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.     

Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens

This paper attempts to answer this question: what should ecoliteracy mean in a biocapitalist society? The author situates his analysis of this question within the general context of the neoliberal reconstruction of education in the US. Specifically, focus is given to the shared model of governmentality GE food industries and education policies both utilize to manage life in the field and classroom – one where optimizing the value of plants and people for ‘flat world’ economic competition is the defining goal. Given this landscape, I suggest that what some environmental educators have called ‘ecological literacy’ or ‘critical ecoliteracy’ must now include a dimension that rejects the ways both human and nonhumans are progressively being implicated into biocapitalist enterprises. I offer an example of how biocapitalist industries educate market understandings of life by looking at how the GE food industry’s educational projects attempt to teach students and the public to think of nature and themselves as entrepreneurial actors. In the final section, I provide an example from my research using actor network theory in learning gardens as a way to develop a theory and practice of ecoliteracy that is capable of identifying and resisting the ways both human and nonhuman life are being captured and reconstructed within biocapitalist development ventures.     

Should contentment be a key aim in higher education?

Higher education institutions are major concentrations of political, social, economic, intellectual and communicative resources. They reach freely across populations and cultures and connect to government, professions, industry and the arts. The neoliberal logic of markets has entered the realm of (higher) education. This leads to discourse on the benefits of education being positioned almost exclusively in terms of their effect on income. The perspective taken in the paper is the development of a happiness motive that asks education to challenge what it is to be a member of society: What moral and ontological stance one will seek to take in developing one’s future? The satisfied student perpetuates the current lifeworld in which they find themselves, seeking to improve the quality of the services provided. It is proposed that an overly emphasised desire satisfaction culture inhibits the edifying mission of universities. This is not to argue against high-quality service provision but to differentiate it from the edifying role of personal challenge, determination and social responsibility, conceptualised here as profound happiness or contentment, and the university’s role in its development. It calls for a different and more refreshing approach to higher education.     

A posthumanist approach to environmental education in South Africa: implications for teachers,teacher development,and teacher training programs

As we enter the sixth great mass extinction event, an event that points to humanity’s exploitative attitude towards nature, posthumanist ethics offers a different way of engaging with the world, a way which has clear and extensive implications for the way environmental education is taught in South African schools. However, given the official curriculum and assessment practices currently in use in South Africa, can a posthumanist approach to environmental education actually work within the current educational framework of discrete discipline/subject areas and specializations? The paper diffractively engages with the Department of Basic Education National Curriculum Statement: Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement: Foundation Phase Grades R-3: Life Skills for South Africa (the phase where environmental education is most likely to take place), and superpositions this text with a research study on environmental education undertaken in Canada and key posthumanist notions as they relate to environmental education. The paper concludes with a section on the implications for teachers, teacher development, and teacher training programs (not solely in South Africa) of using such an approach in the teaching of environmental studies.     

Sustainability science and education in the neoliberal ecoprison

As part of the general ‘greening’ of prisons in the last decade of neoliberalization and the formation of institutionalized programs to provide science and environmental education opportunities for the incarcerated, the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), a partnership between Evergreen State College and the Washington State Department of Corrections, has become the most vibrant partnership in the US to mesh the cultures and institutions of environmental science and corrections. Drawing attention to the SPP’s anchoring mission, which is ‘to bring science and nature into prisons,’ this article looks at environmental science education in the contemporary prison in light of recent discussions of neoliberal science and ecobiopolitical theory, with the final aim of developing what amounts to a carceral political ecology of environmental education amid an ever expanding neoliberal penal State.     

Environmental education in a neoliberal climate

This introduction to a special issue of Environmental Education Research explores how environmental education is shaped by the political, cultural, and economic logic of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, we suggest, has become the dominant social imaginary, making particular ways of thinking and acting possible while simultaneously discouraging the possibility and pursuit of others. Consequently, neoliberal ideals promoting economic growth and using markets to solve environmental and economic problems constrain how we conceptualize and implement environmental education. However, while neoliberalism is a dominant social imaginary, there is not one form of neoliberalism, but patterns of neoliberalization that differ by place and time. In addition, while neoliberal policies and discourses are often portrayed as inevitable, the collection shows how these exist as an outcome of ongoing political projects in which particular neoliberalized social and economic structures are put in place. Together, the editorial and contributions to the special issue problematize and contest neoliberalism and neoliberalization, while also promoting alternative social imaginaries that privilege the environment and community over neoliberal conceptions of economic growth and hyper-individualism.     

‘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.’     

A review of twenty-first century higher education

This article is predominantly concerned with the global challenges associated with managing an academic workforce in an era characterised by increased demand for higher education. In scrutinising global trends in higher education and academic workforce management, the article will address two research questions. First, what are the global trends that most affect education in the twenty-first century? Second, what are the transformations that have taken place in the academic workforce amid these trends? Last, the article calls for a need for researchers to profoundly explore the management of the academic workforce cross-nationally between developed and developing economies, with a particular focus on Australia, Malaysia and Singapore.     

What Constitutes Quality in Minority Education? A Multiple Embedded Case Study of Stakeholder Perspectives on Minority Linguistic and Cultural Content in School-Based Curriculum in Sunan Yughur Autonomous County,Gansu

While quality in education has long been a significant issue, definitions of quality are often taken for granted rather than argued for, allowing the possibility that the criteria used by researchers and planners to judge quality may differ from local stakeholders’ perspectives, particularly regarding the place within quality education of the knowledge, culture and language of non-dominant groups. However, there is an accumulating convergence of research that calls for assessments of quality in education of non-dominant linguistic and cultural groups that engage local stakeholders’ understandings. This paper presents a recent study that attempts to do this, investigating the perspectives of students, parents, teachers, and administrators in Sunan Yughur Autonomous County, a multiethnic, multilingual district in rural Gansu, inhabited by several nationalities. Over one hundred participants in three schools were asked what was important for children to learn in school; including what aspects of local (minority) knowledge, culture and language should be taught as part of school-based curriculum. The study found three educational visions in local schools: regular urban education; Chinese-medium, multicultural education; and bilingual, multicultural education. The study also found that stakeholders support the latter vision, which reflects society’s actual cultural and linguistic pluralism, as well as much research on quality education for non-dominant groups. The paper concludes with a call for a comparative approach, both domestic and international, towards the investigation of quality education of non-dominant groups in China.     

Karma and human rights: Bhutanese teachers’ perspectives on inclusion and disability

The Sustainable Development Goals call on countries to ensure that all children, especially the most vulnerable, are included in education. The small kingdom of Bhutan has made attempts to embrace inclusion in education at the policy level. However, research on inclusion and disability in this context is limited, and there are few studies focusing on the perspectives of Bhutanese teachers. The study presented here was led by the question ‘how are Inclusion and Disability understood by teachers in Bhutan?’ The research aims were to (a) explore the above concepts from the perspective of participants and (b) construct these concepts in a way that is contextually relevant to Bhutan. Data collection comprised qualitative interviews with 15 Bhutanese teachers. Findings revealed that participants saw disability predominantly from a ‘medical model’ perspective, but at the same time held conflicting views as to what inclusion means. They moreover mentioned lack of teacher training as an obstacle to the implementation of inclusion in Bhutan, and some believed that the country is not yet ready for inclusion. We argue that our findings call for Bhutan to strengthen the preparation of its teachers for inclusive education in order to narrow the current gap between policy and practice.     

Widening participation in higher education: the role of professional and social class identities and commitments

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and ‘massification’ of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour’s programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse – of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive – can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.     

The strong poetry of place: a co/auto/ethnographic journey of connoisseurship,criticality and learning

Through a co/auto/ethnographic approach informed by a theoretical bricolage of critical pedagogy, place-based education, science education, human geography, feminism, and indigenous ways of knowing, the authors demonstrate the power of place in and as pedagogy. Using rich personal narratives, they reclaim their stories as an urban island-dweller and nomadic music-dweller, and they illuminate place as an epistemological, ontological and axiological anchor for the Self in the neoliberal wasteland. Specifically, the authors attend to their familial lineages and reasons for migrating from Southern Europe to the USA’s Northeast section, the Northern Mid-Western and to the Southeast. They examine their and their families’ connections with place in relation to the ideological fictions embedded within their shared narrative of “for a better life,” which is the story that was told to them about their families’ migrations. They probe under the surface by asking, “better than what,” “according to whom,” and “why?” In doing so, they peel back the veil of hegemony and expose the ways that economic disadvantage impacted their families’ relationships with their homelands. The article concludes by conceptualizing critical connoisseurship as a means for guiding students to tap into the embodied knowledge of place in order to notice, question, appreciate and critically reflect upon curricular content and subject matter and resist neoliberalism’s removal of person from place and local knowledge.     

“Women and the environmental are together”: using Participatory Rural Appraisal to examine gendered tensions about the environment

Environmental education research (EER) rarely includes women’s perspectives. This means that in environmental education research, an entire knowledge source is largely ignored. This study employed a methodology called Participatory Rural Appraisal, a methodology new to the field of EER, of Kenyan teachers from the Maasai Mara region to understand the tensions around environmental views. The purpose of this work was to examine, through the use of a participatory methodology, the conceptions of the environmental of these teachers and to uncover gendered tensions. The analysis included a continuous, thematic review that included the participants during the analysis. The findings included the following themes: Why are people doing what they are doing? Who is or is not acting? How do we move forward? This research documented gendered tensions such as the burdens of responsibility, the power imbalance disadvantaged women feel regarding solving environmental issues, and the blame that is directed at both men and women as a result of these burdens and power imbalances. This methodology provided a way for participants to understand each other’s viewpoints in layered ways, and pointed to gender issues throughout that sometimes caused blame. However, it also helped the participants think about how to work together.     

Implementing Godly Play in educational settings: a cautionary tale

At the heart of all curriculum decision-making is the learner. Contemporary early childhood education theory and practice emphasises young children’s agency and voice in their learning paying particular attention to valuing each child’s sociocultural contexts. As learners, children are considered capable and active participants rather than as deficit and passive recipients. How does the implementation of godly play in prior-to-school and school early years settings sit within a contemporary view of childhood? To what extent does this programme align with early childhood theory and practice? This paper seeks to evaluate the presence and place of godly play (which is not a curriculum and nor does it claim to be a curriculum) in the religiously affiliated early childhood education context in either prior-to-school or school settings. It is to be emphasised that this paper is not evaluating the presence and place of godly play in the faith community of the local parish where all who participate are believers coming together to share that faith and to have that faith strengthened. However, its presence and place in formal educational settings outside of parish faith communities is questionable and requires closer critique.     

You can lose what you never had

An often-used idiom states: you can't lose what you never had. Yet contrary to this expression, it is possible to lose what you never had – at least when special education support is concerned. In Ontario, as in other jurisdictions, special education exists as a codified system. An ever-changing nexus of discourses and documents – including normalisation, legislation, regulations, and memoranda – set out how special education is to function in the province. The documents themselves articulate how learners' needs are to be formally identified, as well as how students are to be supported. Within this network a phenomenon of non-identification has arisen whereby some students do not get identified and yet would have qualified for special education support had they gone through the process. Yet what leads to this phenomenon? To what does the phenomenon itself lead? Should Ontario's special education system be readjusted to address the phenomenon of non-identification, or is identification itself an inherently flawed practice? To explore these three questions, this paper will analyse Ontario's identification policy, examining what it allows, what it dictates, as well as the challenges it creates.     

Struggling for visibility in higher education: caught between neoliberalism ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ – an autoethnographic account

What happens when neoliberalism as a structural and structuring force is taken up within institutions of higher education, and works upon academics in higher education individually? Employing a critical authoethnographic approach, this paper explores the way technologies of research performance management, specifically, work to produce academics (and academic managers) as particular kinds of neoliberal subject. The struggle to make oneself visible is seen to occur under the gaze of academic normativity – the norms of academic practice that include both locally negotiated practices and the performative demands of auditing and metrics that characterise the neoliberal university. The paper indicates how the dual process of being worked upon and working upon ourselves can produce personally harmful effects. The result is a process of systemic violence. This paper invites higher education workers and policy-makers to think higher education otherwise and to reconsider our personal and collective complicity in the processes shaping higher education.     

NGO Art Education

How is art education being put to use today? To explore this provocation, I read between the lines of teaching for civic literacy through visual arts education in the United States as mandated by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. I consider an art education of social practice's utility within this mandate. In order to accomplish this, I describe artist Rick Lowe's Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow social sculpture project and then analyse this through a service aesthetics’ lens and neoliberal motives. In the process of overlaying social practice within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as a model for visual arts and citizenship education toward globally competent graduates, I articulate the possible limitations of such micro‐utopian ventures for art education that amount to NGO‐esque art, making the case that these efforts, while facilitating a feeling of civic engagement, only further intensify the depoliticisation of art education acting as a form of Rancière's better police in reasserting the neoliberal status quo. I sound a cautionary note about such a pragmatic turn risking the exacerbation of our collective interpassivity through aligning art education too closely to our apparent use value for late capitalism.     

Neoliberalism, globalization, and creative educational destruction in Taiwan

In this article, the authors argue that educational technology is chiefly and increasingly being used as a tool for the privatization of education and the commodification of people by way of top down evaluative structures put in place by governments in collusion with neoliberal interests. This analysis began as a study that sought to illuminate the reasons why teachers in Taiwanese technical colleges have been reluctant to integrate educational technologies for actual instruction. However, what the authors actually found was that teachers in Taiwan are experiencing a forced obsession with top down evaluations and these evaluations are locking teachers in what may be called an amplifying causal loop. By looking up the proverbial food chain of the top–down evaluations, the authors found socio-political and economic forces at work that were less Taiwanese and more global in scope and character and less about teachers and classrooms and more about the rise of educational administration for neoliberal advancement. This article argues that a collusion between neoliberal interests, an obsession with evaluation, and the uninterrogated implementation of educational technologies are giving rise to processes that are wreaking havoc on the Taiwanese education system and similar processes are at work throughout the world.     

Against ‘teaching excellence’: ideology,commodification, and enabling the neoliberalization of postsecondary education

ABSTRACT

In this article, the notion of excellence in relation to teaching is removed from its privileged place in order to render it, and its implications, for analysis. We argue that teaching excellence needs to be understood in the larger context of the neoliberal university in which competition is taken for granted, and therefore, metrics for comparison are evermore necessary. Following this argument, we explore excellence as an instrument of neoliberal ideology in higher education. We explore different manifestations of teaching excellence enacted in policies that that are illustrative of five different countries. Implications for further analysis, and for resistance to the expansion of neoliberal ideology through teaching excellence, are presented.     

Science education — I: The spirit of science

In these two essays we explore the questions: what are the essential features of a workable context for science education? What are the givens, the “of courses,” the “fundamental dispositions” toward science and toward education necessary — or at least sufficient — to provide a fertile ground upon which a functional approach to science education can be established? In the present essay it is argued first that science education must reflect that science is a way of thinking — in fact, more comprehensively, a way of being; and second, and that the fundamentally antiauthoritarian spirit of science must be reconciled with education, with its built-in tendency to be authoritarian.