Defining curriculum policy through slogans

This article explores the upper secondary (or post‐16) school market. The study on which it is based, funded by the Swedish Research Council, was entitled ‘Upper‐secondary education as a market’. Empirical data include official statistics, policy documents, school publications, company reports and school visits. Printed and other news media were also scrutinised to identify how the marketisation of education is represented in public discourse. A number of themes emerged from the study which included mapping the expansion of the school market, chains of ownership and influence, marketing strategies, choice and the school market and issues raised in the media. These imply that there is a new market discourse which represents a clear break with previous social democratic education policies primarily aimed at enhancing citizenship and wider democratic values within an inclusive public school. However, critiques have also emerged including a call for strengthened regulations of and control over independent schools and concern about an education market equated more with shares and profits rather than pedagogy and student citizenship.     

话语协商——新媒体事件中“最美人物”的建构

与新媒体事件中官民对立的抗争性事件不同的是,“最美人物”的建构体现了官方话语与民间话语的协商.网民建构“最美人物”的立场多来自于社会关怀,而传统媒体则将“最美人物”纳入典型人物报道的框架.新媒体事件的参与性促使典型人物报道发生了变化,在宣传主流价值观的同时,也注重对人物本身和公共议题的关注.     

Lifelong learning and the limitations of economic determinism

The contemporary efflorescence of lifelong learning discourse in education and social planning is argued here to be, substantially, the product of economic determinism. That discourse is evaluated from the perspective of three progressive sentiments that have informed lifelong learning advocacy: the individual, the democratic and the adaptive. Each progressive sentiment is seen as expressing a central programmatic purpose for educational reform and as capturing its ethical thrust. Contemporary lifelong learning discourse is found to be only superficially expressive of these informing sentiments. The progressive, ethical, liberatory nature of each sentiment is marginalized or excluded from the discourse, which may best be seen, accordingly, as seriously regressive, counter-ethical and non-liberatory. It is substantially lacking in critical concern, social vision, and any commitment to social justice and equity. It constructs education as a commodified private good, for which individuals should pay. It focuses strongly on individual interests and on vocational skills development. That education which is funded by the state, is focused increasingly on the development of basic life and vocational skills in the interests of engagement in and service to the global economy. Educational engagement is increasingly seen as desirably embedded in the economically productive activities that are its desired outcomes, further limiting any opportunity for socially progressive learning. It is suggested that if the prevailing lifelong learning discourse is to be made more culturally progressive- in both its educational activities and its learning outcomes- it cannot be through a return to traditional progressive ideologies. Rather, it must accept prevailing epistemology in refocusing that discourse. Paradoxically, although non-compliant educationists are now largely marginalized and ineffectual in their influence on the nature of the contemporary lifelong learning agenda, their vocation and their increasing suffusion throughout contemporary cultural formations places them in a potentially strong position to lead cultural and educational change in directions that are more culturally progressive.     

Privatization and Commercialization of Public Education: Consequences for Citizenship and Citizenship Education

My purpose is to examine and evaluate the implementation of market ideology and practices in education through the prism of both modern democratic theory and the discourse of rights. I examine the essence and defining characteristics of public schooling in modern democratic theory, explore the democratic purposes of education, and the unique mission of public schools. I also analyze the vision of public schooling that surfaces from the discourse of human rights and children’s rights, examining relevant UN declarations and conventions. I then proceed to discuss some major manifestations of markets in education, question their congruence with the democratic vision of public schooling, and examine their consequences for both citizenship and citizenship education. My conclusion is that markets in education, and the formulation of education policies and practices through decision-making processes dominated by business and parents, are not necessarily fashioned in the best interest of a democratic society.     

Performance power: the impact of neoliberalism on social justice educators’ ways of speaking about their educational practice

ABSTRACT

Few studies have attended to the specific influence of neoliberalism on education for social justice, despite the complex ways in which the competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice work side by side in local educational settings. This article reports data derived from interviews with 28 educators committed to social justice education from across Ontario, Canada. Participants were asked how they perceived the impact of neoliberalism on education and on their teaching practice. Findings were interpreted through critical democratic theory and discourse analysis. An unanticipated finding is the influence of neoliberal discourse on the ways that educators spoke about their teaching practice for social justice. The study found that discourse of performance is one arena where competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice not only coexist but also intersect. This finding has important implications for the transformative potential of social justice education through more concentrated attention to the power embedded in everyday speech acts. Attending more to the performative potential of neoliberal discourse toward social justice ends can be a mechanism for resistance and teacher agency.     

Conditions of domination: reflections on harms generated by the British state education system

Education in Britain increasingly appears to serve a very narrow notion of pedagogy, partly reflecting the ‘conditions of domination’ generated by the rise of the new managerialism in the delivery of public services. In the name of economy, efficiency and effectiveness, social progress is increasingly seen to lie in achieving continual increases in ‘productivity’, realised through giving management the absolute freedom to arrange its resources in whatever way it feels appropriate. At the heart of this critical reflection on these contemporary developments lies a concern for the role of education in democratic development, as well as the various harms that are the direct result of a profoundly reductionist and dehumanising ‘education’ system. The article concludes by outlining some alternative possibilities for more humane and democratic pedagogical processes.     

Teaching with Social Media: Disrupting Present Day Public Education

Because social technologies present illuminating educational, ethical, economic, and structural challenges to existing constructions of public education, they catalyze a fundamental examination of what public education should look like and be like in a democracy. Given their performances in other arenas, mobile and electronic technologies have the potential to further critical pedagogical praxis by enabling more democratic and participatory discursive practices. At the same time, they are significant vectors for market infiltration. They intensify surveillance, reproduce existing structures, and constrain conceptions of the possible. To examine what emerges regarding the construction of teacher as a subject when these latest technologies are incorporated, this article reports on findings from a multiple case study of five secondary school teachers using social media in their teaching.     

Teachers’ democratic assignment: a critical discourse analysis of teacher education policies in Ireland and Sweden

ABSTRACT

The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers’ role in stimulating democratic spaces. We have termed this Teachers’ Democratic Assignment. We examine changing notions of teachers’ democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using a Critical Discourse Analysis. We tested our hypothesis that teachers’ democratic assignment has changed in unprecedented ways using an analysis of policy documents in teacher education. Our findings reported a substantive converging paradigm shift from a predominantly progressive (reconstructivist) curriculum discourse where democracy was seen as inextricably linked to everyday practice in the early years of this century, to a more essentialist (perennialist) discourse in recent times. The findings will have interest for a wider audience and have implications for the role of democracy in teacher education as well as the question of education as a social responsibility for a vibrant democracy.     

When Is It Democratically Legitimate to Opt Out of Public Education?

In this essay, Michele Moses and Terri Wilson explore the recent movement to opt out of state tests. They situate this activism within a diverse line of efforts to refuse aspects of public education, asking how to evaluate the democratic legitimacy of different kinds of refusal in public education. Drawing on specific examples of opting out, they point to different ethical principles at stake in conflicts over public education. They pose three sets of questions — emphasizing reasons, positionality, and consequences — to help guide local educational leaders, policymakers, and citizens in negotiating difficult cases of refusal in public education. Moses and Wilson conclude that opting out of tests may, under certain conditions, serve the public purposes of education in a democratic society. Although many opt-out activists justify their actions in terms of individual rights, others are concerned with public goals and ideals, including concerns about the narrowing of curriculum, the erosion of teacher authority, and the widening privatization of public education. Yet communicating across and between different interests in this movement remains a challenge, one that points to the need for spaces of democratic deliberation about the aims of education policy.     

Whither the Common Good? A Critique of Home Schooling

This analysis shows home schooling to be part of a general trend of elevating private goods over public goods. The discourse around home schooling centers on issues of individual rights and private benefits, rather than the public good. Yet, the public has an interest in education because there are unavoidable aspects of education that make it a public good. However, home schooling denies this public interest. It undermines the common good in two ways. First, it withdraws not only children but also social capital from public schools, to the detriment of the students remaining behind. Second, as an exit strategy, home schooling undermines the ability of public education to improve and become more responsive as a democratic institution. Thus, home schooling is not only a reaction to, but also a cause of, declining public schools. Therefore, it diminishes the potential of public education to serve the common good in a vibrant democracy.     

Ecclesiastical and religious factors which preserved Christian and traditional forms of education for citizenship in English schools, 1934–1944

Participants in the public discourse pertaining to religious education and education for citizenship in English schools between 1934 and 1944 included many ‘Christian educationists’. They advocated a conservative and elitist form of education for citizenship as taught through indirect training, Arnoldian public school traditions and ecumenical, liberal Protestantism. This contrasted with the conception of education for citizenship promoted by the founder members of the Association for Education in Citizenship. They wanted pupils to be educated into a liberal, democratic and secular version of English citizenship by means of ‘progressive’ pedagogies and direct instruction. This article identifies the ecclesiastical and religious factors which preserved the Christian and traditional form of education for citizenship in English schools between 1934 and 1944. These factors included the revival of the Christian foundations of British national identity and citizenship, the development and acceptance of non‐denominational forms of Christian education, the increasingly positive response which an evermore coherent and professionalised cohort of Christian educationists received from the Board of Education and the Consultative Committee, and the political power of the Anglican Church within the dual system combined with the religious settlement agreed in the 1944 Education Act.     

DEWEY'S THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC AND THE PUBLIC CHARACTER OF CHARTER SCHOOLS

In this essay, Leonard Waks reconsiders the issue of the public character of charter schools, that is, schools funded through public taxation but operated by non‐state organizations such as nonprofit and for‐profit educational corporations and nongovernmental public interest organizations. Using John Dewey's conception of a democratic public as a framework, Waks examines the following questions: (1) Are schools chartered and funded by government, but operated by nonprofit nongovernmental organizations, ever appropriate instruments of a democratic public? (2) If so, what criteria might distinguish those that are appropriate from those that are not? (3) How might public education be re‐institutionalized so as to include the charter schools that are appropriate? Waks concludes that Dewey's theory of democratic publics can play a useful role in thinking about how to balance the democratic benefits of charter schools for the various subcommunities of our society with the democratic requirement of broad public discourse and intergroup education.     

Rights-based education and conflict: a cross-national study of rights discourse in textbooks

This paper investigates the extent to which rights-based education is utilised in textbooks from conflict-affected countries. Drawing on a unique dataset of 528 secondary social science textbooks from 71 countries from 1966 to 2008, we analyse factors that predict a rights discourse in texts. We find that textbooks from conflict-affected nations are significantly less likely to emphasise a rights-based discourse, while more recently published textbooks from more democratic countries are more likely to emphasise a rights discourse. Our findings have ramifications for curricular reform and rights-based education in conflict-affected nations.     

Dissection of a truth regime: the narrowing effects on the public good of neoliberal discourse in the Virginia performance-based funding policy

A major role of all public higher education institutions is to foster the public good. In democratic societies, the public good emphasizes the more collective activities and benefits and how resources are accessible to all in a society. Institutions of higher education create new knowledge, promote cultural tolerance, increase civic activity, and have lasting intergenerational effects among other things which all serve to enhance the collective activities of a polity. Since public higher education institutions promote the public good, and since public higher education institutions are governed by policy, educational policy becomes a crucial determiner of the public good. Moreover, policies are constructed with language or discourse. Thus, the discourse of policy, which has the power to structure the actions, speech, and thoughts of those affected by the policy, has a direct impact on the public good. In light of this importance, this paper critically examines the discourse of educational policy.     

大学生诚信缺失现象的分析与对策

诚信是维护市场经济的灵魂,是任何一个国家、社会参与国际竞争的道德资本.可是,在当今的大学校园却出现了不同程度的诚信缺失现象,主要表现在学业、经济、就业和品行四个方面。高校的思想政治工作者必须深切关注,认真分析产生这种现象的原因,从基本道德规范教育、制度保障等方面对大学生进行诚信教育,把他们培养成社会主义事业的合格建设者和可靠接班人.     

The boundaries of adult education for active citizenship fiinstitutional and community contexts

In common with many other countries, the 1980s and early 1990s in New Zealand were years of considerable upheaval. The welfare state along with many democratic institutions was under attack from the forces of multinational capital. This article reports some findings from a largescale study investigating the impact of these changes on the provision of education and training opportunities for adults as well as possible effects of some of these programmes on wider policies and practices. It is hoped that the study will contribute to greater understanding of the complex relationships between the ‘curriculum’ of adult learning and education and wider social, economic and political forces. This article focuses exclusively on adult education programmes for active citizenship, i.e. programmes explicitly intended to promote, inform, analyse, critique, challenge, or raise public consciousness about public policies and issues. It investigates the nature and extent of the contributions of educational institutions and voluntary organizations to adult and community education for active citizenship. The findings suggest that from one perspective adult education for active citizenship was alive and well in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The period saw an increase in the number of social movements and ‘non-educational’ voluntary organizations and groups engaged in adult education for active citizenship. Much of this drew on progressive or radical democratic traditions. From another perspective the position was by no means as positive. Educational institutions varied widely in their commitment to adult education for active citizenship. Most institutions, drawing on conservative and pragmatic traditions, demonstrated little commitment, while those that were involved drew on liberal traditions. These traditions, grounded in discourses that de-politicized education, reinforced the boundaries between adult education and political action and thus served to legitimate the neo-liberal ideologies.     

State of rhetoric: neoliberal discourses for education in state of the state addresses and gubernatorial press releases

ABSTRACT

Policy elites use rhetoric in speeches and press releases to provide framing that is intended to influence public opinion. These rhetorical events can be treated as instances in which speech usefully promotes particular discourses. Indeed, elected officials are able to influence how individuals think about problems and solutions through speeches and press releases. Two important rhetorical events in which political elites advance frames for social issues are annual state of the state addresses (SoSA) given by U.S. governors and gubernatorial press releases that inform media reporting about state policy. This study employed policy discourse and rhetorical analyses to examine SoSAs and press releases as rhetorical events within the context of educational policy. Our findings show that governors framed the roles of state government, governors, and educational stakeholders within a discourse that perpetuates a neoliberal version of education. In this framing, governors situated education’s purpose as being workforce and economic development, ignoring its role in addressing social issues and preparing informed, engaged participants for democratic society. Given that individuals make decisions about how to address social issues and understand public institutions based on framing provided by political elites, these findings raise implications for state educational policies and the public purposes of education.     

微博空间公共知识分子的话语策略与身份建构

公共知识分子正回应微博技术的赋权,参与公共话语的表达,其微博生存存在多方面的问题和隐忧.微博“共景监狱”式的开放结构,使知识分子“虚妄的公共性”更为凸显.公共知识分子应积极介入微博空间,秉持批判与道义传统,以特殊知识分子的身份,进行中观和微观政治话语的表达,彰显自身的中心话语权力,相应调整话语策略,推动公民交往理性和公民社会的建构.努力消解对其“虚妄公共性”的质疑,实现自我身份和公共价值的重新认同和构建.     

What does it mean to be Irish? Children's construction of national identity1

Ideas relating to identity and belonging are central to the public discourse around citizenship that has emerged in Ireland and internationally in recent years. One thread of that discourse relates to the role of national identity in societies that are increasingly diverse and multicultural. In view of the growing importance of citizenship education, understanding children's ideas about national identity is vital if educators are to engage children in the construction of an hospitable, critical and reflective citizenry. This research was undertaken in two phases during 2003 and 2004. Participating in the study were 119 children, drawn from a range of social contexts. Premised on a social constructivist view of children and childhood, the research drew on participative and democratic methodologies. While the study suggests the existence of an essentialist conception of Irish identity, it also demonstrates the capacity and willingness of children to engage in critical reflection on their constructions of Irishness.     

我国高等教育公共管理中的行为失范及其矫正

高等教育公共管理的合法性基础是高等教育具有公共物品的性质,公共性是衡量高等教育公共管理基本的规范价值尺度.高等教育公共性受到现实挑战的因素很多,其中有观念性因素、资源性因素、政治性因素,也有公共管理本身的因素.管理主义盛行、管理伦理不端,是高等教育公共管理中行为失范的重要原因.改善高等教育公共管理,需要树立正确的管理价值观,建立民主管理制度和权力约束机制,推进社会治理.