Towards a ‘critical cultural political economy’ account of the globalising of education

This paper outlines the basis of an alternative theoretical approach to the study of the globalisation of ‘education’ – a Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) approach. Our purpose here is to bring this body of concepts – critical, cultural, political, economy – into our interrogation of globalising projects and processes within what we will refer to as the ‘education ensemble’ as the topic of enquiry, whose authoritative, allocative, ideational and feeling structures, properties and practices, emerge from and play into global economic, political and cultural processes In the first half of the paper we introduce and develop the concepts that will underpin our approach. In the second half of the paper we explore the explanatory potential and epistemic gain of a CCPEE approach by examining the different manifestations of the relationship between globalisation as a political, cultural and economic project and an education ensemble. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities this perspective offers.     

When ‘we wish they knew’ meets ‘I want to know’

ABSTRACT

The tension between mandated curricula and students’ interests is evident throughout the history of science education. Societal expectations for student learning often lead to standards and curricula that leave little room for students to explore their own individual interests. Occasionally, however, an event can capture the interest of so many students that teachers feel compelled to respond. The Ebola outbreak of 2014 was such an event. This article discusses findings from a study of teacher decision-making; specifically, it explores how high school science teachers in the U.S. decided whether and how they should address Ebola during the 2014–2015 school year, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was at its peak. Approximately 2500 teachers of science responded to an online questionnaire that addressed their Ebola-specific instruction. In comparing the decisions of those who taught about Ebola and those who did not, the study found that teachers weighed various factors, in particular student interest but also curriculum standards, time, and availability of resources for teaching about Ebola. The article concludes with implications for future urgent health-related issues.     

Being ‘nice’ or being ‘normal’: girls resisting discourses of ‘coolness’

In this paper we consider discourses of friendship and belonging mobilised by girls who are not part of the dominant ‘cool’ group in one English primary school. We explore how, by investing in alternative and, at times, resistant, discourses of ‘being nice’ and ‘being normal’ these ‘non-cool’ girls were able to avoid some of the struggles for dominance and related bullying and exclusion found by us and other researchers to be a feature of ‘cool girls’ groupings. We argue that there are multiple dynamics in girls' lives in which being ‘cool’ is only sometimes a dominant concern. There are some children for whom explicitly positioning themselves outside of the ‘cool’ group is both resistant and protective, providing a counter-discourse to the dominance of ‘coolness’. In this paper, which is based on observational and interview data in one school in the south of England, we focus on two main groupings of intermediate and lower status girls, as well as on one ‘wannabe’ ‘cool girl’. While belonging to a lower status group can bring disadvantages for the girls we studied, there were also benefits.     

Unit 9 When was he born？

学会并能运用以when引导的时间状语从句。运用when／how long开头的特殊疑问词提问，并作出相应的回答。能运用所学的词汇和时态，谈论人物的出生和主要事迹等。     

Unit 9 When was he born?

学习指南本单元的话题是谈论一些著名的运动员、音乐家的成长经历,通过这一话题学习运用结构较为复杂的句子,去描述过去发生的事情。单元出现了多种一般过去时的特殊疑问句及由when引导的时间状语从句,这是本单元语法方面的重点。在学习过程中,同学们可以先复习巩固U8中一般过去时的简单句,在此基础上逐渐过渡到本单元结构较为复杂的句子上,这样学起来难度会降低些。同时,要求同学们通过对话、采访等活动及听、说、读、写的训练,逐渐提高逻辑表述和人际交往的能力。学完本单元后,希望同学们能够通过了解、谈论名人的成长经历,来激励自己,从…     

{Le Théâtre de la Cruauté} or When Caring ‘Is’

In this article we offer an ontological theorization of care. The article interrogates the self-evident quality of everyday meanings for ‘care’ that might be generated from psychological or biological discourses; we aim to question the way that ‘care’ is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of early childhood education. The article works towards offering a new theorization that does not treat the meaning of ‘care’ as self-evident. If ‘care’ is a way of addressing concern for ourselves as human beings, we think that deepening the theoretical parameters of this concept will add to how we understand the complexity of gender and race relations. By articulating Heidegger’s use of ‘care’ and comparing it to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger’s work on this concept, we hope to enable professionals and families to view conceptions of ‘care’ outside the familiar definitions applied in everyday discourse. The article treats early childhood education professional practice as an instance of how both gender and race delimit the way in which human relationships can be understood.     

‘Soft power’, educational governance and political consensus in Brazil

This paper is concerned with the longstanding question of policy for those referred to nearly half a century ago by the Crowther Report as the ‘bottom half’; those mainly working class children who, in a sense, are ‘selected for failure’. The issue of selection is a matter of concern in countries around the world and has been at the centre of renewed political debate in Britain during 2005–2006. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair has been keen to advance a policy of ‘freeing‐up’ secondary schools so as to provide ‘diversity’ and ‘more choice for parents and pupils’. Critics regard such a policy as involving ‘selection by other means’. This paper discusses questions of social class and inequality that are bound‐up with the issue of selection. The paper provides an account of ‘Blairite’ New Labour policy and discusses its closeness to new right education policy. The paper concludes with a discussion of radical proposals and observations on the prospects for the future.     

When ‘Muslim‐ness’ is pedagogised. ‘Religion’ and ‘culture’ as knowledge and social classification in the classroom

The article presents a curriculum‐sociological study of ‘religion’ in the classroom. More specifically, it is a study, inspired by Bernstein, Foucault and Bourdieu, that examines various forms of identity politics tied to ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ as these concepts unfold in the classroom in relation to knowledge production and social classification. Categories such as ‘Muslim’ and ‘Danish’ are tentatively broken down in a study of the classroom as a locus for knowledge production and the production of social difference. What knowledge of religion is produced? What spaces for subjects? What ways to be a pupil? And in what ways do ‘Muslim‐ness’ and ‘Danishness’/‘Christian‐ness’ figure in the social economy of the class? The classroom is studied as a micro‐political arena for relations and politics concerning minorities and majority. In this sense, ‘religion’/‘culture’ may be seen partly as knowledge clusters and partly as subject‐producing technologies colouring and shaping bodies. These knowledge clusters, in turn, are coloured by the social economy associated with the agents’ bodies, making it a productive and potent part of social classification. Categories such as ‘Muslim’ and ‘Danish’/‘Christian’ are in themselves to be understood as processes of social classification and distribution. Hence, ‘religion’ may be understood as a class‐producing practice as the latter is transformed and produced in the pedagogical field of practice.     

‘Doing research was inspiring’: building a research community with teachers

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study related to K–12 teachers’ understandings of what research is, and what enables or inhibits teacher use of research in the classroom towards informing their instructional practices. In a collaboration exemplifying school board and university partnerships, we examined the nature of associations between teachers and education research(ers). Our findings indicated that teachers felt both connected and disconnected to research practices in education. Participants suggested ways to establish and sustain better links and collaborations among the communities of teaching and research. This paper emphasizes the importance of universities, schools and teachers working together to conduct meaningful research and apply current knowledge in the field of education.     

‘Teaching’ or ‘support’? The poisoned chalice of the role of Students’ Skills Centres

After the 1992 Further and Higher Education Reform Act enabled polytechnics and the qualifying franchised colleges to be renamed universities or higher education institutions, the dominance of the rhetoric of skill development aggravated long‐standing schisms between further and higher education about whether or not degree‐level courses should be available in further education. One aspect of these disagreements concerns the dominance of a skills deficit model and its influence in learning and teaching. This article draws on the findings of a study into the role of a Students’ Skills Centre (SSC) in a post‐1992 university. It focuses on how and why working in SSCs is envisaged as a subordinate function, as a ‘support’ and not a ‘teaching’ role. The research study utilised both quantitative and qualitative research methods in a case‐study design to examine the nature of students’ requests for help in an SSC. The article argues that academic skills, including writing, study and key skills, are more effective if taught in a subject/disciplinary‐specific context. Hence, lecturers in the SSC had to provide intensive teaching, which, at the same time, also addressed this contextual dimension. This is a complex and highly specialised teaching process, yet, despite the yearly increase in numbers of students attending the centre for help, university managers and some academic staff refused to acknowledge the complexity of the nature of students’ learning requirements or the teaching function of the role of lecturers working in the SSC.     

Reforming teacher education in England: ‘an economy of discourses of truth’

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a fundamental aspect of policy analysis.     

When ‘research ethics’ become ‘everyday ethics’: the intersection of inquiry and practice in practitioner research

The act of engaging in sound and ethical practitioner research, regardless of context, encourages and indeed demands an alignment between the ethical framework employed in the research enterprise and the ‘everyday ethics’ of practice. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of what Cochran-Smith and Lytle have termed the dialectic of practitioner inquiry. The paper argues that the reflexive nature of the theory/practice dynamic means that, in the context of sustained practitioner inquiry, the ethics of research and the ethics of practice both hold the potential to be shaped by and to shape the other. Elsewhere in discussions of the issue of quality in practitioner and other practice-based research, Groundwater-Smith and Mockler have argued that ethical professionalism can and does work as a platform for quality, pushing practitioner inquiry ‘beyond celebration’. This paper builds on these ideas and, in exploring the intersection of inquiry and practice in practitioner research, examines the implications of issues relating to: informed consent; ‘voice’ and ownership; transparency and negotiation; confidentiality, anonymity and trust; and deliberative action in the context of both practitioner inquiry and classroom practice.     

‘Smart state’ for a knowledge economy: reconstituting creativity through student subjectivity

Rejecting notions of creativity as self‐realisation through free expression, this article argues that such discourses currently driving education policy comprise intellectual technologies for the production of student subjectivities required by neoliberal contexts. Using a governmentality framework, it locates the conditions of possibility for the creative subject within dominant policy articulations of the global knowledge economy and emerging rationalities of risk and uncertainty. The analysis focuses on an industry school partnership formed by a state education system in Queensland, Australia, and several multinational corporations. It examines how the partnership has emerged as a novel neoliberal space for the constitution of new education figures such as the enterprising teacher and the entrepreneurial student‐worker. These subjectivities are functional to the devolved governing strategy of social investment, which seeks to achieve a broad reconstitution of relationships between students, schools and industry in Queensland.     

‘The conference was awesome’: social justice and a mathematics teacher conference

Professional development comes in many forms, some of which are deemed more useful than others. However, when groups of teachers are excluded, or exclude themselves, from professional development opportunities, then there is an issue of social justice. This article examines the experiences of a group of teachers from a Māori-medium school who attended a mathematics teacher conference. By analysing the teachers’ sense of belonging through their ideas about engagement, alignment and imagination, we are able to describe how different kinds of relationships influence the inclusion/exclusion process. This leads to a discussion about what can be done by the teachers as well as conference organisers to increase these teachers’ likelihood of attending further conferences in the future.     

‘It’s a life-changing point for me’: critical consciousness,collective empowerment and global awareness as activist identity change in ‘popular education’

The Youth Global Awareness Programme (YGAP) is a 2-week residential ‘popular education’ programme for young, diverse, international, labour movement activists, run by the International Federation of Workers Education Associations in Cape Town, South Africa. In this mixed method study (N = 47), we draw on the Social Identity Approach to Education and Learning. We propose that the participatory, peer-to-peer learning during YGAP leads to activist identity change, where critical consciousness, collective empowerment and global awareness develop as group norms. The first longitudinal questionnaire study found significant increases in activist identity and critical consciousness, which predicted increased collective empowerment. In the second focus group study, data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis and two themes provide compelling evidence of learning during YGAP as identity change processes. Participants’ commonalities and differences enhanced activist identities with global awareness. Simultaneously, new knowledge, passion, hope and connection to a global activist community created collective empowerment.

     

‘Twilight or Middlemarch?’ A Teacher’s Refusal to Choose

What should children and young adolescents read? Recent changes in the English curriculum have once again shifted the focus towards more canonical texts, but does featuring such texts on the course necessarily equate to rigorous teaching and in-depth learning? Through a self-examination of her own reading history, the author argues for a dialogic approach to reading and text selection instead, so that students may negotiate better understandings of themselves and their own socio-cultural contexts.