern? Some reflections on British sociology of education

Abstract

The current state of British sociology of education is reviewed; noting its decline, but suggesting that its influence has been dispersed throughout educational research in Britain. It is argued that its fate is not simply a product of external attack but also derives from internal problems. Against this background, it is suggested that postmodernism can be treated as a stimulus for a fundamental reconsideration of the proper nature and role of academic research on education.     

The Future of Educational Research

Abstract

In order to determine the allocation of money for projects in continuing and vocational education, government agencies in the UK are providing more and more opportunities to bid for targeted funding. This article provides an overview of recent changes in funding policy in higher education and examines how such changes have impacted on continuing education deparatments in higher education, pointing up the increasing pressure to bid for UK government and European Union funds to develop provision which was once outside their sphere of operation. There appears to be little or no theoretical account of the effects of the growth in competitive tendering on continuing education, and so the impact of this relatively new funding strategy on staff and institutions is studied in order to assess its efficacy and significance for the sector as a whole. This study contextualises the familiar differences in culture between liberal adult education and vocational endeavours and between continuing education and ‘mainstream’ higher education. It also reinforces recent calls for a coherent policy of funding for continuing education.

     

Envisioned and enacted practices: educational policies and the ‘politics of use’ in schools

ABSTRACT

It is widely known that there is a discrepancy between educational policy on the one side, and teaching and learning practices on the other. Most studies have been focusing on the sociocultural and micropolitical frames that shape teachers’ understandings and enactments of teaching, and that cause the vast diversity of classroom practices around the world. This article wants to draw attention to the ‘politics of use’ in teachers’ work: how teachers mobilize larger political narratives when implementing curriculum reform. Arguably, these narratives provide a shortcut between the central government and street-level actors, thus circumventing the logics of these actors’ immediate institutional environments.

In order to showcase the politics of use, the article uses the case of education for creativity as it is designed for and practiced at Chinese schools. The case reveals how education for creativity is compromised by requirements emanating from larger political programs when implemented in Chinese classrooms. The article challenges the view that educational policy necessarily moves through a trickle-down process, from higher to medium to lower-level actors. In cases of strong ideological alignment between street-level actors and central state actors, educational policy may in fact sidestep and hence neutralize important institutional actors.     

Does integration count for much? An analysis of the practices of integration in eight countries

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the state of the art of integration in eight western countries: Italy, Denmark, Sweden, United States, Germany, England, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both qualitative and quantitative information on integration practices is given, and from these findings general conclusions on similarities and differences in integration efforts and results are discussed. The differences in the incidence of special needs students in eight countries are mainly to be explained by the differences in registration procedures to enter special facilities in regular or special education. Despite these differences it seems that in all countries involved at least 1.5 per cent of all students is difficult to integrate in regular education settings.     

Student independence in undergraduate projects: different understandings in different academic contexts

ABSTRACT

Independence is a concept of scholarly interest in relation to higher education, especially when it comes to undergraduate projects. At the same time independence is characterised by a certain conceptual ambiguity, and, consequently, tends to be understood differently in different academic contexts, both nationally, internationally and interdisciplinary. Based on the existing research in the field, we see a need for more studies on how supervisors of undergraduate projects handle this conceptual ambiguity. The aim of this article is, thus, to examine how supervisors from two different education programmes, teacher education and journalism, in two different countries, Sweden and Russia, understand the concept of independence within higher education in connection with the supervision of undergraduate projects. The analysis is based on 12 focus-group interviews with supervisors at different universities in the two countries. In our results, we highlight and discuss seven different understandings of independence that were recurrent in our material and in which phases of the undergraduate project they were seen as most significant. Using Wittgenstein’s ideas on family resemblances, we conclude with a discussion of how the concept independence may be understood in relation to some associated concepts that are also significant within higher education.