Competence-Based Vocational Education and Training and Its Cultural Context Sensitivity

This article addresses the question of whether the concept of competence-based vocational education and training (VET) is transferable from one cultural context to another. Drawing on theoretical concepts of comparative education and sociological neo-institutionalism, the competence-based VET is defined as a new paradigm and situated within its cultural context. Then a case study of an educational transfer from Switzerland to India is presented. The article concludes that the pedagogical concept of competence-based VET is not universally applicable but includes culturally coined ideas, which need to be taken into account when trying to implement it in distant institutional contexts.     

German influences on the Spanish academic discourse in educational sciences between 1945 and 1990

The idiosyncrasy of national academic discourses in educational sciences and the flow of ideas between them is a topic that has inspired recent research, even though it has not been treated very exhaustively. This study presents some results of an investigation into German influences on the Spanish academic discourse in educational sciences between 1945 and 1990. Considering system theory as a tool, which makes it possible to widen the knowledge of educational science about itself, the research is based on the idea that all communications between scientists, who represent a certain discipline, constitute the core of a scientific discourse. In this perspective, scientific disciplines appear as social‐communicative networks of knowledge production, which regulate themselves. The basic element of communication, which produces and reproduces the self‐regulated context of the scientific discipline, is the publication. To that extent this study assumes that scientific reviews reflect truly the condition of a discipline and uses their analysis as a method to survey the possible influence of a national academic discourse on another, i.e. how certain ideas cross the boundaries of their own reference system. These assumptions constitute the background for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of two important Spanish reviews, the Revista Española de Pedagogía and the Revista de Educación. The register of all authors and titles of any article that contains the quotation of a German author, all quoted German authors and the titles of their works, all authors and titles related to German educational sciences and all reviews of books edited by German authors allows quantitative statements concerning the presence of German influences on Spanish academic discourse. Furthermore, the interpretation of some selected articles published by Spanish authors illustrates the quality of this reception. The analysis of these data shows as the most important result that the quantity and frequency of quotations of German authors in both Spanish reviews are positively related to the presence of a relatively small group of Spanish educationists among the authors of their articles. A prosopographic approach to these authors discovers that they share certain characteristics, such as for example high interest in German academic discourse, often due to longer stays at German universities. The interpretation of some selected articles identifies different types of reception of the German discourse. Besides a small number of articles that reflect the quoted ideas correctly in their context, there are a large number of studies that use the quotations of German literature only in order to strengthen their own point of view without regarding the original context of their sources. These cases shed light upon the structural differences between the German and Spanish academic discourse in educational sciences and illustrate the difficulties for the exchange of educational ideas between different national debates.     

What are the Bounds of Critical Rationality in Education?

Since Dilthey we have become used to thinking of reason as having a cultural and historical setting. If we take this insight seriously, then critical rationality or critical thinking can no longer be conceived of as context‐free skills. This paper takes up the line of thought that is elaborated by Christopher Winch in his ‘Developing Critical Rationality as a Pedagogical Aim’ and seeks to explicate it by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of ‘language games’ and on the re‐evaluation of ‘thinking’ by Theodor Ballauff (a German philosopher of education who was influenced by Martin Heidegger). The overcoming of a solipsistic and idealistic conception of thinking raises questions regarding the pedagogical settings and aims, as well as the problems over the limits of critique in education. A comparison of Ballauff's and Winch's positions reinforces the sense of the significance of critique: although the role of critical rationality within education is ambiguous and precarious, the investigation of autonomy (as an educational goal) shows that critique cannot be limited in any straightforward way.     

Multiculturalism in the University: Consultation,Advocacy, and the Politics of Culture

An increasing number of scholars, especially those whose work has focused on ethnic studies, curriculum reform, and multicultural education, will be called on to share their observations and recommendations with colleagues whose universities are engaged in the formative stages of expanding the cultural boundaries of their curriculum. The work they will be called on to do as 'cultural consultants' will place them at the center of an ideological and pedagogical debate that has now transcended the educational arena. The political nature of this debate will necessarily cast the consultant in the role of advocate in a struggle that dates back to the controversial beginnings of ethnic studies in the American university. I examine the current discourse-its pedagogical, political, and cultural aspects-and link these to considerations for the consultant who enters into a collaborative relationship with change agents (consultees) in the university of the 1990s. I examine the persistent issues and challenges encountered in my visits to a variety of campuses where the spoken agenda may have been multiculturalism but where an implied strategy may be heralding a more profound level of structural change in the culture of American higher education. The intent is to chart a kind of 'topographical road map' for those who plan to embark on similar journeys. I speak from experience as a consultant, guest speaker, lecturer, evaluator, and observer.     

Modern pedagogy,local concerns: the Junkyard on the kibbutz kindergarten

This paper focuses on the “Junkyard” (chatzar grutaot) – a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an ever-changing set-up in which children’s free play is encouraged, with minimal rules for use of time, space, objects, and social relations. Anchored in the writings of its two founding educators, as well as in writings of and interviews with its advocates and instructors over the years, this paper shows how the Junkyard drew on widespread ideas about early childhood development and education, at the same time as it responded to local conditions and concerns. The paper argues that a unique conjunction of factors – material and structural, educational and pedagogical, ideological and cultural – facilitated the process by which the Junkyard was inserted relatively smoothly into the kibbutz educational landscape, in lasting ways.     

The conservative response to the 2011 Chilean student movement: neoliberal education and media

This paper focuses on the relationship between the media and educational policies in the context of the ‘neoliberal newspeak’, which has characterized the current circulation of ideas in cultural production. Using framing theory, this article presents a critical discourse analysis on the editorials published about the 2011 student movement by El Mercurio, the most influential newspaper in Chile. El Mercurio is more than a newspaper. It is an institution; an institution that supports conservative ideas. El Mercurio framed the public discussion about educational policies and defended neoliberal education based on three discourses: the neoliberal system is absolute, public education is valued less than private and education is a technical issue, not political. By invoking this rhetoric strategy, these discourses attempted to maintain the neoliberal education system in Chile, which in turn rejected the social struggles of the student movement.     

The reception of German progressive education in Russia: on regularities of international educational transfer

This article reports a historical case study of extensive educational transfer: the reception, adaptation, and use of German progressive education and German school reform ideas and practices in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The reception of German educational ideas greatly enriched the theory and practice of the Russian school reform, contributed to the dissemination of progressive education ideas among the educationally interested public (teachers and parents), and contributed significantly to the development of an official plan for a comprehensive progressive educational school reform in pre-socialist Russia. Based on the findings of this and similar case studies, some general conclusions concerning the regularities of educational transfer processes – their presuppositions and motives, their contents and forms, and their functions for the recipients – are drawn, ending with a proposal for the development of an action-theoretical model of educational transfer processes.     

The development of teacher education

Even those who tend to see the present merely as the product of past thought and action are convinced that in the educational process we face new conditions and new tasks, the solutions of which are not mere modifications of traditional approaches. Attempts to identify the new social and educational situation have already had an international, multidisciplinary impact. Out of the great number of concepts, the classification and evaluation of which are a continuing task for the educationalists, the author has chosen two related ideas which have gradually gained acceptance in international pedagogical discussion. as well as Director of Research at the university's Institute for Studies in Teacher Education. In addition to serving as President of the Czechoslovak Pedagogical Society, he is general editor of the series calledCzech Pedagogical Thinking. He is a member of the group set up by the Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences to study the social consequences of the scientific-technological revolution. He is the author ofThe Methodology of Teaching and Learning Science in Secondary Schools, as well as of a number of university textbooks on didactics and several studies on adult education, leisure and teacher education. He has translated widely from Russian, German and English pedagogical literature.     

A poetic journey: the transfer and transformation of German strategies for moral education in late eighteenth-century Dutch poetry for children

One of the most popular Dutch educational enlightenment authors was Hieronymus van Alphen. His three volumes of Little Poems for Children published in 1778 and 1782 were extremely successful, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Inspired by the German poets Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Van Alphen brought about an expansion of educational space based on the integration of moral education in the spirit of the educational ideas of Locke, Rousseau and the Philanthropinists with poetical ideas and the nature of the child in both the content and the form of his poems. His poems were translated almost immediately into English, French and, surprisingly, as many of his poems were more or less adaptations of poems by Weisse and Burmann, into German too. Van Alphen’s trump card was a reversal of former strategies of education: instead of pressing moral ideas upon the children from an adult point of view, he aimed at identification by (1) writing from the perspective of children, (2) situating the poems in the world of experience of children, (3) using a childlike style with a frolicking metre, rhyme scheme and prosody, and (4) combining text and images, so putting the moral message across visually and textually at the same time. In this paper, we follow the journey of poems for children as media for the cultural transmission of moral educational ideas from Germany to the Netherlands from the perspective of cultural transmission, moral literacy and educational space. We conclude that Van Alphen, with the combined power of text and image, successfully adopted and adapted former educational strategies, such as the moral poetics developed by his German predecessors Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann. Taking their strategies on a poetic journey from Germany to the Netherlands, he not only transferred them, but transformed them as well. Van Alphen did so in a specific Dutch utilitarian way. His poems could be read for fun but were intended for learning. They were useful and entertaining at the same time, because he took the life and living environment of children into account, and particularly accounted for the concept of development as a distinguishing characteristic of the specific nature of the child with which child readers could identify.     

Circulation and internationalisation of pedagogical concepts and practices in the discourse of education: The Hamburg school reform experiment (1919–1933)

In the context of the international exchange of school reform ideas and concepts, the new schools in Hamburg were recognised as exemplary instances of a revolutionary and forceful reform in the public elementary school systems. Based on studies of transfer and their premise that the transnational transfer of ideas, practices and objects does not occur spontaneously, but requires specific mechanisms of transmission, this contribution explores the circulation and exchange of pedagogical practices and concepts within the discourse of New Education by looking at the example of the Hamburg experimental and community schools (Hamburger Versuchs- und Gemeinschaftsschulen). A key question in this process is how the Hamburg schools could acquire the great international importance they held. The analysis includes both personal and institutional communication networks of the experimental schoolteachers, the international journals and conferences of the New Education Fellowship, school visits and various reports and documentations of the schools produced by foreign visitors. It shows not only the key role that transnational exchange played in the education reform debates of the 1920s, but also offers clues to the cultural patterns and beliefs that influenced the circulation and reception of ideas.     

Community and the myth of the ideal school: Circulation and appropriation of the Hamburg Gemeinschaftsschulen in Spain (1922–1933)

The progressive education movement was known in Spain from its very inception, and in fact many of its pedagogical theories and practices reached Spain before reaching other European countries. Yet traditional historiography has always maintained that Spain was never integrated in the progressive education movement, a misconception that helps explain the lack of research in the field. Recent historiographical research, however, has shown that numerous Spanish schools served as laboratories for the implementation of progressive education methods in the 1920s and 1930s. The Spanish educational system proved itself to be especially open to international innovation in general and Spain actually enjoyed a privileged position for the study of how innovative pedagogical ideas could be incorporated and appropriated. Proof of this affirmation can be found in the introduction and dissemination throughout Spain of the experimental public school movement of Hamburg known as Gemeinschaftsschulen.

This article will focus on the way this movement was received in Spain. We will examine the phenomenon from a double perspective, corresponding to the different positions that scholars found themselves in within the educational panorama of the time. On the one hand we will examine the role of the “grass-roots” educators who wished to change schools “from below”, starting with classroom practices. On the other hand we will take a look at the representatives of “high pedagogy”, who were intent on formulating a pedagogical theory on which to base a political–ideological model that would serve to change the school “from above”. Tensions arising among the different pedagogical groups, along with the ambiguity of the translation into Spanish of the term Gemeinschaftsschulen, led to the different groups appropriating the concept in different ways. The evolution of the term Gemeinschaftsschulen, from its original identification with a localised school experiment in Hamburg to its becoming a symbol for virtually all European school vanguards, will be addressed at the conclusion of the article.     

Education,art, and exile: cultural activists and exhibitions of refugee children’s art in the UK during the Second World War

Abstract

During the 1930s and 1940s art increasingly came to be used as a therapeutic tool with children who were perceived as damaged by their experiences of war or displacement. This article explores two related exhibitions – Children’s Art from All Countries (1941) and The War as Seen by Children (1943) – which provided a platform for children’s impressions and experiences of war as seen through their drawings, whilst also raising money and awareness for refugee children’s causes. Although supported by an influential network of British educators and cultural figures, the exhibitions were conceived and organised by displaced German, Austrian, and Czech artists and cultural educators who were members of the Free German League of Culture in London during the Second World War. The exhibitions are considered as sites of educational and political interventions by adult refugees in the context of therapeutic interventions with refugee children in British educational settings. In so doing, this article argues that the exhibition organisers conceived of cultural and creative learning as a transformative vehicle for supporting and re-forming personal identities, and for the re-imagining of collective democratic futures.     

Revisiting the Analects for a modern reading of the Confucian dialogical spirit in education

Abstract

This study investigates the educational thought of Confucius with focus on the educational relationship in the Analects, which is a historical text that defines the foundations of Confucianism. The first part of the investigation examines Confucius’ concept of the educational relationship and how it is characterized with a dialogical spirit, which consists of worldly and secular human-orientedness, co-existentiality as a fundamental principle for educational practice, and dialogue to become an ideal ruler through self-discipline. The second stage of this study further examines the spirit of dialogue in the Analects with consideration of its historical–cultural context. Through this process, the study unravels the historical and cultural limitations of original Confucian educational thought for modern society and proposes a possible way to reengage Confucius’ educational value in today’s modern educational context.     

Educational Transfer as Transformation: A Case Study about the Emergence and Implementation of Dual Apprenticeship Structures in a German Automotive Transplant in the United States

The apprenticeship system in Germany is carried out both by companies and vocational schools (the Dual System). The question of whether the German Dual System is transferable is currently being asked in vocational education and training research. The analysis of current transfer discourses alludes to a research desideratum: the actual approaches consider either the input or the output of an educational transfer, but the transfer process in relation to its input and output has not been investigated to date. We focus on this desideratum. In the present case study, the processes emergence and implementation of dual apprenticeship structures is analysed in relation to its input and output in a German automotive transplant in the United States. Transplant organisations provide an ideal case to explore the transfer phenomenon because they have been transferred from a familiar context to a foreign context. The research questions are: firstly, why and how did the need emerge to implement dual apprenticeship structures in the German transplant in the United States (input); secondly, how and in which way have these structures been implemented (process); and thirdly, how can the implemented structures be characterised: as an imitation, adaptation or transformation of the original model (output)? The central findings of the case study are: firstly, that growing contradictions in the production system triggered the implementation process; secondly, that the original Dual System was transformed within the implementation process; and thirdly, that this transformation led to innovative solutions. These findings may not be valid for every transfer at any time, but they reflect that educational transfer of dual apprenticeship structures can be more than just a more or less successful imitation or adaptation.     

Policy into practice in Hong Kong pre-primary kindergartens: the impact of a reform agenda viewing early childhood as the foundation for lifelong learning

In this paper we outline the provision of pre-primary education in the Hong Kong SAR and discuss how the educational reform initiatives of 2000 (Learning to Learn) and global imperatives provided the impetus to reshape a new educational approach to early childhood education. We use the example of a half-day pre-primary (kindergarten) programme to illustrate the ways in which policy and guidelines are enacted and how they appear to reflect all the attributes of the reform movement that have adopted contemporary ideas from the international educational arena. We highlight the interpretations and enactments of these new educational imperatives in a system that has a long history of different cultural pedagogical traditions that often do not resonate with western pedagogical approaches.     

The discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik – A contextual reconstruction

The framework of German educational discourse of the twentieth century is so‐called geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, or education as one of the humanities or arts rather than as a science. It triumphed around 1925 in the second half of the Weimar Republic. This article outlines in three steps the core elements of this educational discourse. First, it shows that the mode of thinking of the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik was dualistic in a traditional Protestant manner. They juxtaposed empiry and Geist, plurality and unity, and outward and inward, and they favoured the inward unity and coherency of Geist. The contextual analysis shows, however, that the dualistic thought schema was virulent not only among German educationalists and philosophers, but also found strong expression in novelists and essayists like Thomas Mann, or the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudolf Eucken. Mainstream thinkers criticised the plural systems of Western democracy and capitalism – first and foremost, however, American democracy and capitalism – which were seen to epitomise both of these “un‐German” movements. The true German nature was thought to be an inner spiritual life, which was originally religious and through the course of history came to characterise the whole of German life and thought. It was believed that this spiritual inner life was revealed best by German art, particularly German music. This resistance to empiricism led, and this is the second step, to two analogous notions of the totality or wholeness of the individual and the nation. Man is not understood to be merely an individual, but more importantly a “personhood” (Persönlichkeit), which was described as an inward spiritual life that arose through effort and self‐cultivation, or Bildung. In addition to this inward personhood, however, the conception of “nationhood,” a national spiritual life as Volksstaat, or the ethnocultural nation as detached and distinguished from the political sphere, is seen as important. The individual person can perfect himself only in the framework of the typical characteristics of his Volk – the German Volk. Western democracy and plurality are seen as an atomistic “aggregate of individuals” and juxtaposed against the German concept of the ethnocultural Nation, the Volk community composing an organic unity that transcends the individual. Bildung is the spiritual formation of integrated, cultivated personalities who would orient themselves to the Volk community. In the curriculum of true education, along with the German language the study of Heimat becomes the fundamental element. In contrast to specialised subjects, the contents of Heimat would reflect the organic in the world, the totality of life: in the Volk and in the spiritual‐mental unity within the Persönlichkeit. The two constructions – deepest roots in the tradition of the Volk on one side, and highest inner spirituality in the personality on the other – resulted in education that had to oscillate between lowest and highest and, through this, had to lose sight of empirical, that is, social and political, dimensions. This is the third step that the present article wants to address. The true understanding of education, according to the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, puts social and political issues in their only proper place: inside the inner 760 Daniel Tröhler personality. Politicisation of the German person had to take place in the context of Volksstaat, not in democracy. To be free meant the embedding of the individual into the harmonious beauty of the whole. This notion created a social and political vacuum between the lowest denominator or totality of the Germanic people and the highest whole or totality of the Germanic personality, so that education had to be given the attribution – one that continues to be variously described and affirmed in education research in the German‐language realm up to the present day – that education is autonomous, independent of social or political context. This was based on the term Bildung – the inner ideology set against a pluralistic world. Autonomy means insisting on the inner freedom of man, on his inner coherency, and his will. In the midst of the confusing simultaneous demands of society on youth, educational autonomy is believed to be a means of assuring human unity and wholeness; it serves a protective dam to contain the danger of persons being ripped apart or pulled hither and yon. With its goal of awakening a unified spiritual life against the modern plural democratic world, the true educational community becomes crucial.     

Notes on contributors

Authority, a fundamental part of the teaching–studying–learning process, is a problematic and poorly understood component of classroom life. It can be said, in practical terms, that pedagogical authority is constructed in classrooms, in teacher–student interaction and in the spirit of their physical presence, confidence, appreciation, responsibility and respect, and in the way they both relate to the content and norms. Based on the German Didaktik tradition and classroom interaction, an approach for the analysis of pedagogical authority is proposed providing an analytical tool for examining and understanding its constitutive elements and explaining its construction. It posits the existence of three types of interaction or relation from which pedagogical authority emanates: pedagogical interaction, deontic interaction and didactic interaction. Depending on how these relations are enacted in the classroom, they, in turn, may evolve into pedagogical authority. Data collected from four teachers’ interviews in Finnish comprehensive schools are analysed and some empirical evidence is provided to show the characteristics of these relations and how they construct this positive view of authority. More research on pedagogical authority resulting from these relations in classroom settings is needed to account for this critical educational phenomenon.     

“To See is to Know”: the Pedagogy of the Colonial Exhibition,Semarang, 1914

In this paper, which focuses on a western discourse of race within the pedagogical context, I want to draw some parallels between the “object” and the image in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century classroom and the exhibit of the contemporary museum and exhibition. I suggest that the classroom, museum and exhibition were fundamentally similar pedagogical sites in which the object and the image illustrated similar pedagogical subtexts and were located in architectural environments which were similarly complicit in delimiting the range of meaning which spectators/readers were being encouraged to extract. I emphasise this parallel by focusing on visual representations of “the Other” in the school text and exhibition in both the meteropolian and colonial context. The paper concludes that a discourse of race and cultural contestation pervaded European educational institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in both the metropole and the colonial periphery.