The politics of normalcy: Intersectionality and the construction of difference in Christian-Jewish relations

This article examines the workings of a discourse of normalcy for a group of black Christian fundamentalist students. Focusing on the intersection of religion and race the essay analyzes the representation of Jewish people as dark and other, while constructing Christians who are white and normal. The inversion of racial identities unfolds in contradictory ways, reinscribing a discourse of colorblindness while simultaneously reifying categories of race. Through discourse analysis the article discusses how the political moves in both centrifugal and centripetal directions to construct a "universal" (Eurocentric) Christian identity while suppressing subgroup differences.     

Reframing hostility

This paper comments on the Annette Hemmings's paper entitled, 'Youth culture of hostility: Discourses of money, respect and difference.' The paper briefly looks at Hemmings's findings, in particular those related to identity development. However, the major focus is on reframing methodological aspects of Hemmings's study. In particular, the paper examines challenges facing cultural outsiders doing research; the dynamic and multiple roles of the researcher in discourse analysis (i.e., participant, observer, and subject); and a theoretical rationale for including the researcher as subject in research, which is based on Foucault's notion of how discourse systems impact the construction of people's sense of social, political and cultural realities.     

What role of education for youth? Discourse within the European Union’s Structured Dialogue

Abstract

Within the EU, answers and responses to detected issues and problems facing young people are regularly searched for within and through education and learning. The EU’s Structured Dialogue on youth is one of the consultation-based policy processes where education is often suggested as a solution and a highly relevant field of action helping to improve youth’s status and life. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, this paper examines discourse about education present in selected policy texts and statements of various stakeholders and individuals active within the EU’s Structured Dialogue on youth. As an example, the first two phases of the fifth cycle of that dialogue are considered and examined, exploring perceptions of the dialogue and education and their role. The paper aims to explore the underlying political rationalities of education via which the field is governed and programmable realities created, while young people’s specific role and conduct is suggested and framed.     

Revisiting China’s Africa policies and educational promises: towards a global convergence of development in the post-2015 era?

ABSTRACT

Comparing China’s 2006 and 2015 Africa policies, this article reveals how China’s political discourse has become more confident, practical, and depoliticised. In particular, this paper shows how education is allocated, promised, and embedded in China’s ‘shared’ agenda, which is centred on development co-operation and mutual learning. It then reflects on the extent to which China may move towards traditional donors. This paper concludes that, despite fragmented convergences in the discourse and an increased recognition of a Chinese model, China maintains its distinctive role and position in the post-2015 era.     

Creating a space to #SayHerName: Rhetorical stratification in the networked sphere

ABSTRACT

This essay examines #SayHerName as a case study to analyze how circulation of the hashtag both challenged women’s erasure from #BlackLivesMatter discourse and motivated activists to center the stories of Black women killed in police interactions. We introduce the term rhetorical stratification to discern why the #SayHerName hashtag came to matter, and how it remained relevant in the national discourse about police brutality. To do so, we analyze how the #SayHerName movement evolved from the discursive to the material through policy briefs, social media circulation, and citizen journalism, which influenced news framing and initiated greater deliberation about this issue in both the networked public sphere and in local communities. We conclude that this hashtag invitation to digital activists engaged more nuanced perspectives about police brutality and policy reform, influenced the way Black women victims of police violence are covered in the news, and motivated community-based policy proposals addressing necessary changes in local policing.     

A Discourse of Benefit: technology and school reform in the USA

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests that the subject of school reform and technology in education needs to be considered as a discourse that needs to be ‘unpacked’ and analyzed from a social, historical, and cultural perspective. Unpacking the historical and current interests in educational reform in light of information and communication technologies is no simple matter. There are two basic challenges. First, we need to analyze the language of change and the context of school reform. Second, the discourse of school reform needs to placed within a context of history and political theory. In the end the paper asks the reader to consider who the ideological ‘we’ is when we talk about education and technology.     

Teaching Trump: Student Recommendations to Ensure Safe Discussions in a Time of Polarized Political Divide

ABSTRACT

This article includes findings from a mixed method survey at a large, public midwestern university following the election of Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States. It examines student perceptions about effective engagement in political discourse within social work classes. Survey questions urged students to suggest how instructors might facilitate this dialogue fairly in the classroom given the passionate emotions and differing viewpoints surrounding the election, while acknowledging and educating about values espoused by the profession. Findings from this study illustrate the challenges that students face in having these conversations and outline their recommendations to social work educators for facilitating safe, sensitive, and inclusive classroom discussion about politics.     

Comparative analyses of discourse in specialized STEM school classes

ABSTRACT

The authors detail the discourse patterns observed within mathematics and science classes at specialized STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) high schools. Analyses reveal that teachers in mathematics classes tended to engage their students in authoritative discourse while teachers in science classes tended to engage students in dialogic discourse. The authors examined variations in the type of discourse in relationship to the discipline being taught, the educational level of the teacher, and course requirements were also explored.     

From PSAs to reel communities: exploring the sounds and silences of urban youth mobilizing digital media production

ABSTRACT

Amplified by a global political climate of fear, oppression, and increased nationalism, this article examines how U.S. secondary students in a digital media elective course used multimodal composition, and video production in particular, as a nexus of ‘participatory politics.’ By partnering theories of multiliterate expression with youth civic engagement, it offers new understandings into how urban youth use digital media production to leverage school-based social action. Refracted through a mediated discourse analysis lens, and with a particular focus on sound as a modal resource for design, findings suggest that youth used media production and semiotic sense-making to simultaneously enliven community action as well as shield students from personal histories of trauma. By engaging in the process of digital media production, as this article suggests, students cultivated new core practices of civic interaction and local engagement by amplifying injustice.     

Being an unaccompanied- a dilemma for policy? Representations of unaccompanied teenagers in Norwegian policy

ABSTRACT

The discourse surrounding unaccompanied teenagers’ migration seems to favor a willing-participant model in their journey to asylum. When such a discourse is prominent, other restrictive measures are taken, such as invoking temporary, limited permits to control the migration of children without an adult. Further, policy frameworks are not consistent; they change depending on the government in power and its political-ideological leanings. As such, this paper aims to uncover the representation of unaccompanied teenagers within the changing political ideology and discourse that emerge in four Norwegian whitepapers between 2004 and 2016. Inclusion, education, and immigration policies are critically analyzed to identify how they discursively represent unaccompanied teenagers seeking asylum. I argue that these papers’ changing ideological representations of unaccompanied teenagers reveal the essentialization of collective identities that have shifted during the period identified.     

Seeing,grasping and constructing: pre-service teachers’ metaphors for ‘understanding’ in religious education

ABSTRACT

Despite its centrality to most, if not all educational endeavours, what is meant by understanding is highly contested. Using Religious Education (RE) in England as a case subject this paper examines pre-service secondary school teachers’ construals of understanding. It does so by employing conceptual metaphor theory to analyse their linguistic discourse. Specifically, it examines the metaphors employed by participants in a series of focus group discussions (FGD) and provides important insights into how understanding is conceptualised by these pre-service teachers who are preparing to enter the RE profession. The metaphors employed by these pre-service teachers (‘understanding is SEEING’; ‘understanding is CONSTRUCTING’; ‘understanding is GRASPING’), focus on the dynamic and developmental nature of understanding (rather than on the outcomes) and reveal subject specific ways of thinking and practicing. This paper argues that each of the three conceptual metaphors employed by participants suggest particular ways of acting towards understanding with significant implications for teaching and learning in RE.     

Curriculum online? Exploring the political and commercial construction of the UK digital learning marketplace

Government support for the production and consumption of educational software is now a key element of New Labour's education technology drive. At present much attention is being directed towards marketing ‘digital learning’ to an educational sector traditionally wary of technological innovation. In an effort to understand the social shaping of this current phase of policy‐making, the present paper examines the political and commercial discourses surrounding digital learning and associated initiatives such as Curriculum Online and the Digital Curriculum. After analysing a range of political and commercial texts produced from 2000 to 2005, the paper explores the dominant themes emerging from these discursive constructions—considering in particular the limitations of the often ambiguous yet structured ways in which digital learning is being shaped by its key actors.     

Individualization,the new political spectrum and the functions of adult education

The ambivalences of individualization have triggered a new discourse on social policy. The central themes in this discourse are the promotion of social integration and participation. This new political discourse has thwarted the old left‐right continuum and given rise to a new political spectrum. On one side of this new political spectrum are political perspectives that emphasize integration, solidarity, community. The authors call these collectivistic perspectives. On the other side of the spectrum are perspectives that interpret individualization as the triumph of freedom of choice for individuals. The authors call these the individualistic perspectives. They then describe the spectrum between collectivism and individualism in detail and link each perspective to programmes in adult education typical of such a perspective. In conclusion, the authors summarize their own position in respect of the mission of adult education.     

Social enterprise,education and work: entrepreneurialism on the margins

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the rise of social enterprise in relation (and in response) to the contemporary nexus between education and work. Contextualising social enterprise within the broader trend toward private influences in education, the paper explores how diffuse networks driven by both market ideals and a social conscience are shaping new sites of education and work on the margins. Drawing on in-depth research undertaken on the experiences of homeless street press sellers of the social enterprise The Big Issue, I bring focused attention to the lived experience of these transformations in policy and practice. The analysis reveals how entrepreneurialism intersects with precarious poverty to frame sellers’ cultivation of their skills and techniques as enterprising workers on the margins.     

Problematizing global educational governance of OECD PISA: Student achievement,categorization, and social inclusion and exclusion

Abstract

This study problematizes the global educational governance of OECD PISA and its statistical data as a governing technology in contemporary discourses of education reforms. The study examines principles that order the discourses and practices of the international comparative assessment. The effort of analysing the impact of an education reform regime led by OECD PISA reveals how statistical reasoning defines problems in educational systems and forms social discourse surrounding educational reform to solve such problems. In doing so, this article focuses on standardization, classification, and normalization for measuring and comparing student achievement and national effectiveness. The study also offers an alternative way of considering the politics of inclusion and exclusion embedded in practices of education reforms propelled by the international comparative assessment.     

Can media literacy education increase digital engagement in politics?

ABSTRACT

Online environments are now central to political life, especially for young people. They are prominent contexts for activities that include: fundraising, political debate, sharing political perspectives, mobilizing individuals and groups to act, and applying pressure to governments, corporations, and nonprofits. Much of this online politically focused activity occurs within a broader media ecology that can be characterized as a participatory culture (Jenkins, H., R. Purushotma, K. Clinton, M. Weigel, and A. J. Robison. [2009]. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Occasional Paper on Digital Media and Learning. Chicago: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation). Many have argued that media literacy efforts are needed for youth to fully leverage these digital opportunities, but rigorous studies of such educational efforts are just beginning to emerge. Drawing on an original panel survey, this paper examines whether efforts to promote digital engagement literacies increase youth online engagement in politics. We find that they do. Educators’ efforts to foster digital engagement literacies increase youth engagement in participatory politics and in applying targeted political pressure to government, corporations, and nonprofits.     

Unfortunate or scrounger? Ambivalence,stereotype and the adult unemployed

This paper uses Bhabha's concept of colonial discourse to explore how the subject of the educational discourse concerned with the education of the adult unemployed is constituted by a variety of stereotypical representations. The paper examines in some detail a key policy text which appeared at a critical moment in the establishment of REPLAN, a UK policy initiative for the education of unemployed adults, in 1984. It explores how the problem of education for the unemployed adult was made visible, the first arena for analysis in Scheurich's ‘policy archaeology’. A number of ‘regularities’—race, gender, sexuality, pro‐fessionalization, class and governmentality—serve to constitute that problem and, to a lesser extent, its solution. Educational policy is seen as a highly problematic play of fantasy and materiality, where policy texts produce and perpetuate inequalities. This critical reading attempts to subvert official discourse on education and unemployment.

there is no reason at all why people should wander about in a loafing and idle manner; if they are not earning their living they ought to be put under some control. (Winston Churchill, 1909).     

Education and new hegemonic blocs: Doing policy the 'right' way

Discussions of higher education need to be placed within larger processes of socio-economic and cultural restructuring. While higher education does indeed have its own specific histories and its own relatively autonomous dynamics, the entire sphere participates in and is connected in complex ways to social transformations and to struggles over power. The author examines these larger transformations that are changing the very landscape on which higher education - and education in general - sits. He analyzes the formation of a new hegemonic bloc that is pushing education in particular rightward directions. This tense alliance includes various factions - neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, authoritarian populists, and a particular fraction of the upwardly mobile new middle class. The author critically examines the policies that are being proposed and the possibilities of counter-hegemonic action.     

Early Islam in British Higher Education

Abstract

In an educational environment where interest in Arabic and Islam is growing, I ask the place of revisionist/critical approaches to early Islam in Higher Education. This paper uses 15 semi-structured interviews with Lecturers in early Islam to investigate how they treat controversial subject matter in the classroom. The paper examines how the different approaches taken by lecturers are linked to different kinds of academic training, and asks what kinds of approach are suited to different student demographics. It concludes by suggesting how critical ways of teaching this subject are linked to new approaches in interfaith engagement, which acknowledge the political context for the development of Scriptures.     

Were we right? A re-evaluation of the perceived potential of technology to transform the educational opportunities and outcomes of learners with special educational needs

ABSTRACT

The focus of this paper is the history of how special needs technology in the UK was developed for people with special educational needs between 1970 and 1999. Despite the proclaimed potential of technology, this context and period has undergone very little historical examination. This paper will draw on interviews with 52 experienced professionals in order to illuminate this history. Analysis will attempt to extend our understanding of the perceived transformative potential of technologies and the factors that influenced the actual transformative potential of technologies. In particular the analysis will focus on three particular kinds of transformations: a transformation of the micro-technology industry; a transformation of teaching practice and a transformation of experience of special educational needs/disability. These three transformations and the potential tensions between them will be illuminated through two themes: ‘Entrepreneurialism versus Creativity’ and '“Miracle Cure” versus “Just a Tool”'.