Education in the Sudan: the privileging of an Islamic discourse

This article examines the educational discourse in the part of the Sudan administered by the Government of the Sudan. It first analyses the value system upon which the Sudanese education is based by focusing on the nature of Islamism. Such a discussion is necessary because the dominant discourse is a discourse where power and Islamic theocracy legitimise each other and spill over into the educational discourse. Given the ethnic and religious complexity in the Sudan the imposition of a fundamentalist Islamic discourse is fiercely contested. The second part of the article, therefore, discusses the educational discourse of the government and relates it to the oppositional discourses in the country. It pays particular attention to the homogenising efforts of the dominant discourse to eradicate difference as a constituting factor in the Sudanese education system. The attempts to recognise difference have not led to a fundamental negotiation of the consequences of Islamism in the official school system.     

US news media portrayal of Islam and Muslims: a corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

This article exploits the synergy of critical discourse studies and Corpus Linguistics to study the pervasive representation of Islam and Muslims in an approximate 670,000-word corpus of US news media stories published between 2001 and 2015. Following collocation and concordance analysis of the most frequent topics or categories which revolve around the representation of Islam and Muslims in US news stories, the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to investigate how the discursive strategies of nomination (construction of in-groups and out-groups) and predication (labeling social actors more or less positively or negatively) are used in US news media stories. The findings indicated that, in general, Islam and Muslims are associated with violence, religious radicalism, and Islamic extremist militants. Finally, the article discusses the discursive themes resulting from the analysis of personal pronouns as well as the educational implications of the findings for social studies and multicultural education.     

Are Muslim women in need of Islamic feminism? In consideration of a re-imagined Islamic educational discourse

In its remonstrations against male patriarchy, common understandings of Islamic feminism have, on the one hand, claimed attachment to other forms of feminism. On the other hand, because of its location within the structures of Qur’anic exegesis and prophetic traditions, it has claimed a detachment from what has been understood as the largely secular base of other forms of feminism. Inasmuch, however, as there continues to be disagreement about feminism in its conceptions of the identity of women, gender recognition and inclusion, Islamic feminism has remained unproblematised. In this article, I wish to address two questions. Firstly, to what extent is Islamic feminism based on a bifurcationist or divergent understanding of Islamic education? And secondly, to what extent should Islamic feminism be reconsidered as a discourse of Islamic education? In addressing these questions, I argue that there are two possible solutions to the prevalence of social inequality experienced by Muslim women. One is a reformation of Islamic education. And secondly, that Muslim women need to engage and deliberate with the discourse of the Qur’an, so that they can begin to bring into contestation the privilege of male interpretation.     

Governance and knowledge transformations in educational administration: Greek responses to global policies

This article explores the localisation of the global and European discourse of educational governance in the Greek education system through the changes that have been introduced in the field of education administration since 2009 by the then socialist government. Our research aims to contribute to the critical policy literature on the spreading marketisation and privatisation in the governing of education around the world and in Europe – through the adoption of New Public Management and Educational Leadership models. In developing our theoretical perspective, we use the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and discourse, and in order to conceptualise power and control relations in the organisation, transmission, acquisition, and evaluation of pedagogical knowledge, we draw on Bernstein's theory of symbolic control. Our study has examined how the field of education administration is governed through power and knowledge transformations. We trace these transformations by analysing systematically the pedagogic discourse through which the global governance discourse is relayed and becomes a ‘regime of truth’ within public policy and practice in Greece. We argue that such changes have significant implications for everyday educational practice and for the kinds of knowledge that are considered legitimate, and they may affect educational professionals' subjectivities in fundamental ways.     

Hope and fear in education for sustainable development

Education for sustainable development represents a politically prioritized area of knowledge in contemporary Swedish education and as such it has acquired a prominent position among the governing values of educational policy. Insofar as education for sustainable development is directed at securing the future of human well-being, this article suggests that it concerns a moral discourse where notions about what may or may not happen in the future plays an important role in the governance of practices and behaviors in the present. Since the future is shrouded in uncertainty, it is suggested that the emotions of hope and fear may be understood in terms of tools for governing the everyday lives of children, invoking alluring and deterrent images that influence their decision-making. Besides seeking to gain a better understanding of some of the preconditions of education for sustainable development, the aim of this article concerns an investigation into some of the effects that education for sustainable development may have on the lives of children. To this end, it looks at how hope and fear are being put into play within the discourse as strategies for governing individuals in relation to the uncertainty of the future.     

Portuguese,French and British discourses on colonial education: Church–State relations,school expansion and missionary competition in Africa, 1890–1930

This article draws a comparison between the Portuguese in relation to British and French discourses on overseas educational policies at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century until the 1930s. It focuses on three main colonial educational dynamics: school expansion (comparing the public and private sectors); State–Church relations (comparing these relationships at the European and colonial levels); and missionary competition (comparing Catholic with Protestant strategies towards educational incorporation). Colonial discourse is seen here as a power‐knowledge discourse aimed at constructing the colonial subjects as individuals, enabling them to imagine themselves as belonging to a particular cultural polity. The article intends to show how cross‐national discourses on education affect the principles on which theories of schooling are built and the ways in which they influence the first attempts to systematize pedagogical and school models in the colonial peripheries. On the other hand, it tries to understand, within government technologies of domination, the conflicting views, negotiations and ambiguities between global policy formulation and local school system implementation. In this sense, the author sought to analyse the different ways in which concepts such as ‘assimilation’, ‘civilizing mission’, ‘adapted education’, and ‘learning by doing’ were mobilized and appropriated into the colonial education discourses in order to legitimize particular governmental strategies. Two main ideas run through the text: the first attempts to demonstrate the existence of discontinuities between official educational ideologies at home and local system and school expansion strategies in the colonies. The second claims that educational borrowing from other colonies at the Empires' peripheries was, more often that is thought, a crucial feature of colonial educational discourse.     

Gender and the expansion of university education in Jordan

This article explores how gender is threaded through the expansion and privatization of higher education in Jordan. Due to the justified current concern with the educational deficit of Muslim girls, it is easy to overlook the educational advances made by girls in some Islamic countries. In Jordan, girls have profited more than boys from the expansion of higher education. Economic or political reasons cannot explain this change, so explanations for the advancement of girls in the universities have to be sought elsewhere. I argue here that, for Jordan, this female advancement is linked to the commercialization of education set in motion by the early mission schools, the re‐Islamization of society, and the prestige system of ‘culturedness’. For this article, I have drawn upon qualitative anthropological data gathered through interviews with students, staff and parents in Jordan and from an analysis of higher education statistics.     

Involved fatherhood? Exploring the educational work of middle‐class men

The present paper explores middle‐class fathers’ educational work by studying how they and their partners are involved in their children’s education at home, in school, and how they investigate school options and make decisions about educational issues. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of 30 dual‐earner couples in the Greater Los Angeles area, this article analyses how fathers position themselves in relation to discourses on parental involvement in education. In order to demonstrate the variety of ways fathers are involved three case studies are presented. It is illustrated how the men, by drawing on a discourse on involved fatherhood, position themselves in line with an ideal of parental involvement in education. Fathers who are doing less educational work than their spouses offer accounts for not taking a greater educational responsibility by drawing on a breadwinner discourse or by depicting mothers as gatekeepers of father involvement.     

Twenty-Year Evolution of Discourse System of China’s Educational Economics

Although the discourse system of China’s educational economics has a short history of only 20 years, it has gained an important position in the discourse system of pedagogy. This system consists of rich discourse branches including the relations between education and economy, educational investment and educational finance, educational cost and educational benefit, changes and innovation in education system and utilization and efficiency of educational resources. All the above discourse branches show various characteristics in different stages. From their development and changes, the following features of discourse system of educational economics can be drawn: the specialty of discourse, the trend of time of discourse themes, the positivism of discourse expressions and the applicability of discourse nature and contention of Chinese perspectives. To further improve the quality of the discourse system, the emphasis of educational economic studies should be laid upon the improvement of research attitude, theoretical basis, content and methodology. Translated from Educational Research, 2004:12     

Educational leadership: an Islamic perspective

Ethnocentric concepts, theories and practices in education, predominantly embedded in western philosophy and values, tend to ignore the growing multicultural nature of educational institutions. This article draws attention to the knowledge gap in mainstream literature regarding diverse perspectives of educational leadership—an issue which is foreseen as gaining higher significance with the fast‐changing societal structures in Britain. Having worked as a Muslim woman educational leader/manager in higher education in an Islamic state for more than two decades, and now working at a British university, positioned as a non‐White woman Muslim, the author endorses the need to move beyond ethnocentrisms and to work towards developing complex theoretical constructs to reconceptualise educational leadership, drawing from perspectives held by diverse ethnic groups—students and communities. How learners from diverse philosophical and ethnic backgrounds conceive and perceive educational leadership, and how they receive it, is bound to interact with their learning experience and performance. This article briefly introduces leadership as a concept formulated in context. It presents philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of these conceptualisations from an Islamic perspective, and highlights the interplay between knowledge and leadership. The article deliberates how these discourses interact to formulate ‘educational leadership’ in Muslim societies, and explores the implications of these constructions with a focus on the British context, where Muslims are in a minority, pointing to the significance of understanding philosophical diversity for embracing population diversity.     

Divisions,diversity and educational directives: IRE teachers’ didactic choices in Kisumu,Kenya

The present article focuses on the choices teachers make when teaching Islamic religious education (IRE) in the town of Kisumu, Kenya. The data were collected through interviews with IRE teachers and participant observations in schools that offered IRE during several fieldwork sessions in the period 2003–2006. The fieldwork revealed that the choices teachers made were related to social and religious contexts both inside and outside the school setting and also the more immediate contexts of the teaching–learning situation. Most clearly, the choices were influenced by the fact that IRE is an examinable subject in a larger educational system. This article claims that an alternation between a confessional education into Islam and a more fact‐oriented education about Islam was a strategy used by some teachers balancing between competing demands posed by the educational system, students, parents and the surrounding local society.     

What Islamic school teachers want: towards developing an Islamic teacher education programme

In the 70 year history of Islamic schools in North America, there is yet to be an accredited teacher education programme to train and professionally equip Islamic school teachers with an understanding of an Islamic pedagogy. Arguably, there has been an imbalance of energy placed on curriculum development projects over the considerations of teacher training. From my experience working as a teacher trainer/education consultant for Islamic schools for the past 10 years, it is evident that the underlying assumption for many school administrators is that a State/Ministry certified teacher who is Muslim will know how to teach ‘Islamically’. The aims of this paper are to first establish some semblance of what it means to teach Islamically or, more accurately, to teach through an Islamic pedagogy. From this framework, the crux of the paper is to present findings from a series of focus groups with Islamic school educators about their teacher training needs. The findings of this study establish the need for a formal teacher education programme in Islamic pedagogy within an established faculty of education. Such a programme would achieve three major ends in cultivating the stewardship of Islamic schools in North America: 1. Define and establish Islamic education as a valid and relevant pedagogical model that can contribute to the broader discourse of alternative, faith-based education;

2. Standardise the pedagogy and curriculum of Islamic schools based on the principles of education in Islam and to make both contextually relevant;

3. Contribute to raising the standards of Islamic schools through a teacher education programme at credible faculties of education where ongoing research and development will also be supported.

     

Re‐envisioning the Future: Democratic Citizenship Education and Islamic Education

In this article we address the issue of why democratic citizenship education should be incorporated more meaningfully into Islamic education discourses in formal institutions in the Arab and Muslim world. In the Arab and Muslim world civic and national education seem to be the dominant discourses. We argue that the latter discourses are inadequate to address some of the dystopias in the Arab and Muslim world such as the perpetuation of patriarchy, uncritical obedience to the state (often dictatorships), and blind patriotism. Consequently we posit that unless a culture of acceptance and hospitality (i.e. cosmopolitanism) is cultivated at Islamic educational institutions the possibility of democratic citizenship education unfolding is quite remote. That is, the future of Islamic education can only be re‐envisioned if an amended version of democratic citizenship education can inform Islamic education discourses in institutions—one constituted by a culture of acceptance and hospitality.     

Problematizing global educational governance of OECD PISA: Student achievement,categorization, and social inclusion and exclusion

Abstract

This study problematizes the global educational governance of OECD PISA and its statistical data as a governing technology in contemporary discourses of education reforms. The study examines principles that order the discourses and practices of the international comparative assessment. The effort of analysing the impact of an education reform regime led by OECD PISA reveals how statistical reasoning defines problems in educational systems and forms social discourse surrounding educational reform to solve such problems. In doing so, this article focuses on standardization, classification, and normalization for measuring and comparing student achievement and national effectiveness. The study also offers an alternative way of considering the politics of inclusion and exclusion embedded in practices of education reforms propelled by the international comparative assessment.     

WHAT UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS THINK OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

This article examines the tenets of today's two contemporary traditions in Islam, neo-traditional Salafism and liberal or progressive Islam and analyzes how they cultivate a typology of Islamic religious education. The typology under study clarifies the meaning of tarbi yya and ta`dib in Islamic educational philosophy and demonstrates the place of these goals within a continuum of critical versus noncritical talim (teaching) in Islamic religious education. The purpose of this typology is to provide both scholars and practitioners a theoretical framework for thought and reflection about their pedagogic methods and scholarly work.     

Language Games and Schooling: Discourses of colonialism in Kiribati education

The present secondary education system in Kiribati is little changed from its establishment and growth through the colonial years when the island group was known as the Gilbert Islands. It is marked by a heavy emphasis on English language and a curriculum geared to place students in a limited labour market. It is also marked by an uneven distribution of privilege across the population it serves. This article suggests a theoretical basis for critiquing the dominant voices in the educational and colonial past and their representations of Kiribati others. In such a critique, the legitimising technologies and discursive practices that have helped shape these educational practices are exposed. The act of exposing “how they did it” in turn creates the conditions for more equitable educational futures. This article presents a critical postcolonial discourse analysis of some language and language teaching policies from the Kiribati educational and colonial past. Though focused on Kiribati, the ideas here have relevance across the Pacific region.     

The legitimation of OECD's global educational governance: examining PISA and AHELO test production

Although international student assessments and the role of international organisations (IOs) in governing education via an evidence-based educational policy discourse are of growing interest to educational researchers, few have explored the complex ways in which an IO, such as the OECD, gains considerable influence in governing education during the early stages of test production. Drawing on a comparative analysis of the production of two international tests – the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) – we show how the OECD legitimises its power, and expertise, and defines ‘what counts’ in education. The OECD deploys three mechanisms of educational governance: (1) building on past OECD successes; (2) assembling knowledge capacity; and (3) deploying bureaucratic resources. We argue that the early stages of test production by IOs are significant sites in which the global governance of education is legitimated and enacted.     

Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse

I argue that analyses of racial(ised) discourse and policy processes in education must grapple with cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness. This article explains how a theorization of antiblackness allows one to more precisely identify and respond to racism in education discourse and in the formation and implementation of education policy. I contend that deeply embedded within racialized policy discourses is not merely a concern about disproportionality or inequality, but also a concern with the bodies of Black people, the signification of (their) Blackness, and the threat posed by the Black to the educational well-being of other students. Using school (de)segregation as an example, I demonstrate how policy discourse is informed by antiblackness, and consider what an awareness of antiblackness means for educational policy and practice.     

中国教育经济学话语演进二十年

中国教育经济学话语体系虽然只有二十余年的发展历程,但它在教育学话语体系中已经取得重要地位。它有丰富的话语分支,包括教育和经济的关系、教育投资和教育财政、教育成本和收益、教育制度变革和创新、教育资源利用和效益。这些话语分支在不同阶段呈现出不同的特点,从它们的发展变化中可以归纳出教育经济学话语体系有如下特征:话语者的专业性、话语主题的时代性、话语表述的实证性、话语性质的应用性、话语观点的争鸣性。展望未来,方了进一步提高话语体系的品质,教育经济学研究必须在研究态度、理论基础、內容方法等多方面加以改进。     

Addressing issues of religious difference through values education: an Islam instance

The article’s main focus is on exploring ways in which modern forms of values education are being utilized to address major issues of social dissonance, with special focus on dissonance related to religious difference between students of Islamic and non‐Islamic backgrounds. The article begins by appraising philosophical and neuroscientific research relevant to the underpinning concepts behind such forms of education. It then explores evidence from the federally funded Australian Values Education Program, and its various related research projects, that suggests that values education has potential to impact on a range of educational measures, including those related to enhancing understanding and tolerance across lines of religious difference.