Teachers and the State: forming and re‐forming ‘partnership’

Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of ‘partnership’ is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second World War. Initially a partnership based on a commitment to welfarist values, professional autonomy and collective bargaining; this has been systematically dismantled and reconstructed as a ‘social partnership’ based on teacher union involvement in workforce reform coupled with a significantly more managerialist conception of professional accountability. Re‐engineering the terms of its partnership with teachers has been central to the State’s restructuring of public education along neo‐liberal lines.     

Nature is a nice place to save but I wouldn’t want to live there: environmental education and the ecotourist gaze

This article explores the role of ecotourism in the neoliberalisation of environmental education. The practice of ecotourism is informed by a particular ‘ecotourist gaze’ in terms of which the ‘education’ that providers characteristically offer is implicitly framed, embodying a culturally specific perspective in which western society is depicted as alienating and constraining and immersion in ‘wilderness’ is understood as a therapeutic escape from the reputed ills of industrial civilisation. While in the past, these educational aspects of ecotourism delivery have often contradicted the activity’s promotion as a quintessential neoliberal conservation mechanism, increasingly this education has become neoliberalised as well in its growing emphasis on the environment’s role as an instrumental provider of ‘ecosystem services’ for human benefit. In conclusion, this analysis calls for transcendence of these limitations in pursuit of a more inclusive environmental education encompassing diverse ethnic and socioeconomic dimensions of the human community.     

Deconstructing the Carter Review: competing conceptions of quality in England’s ‘school-led’ system of initial teacher education

The commitment to establish a ‘school-led’ system of teacher education in England, announced by the Coalition Government in 2011 and relentlessly pursued thereafter, represented a radical departure from previous kinds of initial teacher education partnership. While it is entirely consistent with a neoliberal agenda, with its strong regulatory framework and appeal to market mechanisms, it is also underpinned by a particular conception of teaching as a craft – ‘best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’. In 2014, the government established a Review of Initial Teacher Training, led by a primary school head teacher, Sir Andrew Carter. This signalled the recognition of teacher education as a ‘policy problem’, adopting Cochran-Smith’s term. The ensuing report, published in early 2015, was more nuanced than might have been anticipated, although a number of profound tensions emerge from a closer analytical reading; four of these tensions are similar to those previously defined by Cochran-Smith and two are newly emergent. This paper identifies and discusses these tensions as they appear in the Carter Review and relates them to wider debates about the links between teaching, teacher education, evidence and research and to policy-making processes in education.     

Teachers' environmental education as creating cracks and ruptures in school education: a narrative inquiry and an analysis of teacher rhetoric

This article discusses a narrative inquiry as a methodology for understanding and examining teachers' interpretations of their environment‐related teaching experiences. Focusing on the value of teacher stories for interrogating the discursive practices of schools as institutional contexts, four main rhetorical themes are identified to illustrate how teachers' engagements in practice and thinking with environmental education display ongoing identity work. Five Korean secondary science teachers' stories illustrate the dynamic processes and interplay between multiple discourses, such as the ‘proper’, ‘good’, ‘science’ teacher, and the cultural norms, resources and subject positions available to them, as they take up and explain their own and others' meanings and subject positions in science education and environmental education. The paper discusses the value of narrative inquiry to conceptualising teacher agency in ways that offer alternatives to conventional research perspectives in this field, and in taking account of the possible meanings of environmental education, the possibility of creating cracks and ruptures in the ‘sense‐making’ discourses and ‘sense that is made’ of experiences of environmental education and school education more widely.     

Neoliberalism,lifelong learning,and the homeplace: problematizing the boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ to explore women's learning experiences

This paper develops a critical feminist theoretical analysis of the significance of the homeplace in explaining the experiences of adult women learners. It argues that current discourses in lifelong learning are shaped by neoliberal influences that emphasize individualism, competition, and connections to the marketplace. Critical educators, drawing upon a Habermasian analysis, make some valid critiques of problems with developing an educational agenda shaped by neoliberal values, but their assessment is insufficient for explaining the persistence of gender inequalities within adult education. This is because critical theory does not adequately take up other ‘medias’ of power, such as patriarchy. A feminist lens is used to explore and complicate the perceptual divisions between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres through an examination of three focal points in the homeplace; identity, relationships, and labour. Drawing upon a social science and humanities (SSHRC) research study that looks at women's learning trajectories in Canada, and a Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) grant on women and active citizenship, examples are brought in to support the discussion. From this analysis, recommendations are made for educators, administrators, and policy makers to challenge a neoliberal agenda in lifelong learning and develop a more holistic and gender inclusive approach that troubles commonly accepted parameters of ‘public’ and ‘private’ by exploring the significance of the homeplace on adult learning experiences.     

Refusing to settle for pigeons and parks: urban environmental education in the age of neoliberalism

The institutionalization of neoliberal reforms that began to take hold in the 1970s were by and large ‘common-sense governance’ by the 1990s. While the growing predominance of neoliberal discourse and marginalization of alternatives in environmental education is disconcerting on the level of policy, this paper explores an equally troubling phenomenon: the deepening of a neoliberal logic, such that it pervades the way we understand and relate with the world. Specifically, this paper draws upon an experience at a recent environmental education conference whereby participants were invited to explore three place-based inquiries inspired by Aldo Leopold in an urban environment: what is happening here? what has happened here? and what should happen here? Although the intention of the workshop was to explore some of the challenges involved in implementing a critical pedagogy of place, many of the participants seemed unwilling to criticize the way in which an urban downtown core suppresses the more-than-human aspects of place. We contend that environmental education is a key arena for debating the limits of neoliberalism and explore how these well-intentioned, but ultimately uncritical responses, run the risk of being appropriated by the ecologically destructive logic-informing neoliberal natures.     

Environmental education and the science of ecology: exploration of an uneasy relationship

While modern science is receiving harsh criticism within the framework of environmental education, at the same time ecology is presented as an alternative science, characterized as ‘holistic’ and ‘non‐exploitative’. However, many of the characteristics of the science of ecology do not comply with its characterization as alternative science. Furthermore, ecology is a science with competing paradigms, provisional theories, incommensurable worldviews, and extensive theoretical and methodological debates. The treatment of the science of ecology in environmental education is not taking into account the relevant evidence, resulting in a quite strong positivistic and dogmatic educational approach. The importance of approaches that comply more with a post‐positivistic account of education are discussed in the light of the possible contribution of environmental education to science education discourse.     

Non-formal education,personhood and the corrosive power of neoliberalism

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which non-formal education is being corroded by neoliberal values. Given non-formal education is frequently used to develop young people’s notions of citizenship, and that non-formal education providers are increasingly forced to operate within the free-market paradigm, it is significant to consider what forms of personhood are being championed. Qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and observations with coaches and young people from a youth sports charity in the UK. Focusing on a core aspect of non-formal education – caring relationships (as understood by Nel Noddings and Carl Rogers) – the findings suggest that the quality of coaches’ care for young people was conditioned by the extent to which adolescents re-shaped their personhood to align with neoliberal values of individual responsibility and discipline. Thus, the meanings of ‘care’ and ‘good citizenship’ were corroded by a neoliberal rationality.     

Rethinking the Subject: (de)constructing human agency in environmental education research

In this article I critically analyse some of the ways in which human subjectivity and agency are constructed in contemporary discourses of environmental education research, with particular reference to conceptual change discourses such as those borrowed from ‘misconceptions’ research in science education. I argue that the methods of constructivist science education research are not necessarily applicable to either the (human) ‘subjects’ or subject‐matters (in an epistemological sense) of environmental education, and that poststructuralist methodologies may provide useful frames for rethinking the ways in which understandings of human subjectivity and agency are deployed in environmental education research.     

‘Quality revolution’ in post-Soviet education in Russia: from control to assurance?

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of ‘educational quality’ in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology. Alongside other major reform initiatives, the ‘quality revolution,’ proclaimed by the Russian Government in the early 1990s, signified a rhetoric shift away from the Soviet-era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm. Through fine-grained textual analysis of policy documents and political statements by key educational stakeholders, the analysis unpacks the discursive underbelly of the new quality paradigm, in an attempt to determine whether a paradigmatic transformation has taken place. The paper argues that despite the nominally proclaimed shift towards a quality assurance model of educational governance, the representation of educational stakeholders and responsibilities within the new quality paradigm continues to correspond to the Soviet-era command-and-control authoritarian model. The study challenges the popular claim of a neoliberal turn in Russian education and suggests that a neoconservative authoritarian approach to education governance has been smuggled in under the disguise of ‘quality assurance.’     

‘Shit shows’ or ‘like-minded schools’: charter schools and the neoliberal logic of Teach For America

Over the past three decades, two neoliberal educational reform efforts have emerged in tandem – the charter school movement and Teach For America (TFA). This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ Grounded in corps members’ teaching experiences, this paper argues that even at its best, the close partnership between TFA and charters can create a mutually reinforcing educational subculture that is isolated from broader educational discourses and practices. At its worst, this partnership can result in the ill-advised ‘propping up’ of under-funded, mismanaged, ill-equipped charters that might otherwise struggle to find adequate staffing and, consequently, close. This paper suggests that these two tendencies – toward corps members’ insularity and poor placement – have the potential to conflict with the charter movement’s and TFA’s stated purposes of improving the quality of schooling for disadvantaged and marginalized students.     

Seeing institutionally: a rationale for ‘teach the University’ in student and staff partnerships

ABSTRACT

Students as Partners (SAP) initiatives are often framed as opportunities to reanimate university education so that students become active participants in their learning, and change agents capable of transforming their institutions. Embedded in these framings is a view that students are also the primary ‘experts’ of their learning experiences. This shift marks curious terrain about how staff come into partnership when students are encouraged to understand themselves as experts at the very same time the purpose of universities is beset with multiple and contradictory narratives, and the whole notion of expertise – even for academics – has become unsettled by the politics of a post-truth era. If the advocacy of student expertise is to be understood as a radical intervention to the marketised neoliberal university, as is often claimed, we argue that the desire for expertise has a more compelling basis when students are engaged with what Gina Hunter calls learning to ‘see institutionally’. In this article, we both describe, and put to work, Jeffrey J. Williams’s idea ‘teach the university’ as one mechanism for students and staff working in partnership to ‘see institutionally’. We then examine the nascent efforts of our own SAP initiatives to make a case for why ‘the university’ – as idea and institution – deserves to be introduced to, studied and critically interrogated by students as part of a long tradition of inquiry. While a good many SAP initiatives aim to address where students are absent, under-represented or disempowered in the university, very few appear to take seriously that there is a field of scholarship about universities that lends credibility and contest to the notion of expertise. By staging a conceptual encounter between Williams, Hunter and our own partnership work, the potential for SAP is expanded as project that cares for the future university.     

Trends and developments in postgraduate education and training in the UK†

This paper argues that ‘partnership’ is an essential part of the marketization of education. Whilst the market fragments and promotes individualism, ‘partnership’ promotes involvement, commitment and responsibility. It is, though, an involvement, commitment and responsibility based on individual vested interest; a necessary prerequisite to protect one's ‘investment’. In harnessing this, control upon the individual is exerted. ‘Partnership’ is presented here as double‐edged for both parents and teachers. Whilst parents may call teachers to account, ‘partnership’ acts as a form of control upon parents. Employing ‘surveillance’ as a conceptual framework, the nature and purpose of ‘partnership’, together with its management by teachers, is discussed. The paper argues that partnership serves as a device for monitoring parents and engendering what Foucault describes as ‘disciplinary power’ which is ensuring that parents learn to be ‘good’ parents as defined by the teachers and adopt a set of values that match those of the school.     

On Doing Philosophy Of Teacher Education

Several authors posit the notion that universities have experienced ‘moral loss’ over the last 15 years under the sustained influence of neoliberal education policies. However, whilst some consensus exists around the causes and effects of moral loss, there appears to be little agreement about how ‘moral reconstruction’ can be enacted. This paper explores the academic discourse on moral loss and moral reconstruction. It concludes that action-based approaches to the moral reconstruction of universities such as recognition and reward policies are unlikely to alter the current utilitarian trend in higher education. In the context of the contemporary world, the restoration of an ‘academic community’ founded on ‘higher moral purpose’ appears to be a remote aspiration. This is because the university has evolved into an integral part of the wider socio-economic system, which itself has fractured under the same neoliberal influences.     

Environmental science education in a small island state: integrating theory and local experience

Abstract

The importance of education to address current sustainability challenges in small island states has been widely recognized. Environmental education may increase knowledge, while also increasing environmental awareness and motivating students to become agents of change. Student engagement in introductory environmental science courses may benefit from operationalizing abstract concepts by embedding course material and activities within this local context. Here, we describe an introductory course in environmental science that has been tailored to the local context of a small island state in the Caribbean. In addition to reaching academic course goals, pre- and post-course surveys showed that course participants’ environmental awareness increased on the dimensions ‘Personal Value System’ and ‘Willingness to Take Environmental Action’. The described course provides a template for the development of a low-cost introductory environmental science course that integrates general theory and application within the context of Caribbean island states.     

Early-Years Teachers’ Professional Upgrading in Science: a Long-Term Programme

In this paper, we present a professional development/upgrading programme in science for early-years teachers and investigate its impact on the teachers’ competencies in relation to their knowledge and teaching of science. The basic idea of the programme was to motivate the teachers by making them members of an action research group aimed at developing and implementing curriculum activities to which they would contribute and thus meaningfully engaging them in their own learning. The programme used a ‘collaborative partnership’ model for the development of the activities. In this model, the collaborative notion is defined as an act of ‘shared creation’: partners share a goal and members bring their expertise to the partnership. Within this context, the partners were a researcher in science education with a background in physics, who also served as a facilitator, and six in-service early-years teachers with a background in early-years pedagogy and developmental sciences, who had many years of experience (classroom experts). These teachers participated in the programme as co-designers, but were involved to a significantly lesser degree than the researcher. The programme procedures comprised group work and individual teachers’ class work. Data sources included teachers’ essays, field-notes, lesson recordings and group-work records. Data were qualitatively analysed. The main results indicate improvement of teachers’ ‘transformed’ knowledge of the subject matter, development/improvement of knowledge of instructional strategies, including factors related to quality of implementation of the activities, knowledge of the pupils and improvement of the teachers’ efficacy.     

The ontology of science teaching in the neoliberal era

Because of ever stricter standards of accountability, science teachers are under an increasing and unrelenting pressure to demonstrate the effects of their teaching on student learning. Econometric perspectives of teacher quality have become normative in assessment of teachers’ work for accountability purposes. These perspectives seek to normalize some key ontological assumptions about teachers and teaching, and thus play an important role in shaping our understanding of the work science teachers do as teachers in their classrooms. In this conceptual paper I examine the ontology of science teaching as embedded in econometric perspectives of teacher quality. Based on Foucault’s articulation of neoliberalism as a discourse of governmentality in his ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ lectures, I suggest that this ontology corresponds well with the strong and substantivist ontology of work under neoliberalism, and thus could potentially be seen as reflection of the influence of neoliberal ideas in education. Implications of the mainstreaming of an ontology of teaching that is compatible with neoliberalism can be seen in increasing marketization of teaching, ‘teaching evangelism’, and impoverished notions of learning and teaching. A shift of focus from teacher quality to quality of teaching and building conceptual models of teaching based on relational ontologies deserve to be explored as important steps in preserving critical and socially just conceptions of science teaching in neoliberal times.     

Environmentalization of the physical education curriculum in Brazilian universities: culturally comparative lessons from critical outdoor education in Australia

‘Environmentalizing’ curriculum in Brazil is a worthy goal of global educational reform for sustainability but is challenging given the limits to rational change thesis already argued in critical social science and post-structural deconstructionism. The federal government mandate to environmentalize undergraduate physical education programs poses the question of which aspects of physical education are conducive to change. ‘Nature’ sports, or outdoor/adventure activity education, is the most likely candidate. In Australia over the past three decades, the environmentalization of ‘old’ physical education outdoor activities has led to the development of ‘new’ discourse practices that integrate environmental studies and outdoor education and are designed for ecological responsibility and social sustainability. In this culturally comparative light about the possibilities for curriculum change in environmental, outdoor and physical education, we examine the potential for change in Brazilian approaches to physical and sport education by critiquing broader ‘environmentalizing’ issues as they have occurred historically within the Australian outdoor education context in the university and secondary schooling sectors.     

Inadequacies in the concept of neutrality 1

While the need for humanising education is pressing in neoliberal societies, the conditions for its possibility in formal institutions have become particularly cramped. A constellation of factors – the strength of neoliberal ideologies, the corporatisation of universities, the conflation of human freedom with consumer satisfaction and a wider crisis of hope in the possibility or desirability of social change – make it difficult to apply classical theories of subject-transformation to new work in critical pedagogy. In particular, the growth of interest in pedagogies of comfort (as illustrated in certain forms of ‘therapeutic’ education and concerns about student ‘satisfaction’ in universities) and resistance to critical pedagogies suggest that subjectivty has become a primary site of political struggle in education. However, it can no longer be assumed that educators can (or should) liberate students' repressed desires for humanisation by politicising curricula, pedagogy or institutions. Rather, we must work to understand the new meanings and affective conditions of critical subjectivity itself. Bringing critical theories of subject transformation together with new work on ‘pedagogies of discomfort’, I suggest we can create new ways of opening up possibilities for critical education that respond to neoliberal subjectivities without corresponding to or affirming them.