Renewing the public and the role of research in education

Australians live at a time when the quality of discussion in the public sphere and within the institutions of the state is at a very low ebb; when policy making is dictated by short term political cycles, spin and focus groups; and when notions of the public good are set aside in favour of self-interest. This paper is based on the premise that if one of the historic purposes of education is to renew the public, then education holds the key to improving the quality of public discourse. However since education policy making in contemporary times is also caught up in the processes which diminish public discourse, the challenge is to find ways to break this vicious cycle. This paper argues that one of the factors contributing to this state of affairs is the influence of what is currently passing for educational ‘research’. It traces the ways in which unrefereed consultant and think-tank research has captured policy makers and some sections of the media, and shows—using a recent influential research report as a case study—how such research often does not stand up to critical review. The purpose in questioning the rigour of such research is based on the conviction that a process of reinvigorating and deepening public debate about education must be based on quality research. The paper concludes by suggesting some ways by which the education research community can contribute to the process of renewing the public.     

Whose knowledge,whose values? the contribution of local knowledge to education policy processes: a case study of research development initiatives in the small state of Saint Lucia

This paper draws upon a case study of education in the small Caribbean state of Saint Lucia (population 154,000) to examine how local knowledge and values can influence the education policy process. It is argued that recent research development initiatives have strengthened the ability of Saint Lucia to mediate international education agendas to suit its distinctive ‘social ecology’ and circumstances as a small state. Saint Lucians, it is argued, are reconceptualizing educational research in ways that better reflect the society's Kwéyòl‐majority culture, oral traditions and postcolonial context. The boundaries of educational research are therefore being stretched to incorporate local knowledge and values and multiple modes of meaning‐making. The paper argues that increased recognition of the epistemological issues and cultural values that are at the heart of efforts to strengthen research capacity can play a crucial role in democratizing the education policy process and educational research itself.     

’Equal Opportunities’ and Local Management of Schools — what happens now?

The introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act in Britain marks the beginning of the most substantial changes to the system of State education since the 1944 Education Act. Many have argued that the rationale for these changes rests on the introduction of the principles of ‘market forces’ and represents an attempt to create an internal and external educational market. Already some research has begun to examine the ideology behind some of the measures introduced by the Act such as the National Curriculum and the likely effects of the testing and assessment which accompanies it on issues of ‘race’, gender and class. However, as yet, little work has focused on another measure introduced by the Act which threatens ‘equal opportunities’, that is local management of schools (LMS). It is my argument that central to all these measures is an ideology that sees education as performing a certain function, State schools as certain types of institutions and teachers and pupils as certain types of people. Indeed, just as it is often argued that the National Curriculum rests on an assumption of a specific type of educational knowledge and a certain type of educational practice, so it is my contention that local management assumes a specific model of pupil, school, governor, teacher and parent. Both the ideology behind the 1988 Education Reform Act and the measures flowing from it seek to create a market in education. It is this tenet in the recent reforms which theatens the continuance of ‘equal opportunities’. The creation of this educational market aims to replace the notions of quality of opportunity which in one form or another have represented the British post‐war educational consensus with the rhetoric of choice, standards and differentiation which have been the hallmark of British domestic social policy since 1979.     

The end of modernist approaches to school funding policy in Australia: a new rationale for funding with inclusive implications for all Australian schools?

The Australian Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee has been asked to examine the principles of Commonwealth Funding for schools, with particular emphasis on how these principles apply in meeting the current future needs of government and non‐government schools and whether they ensure efficiency in the allocation of school funding. The Committee will also investigate accountability arrangements including and through the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. This paper provides a critical discourse analysis of recent developments, tracking two themes: the construction of ‘efficiency and effectiveness’ in the allocation of school funding in Australia, and the impact of such a construction on a discourse of inclusive education for all schools in Australia. Through this analysis, it is argued that the current enquiry creates an opportunity for a substantial shift in focus — from funding government and non‐government schools in relation to government schools, to both government and non‐government schools — within a framework of presumptive equality and inclusion. It is also argued that extant policy, removing the substantial Catholic sector from its hitherto hybridized and separate funding position and bringing government and non‐government schools into sector‐specific funding competition with each other, realigns and rearticulates federal involvement in school funding policy areas that have been the traditional preserve of state governments and territories. In the process, responsibility for instilling and supporting inclusive educational practices is currently solely that of the states and territories where, in many cases, funding as well as inclusive education policies and programmes have been determined at local levels. The endorsement by the federal government of new principles in funding, as proposed here, linked with renewed requirements in relation to school access and participation, creates a space that potentially enables new strategies for inclusive education to be conjoined with funding allocation policy in Australian schools, to the economic and social benefits of all schools as well as the polity.     

Scholarship, Research and the Evidential Basis of Policy Development in Education

The starting point for this paper is the ongoing debate about the relation between research and policy in education. Recent developments in England and Scotland are reviewed in the context of political and academic arguments about the nature and function of research activity. The defensiveness of the research community in the face of professional and political attacks is examined critically. A case study of the Higher Still programme is used to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between evidence, ideology, values and professional practice. It is argued that the research community needs to become more politically sophisticated and to advance a clearer vision of its social function in advanced democratic societies if its potential contribution to educational development is to be realised. The dangers of a retreat to a narrow empirical role are highlighted.     

Contesting education policy in the public sphere: media debates over policies for the Queensland school curriculum

This paper investigates the work of media discourses on education policy in public debates over the Queensland school curriculum. It draws on theories of discourse, theories that have recently influenced the field of policy sociology, to outline a conceptualization of policy and media texts as discourses in the public sphere. In so doing, it notes the significant contribution such public discourses on education make to the policy process. The paper employs critical discourse analysis to investigate the discursive constructions of curriculum during one particular policy initiative. The analysis focuses on newspaper debates over the inclusion of a subject called Health and Physical Education (HPE) in the Queensland secondary school curriculum. The paper shows how educational policy issues were discursively constituted and contested through the construction of public discourses on education policy. In particular, it demonstrates how such public discourses worked to construct authoritative voices on educational policy. The paper concludes with a call to teachers and policymakers to seek opportunities to construct an authoritative public voice on issues of education policy.     

National gender equity and schooling policy in Australia: Struggles for a non-identitarian feminist politics

This paper tracks the development of gender equity and schooling policy in Australia from theNational Policy on the Education of Girls in 1987, to current policy concerns with boys’ educational underperformance. The paper’s key focus is on the ways in which feminist informed equity policy has been undermined by broader imperatives of economic rationalism and anti-feminist discourses. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s understandings of distributive and cultural gender justice and her notion of a nonidentitarian feminist politics, the paper critically examines the ways in which such imperatives have re-articulated equity and schooling concerns. Through these lenses, the limitations of the affirmative gender binary politics and remedies that have dominated gender and schooling reform in Australia are highlighted. The paper concludes with an illumination of the gender justice spaces currently being mobilised in Australian schools. Such spaces, it is argued, fostered within a context of increasing autonomy and self-management for schools, are providing avenues for creative and disruptive (pro)feminist activism.     

Researching the once-powerful in education: the value of retrospective elite interviewing in education policy research

While it is generally acknowledged that being ‘historically informed’ lies at the heart of critical accounts of education policy-making, the use of historically focused retrospective research methods within the field is rare. This paper makes the case for retrospective research at a time when some of the most significant episodes of post-war educational policy-making are fast passing into the realms of not-so-recent history. In particular, it is argued that current policy scholars now have an opportunity to revisit the issues and concerns regarding the formation of the ‘New Right’ education policy reforms 30?years ago. Drawing on the experiences of a recently completed study of educational policy-making during the 1979–1983 Thatcher administration, it is argued that retrospective methods offer a surprisingly rich opportunity to collect primary data from the policy elites of the 1980s. It is concluded that the time is right for the production of a useful addendum to the founding studies of educational policy sociology that were conducted at the time.     

One step forward,two steps back? Work experience,equal opportunities and TVEI

Abstract

The funding criteria of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative included a high profile commitment to equal opportunities for boys and girls, as well as a commitment to the provision of work experience. This paper presents data from a case study of work experience provided under the auspices of ‘Masonfield’ TVEI project, a project which had a strong commitment to tackling gender inequalities in education. It is argued that the nature of work experience ‐‐ by definition explicitly allied to the needs of the labour market ‐‐ made it virtually impossible for the project to meet its equal opportunities objectives in this area. Furthermore, work experience may have served to reinforce — if not exaggerate — existing sexual divisions within the local labour market. Whilst TVEI may now be consigned to educational history, work experience continues to thrive — yet increasingly within a policy framework which ignores equal opportunities considerations.     

Boundary spanners,network capital and the rise of edu-businesses: the case of News Corporation and its emerging education agenda

This paper provides a critical analysis of News Corporation and argues that through the acquisition of high profile policy actor, Joel Klein, News Corporation has been able to assemble significant network capital to position itself as an entity apparently responsible for the public good and with a role to play in public policymaking. My aim in this paper was to document and analyse how the contexts of policy influence in education are evolving through the involvement of multinational edu-businesses and the quasi-privatisation of the education policy community globally. I analyse the place of education in News Corporation’s current business strategy as exemplary of the changing role that businesses are playing in education policy processes nationally and globally and argue that we are seeing the emergence of powerful new policy actors. This analysis is set against the emerging literature that seeks to analyse the increasing influence of edu-businesses on education policy processes and locates these developments within considerations of changing educational governance structures, new privatisations and public–private partnerships in education. It is argued that boundary spanners like Klein with their intimate ‘inside knowledge’ of state structures are mobilising network capital to frame policy problems and advocate policy solutions in ways that are attractive to education policymakers while also being commercially beneficial to News Corporation and their shareholders.     

Defining educational research: A perspective of/on presidential addresses and the australian association for research in education

This paper is concerned with the definition of the field of educational research and the changing and developing role of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in representing and constituting this field. The evidence for the argument is derived from AARE Presidential Addresses across its 40-year history. The paper documents the enhanced complexity and diversity of the field over these 40 years, including the emergence of a global educational policy field, theoretical and methodological developments in the social sciences and new research accountabilities such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) measure. Specifically, the paper suggests that the evidence-based movement in public management and education policy, and the introduction of the ERA, potentially limit and redefine the field of educational research, reducing the usefulness and relevance of educational research to policy makers and practitioners. This arises from a failure to recognise thatEducation is both a field of research and a field of policy and practice. Located against both developments, the paper argues for a principled eclecticism framed by a reassessment of quality, which can be applied to the huge variety of methodologies, theories, epistemologies and topics legitimately utilised and addressed within the field of educational research. At the same time, the paper argues the need to globalise the educational research imagination and deparochialise educational research. This call is located within a broader argument suggesting the need for a new social imaginary (in a post-neoliberal context of the global financial crisis) to frame educational policy and practice and the contribution that educational theory and research might make to its constitution. In relation to this, the paper considers the difficulties that political representations of such a new imaginary might entail for the President and the Association, given the variety of its membership and huge diversity of its research interests.     

Educational research, policy and practice in an era of globalisation

Globalisation includes not only the changes brought about by the opening up of markets and communication technology, but also those set in motion by shifts in policy relating to the responsibilities of government and the role of research and innovation in development. This paper examines the impact of globalisation on education research, policy and practice, and the ways in which reforms and priorities in the education systems of the Asia-Pacific region are being shaped by the interaction between the global and the local. It is argued that educational reforms should not be left to global forces or powerful global organizations to decide for us, but should stem from deliberate and considered choices based on the best-available research. Closing the gaps between research, policy and practice demands that we rethink our research priorities and practices, as well as the ways in which we develop and implement policy. The paper examines some of the rethinking underway, and how organizations like APERA, UNESCO and Eidos promote the sharing of knowledge and experience and collaboration between educational researchers, policy makers and practioners in the Asia-Pacific region.     

Blogging as public pedagogy: creating alternative educational futures

In this study, I explore ‘blogging’, the use of a regularly updated website or web page, authored and curated by an individual or small group, written in a conversational style, as a form of public pedagogy. I analyse blogs as pre-figurative spaces where people go to learn with/in a public sphere, through collaboration with interested others. However, my intention is not to conceptualize blogging spaces as such, but rather—having framed them in a particular way—to explore the extent to which they globalise dissent. My argument is that the blogs I explore, understood as public pedagogic spaces, cultivate voices of educational dissent. Positioning itself within the global research imagination, the study draws extensively on data generated by two blogging communities with a combined international readership in excess of 40,000 people; one of the blogs is based in the UK, written by a group of adult educators. The other is based in Canada written by a group of adult literacy practitioners. Whilst both blogs are authored, curated and carried by a named individual, as public pedagogic spaces, they are implicated in the creation of a dialogic self: a self which is developed collaboratively with/in the interests of and through a public that coalesces around them. The pedagogies associated with these spaces are argued as explicit and intentioned. The public that coalesces around them learns how to survive a global neoliberal policy nexus that is unsympathetic towards the ideals they pre-figuratively embody. In so doing, they call into being the creation of alternative educational understandings of themselves and each other in relation to policy, pedagogy and the purposes of education.     

Some economic and ideological aspects of the reform of education and training in England and Wales in the last ten years

This paper reviews the changes, which have been introduced to public education in Australia, particularly over the last decade. These changes are analysed against the background of the free, compulsory and secular Education Acts that were implemented in every Australian colony during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This legislation has formed the cornerstone of public education in Australia since that time. The principles of free, compulsory and secular public education and the underlying social values which underpinned the legislation are re-examined, together with the factors leading to the development of the centralized state education bureaucracies which were set up to administer the Acts. In considering current changes to public education policy in Australia, the paper argues that the principles underlying the establishment of public education have been significantly eroded. In the space of little more than a decade, the social values underpinning the Education Acts have been dramatically changed, leading to a re-invention of what public education means in this country.     

“有教无类”的历史解读与现代价值

"有教无类"是孔子教育思想体系的重要组成部分,是孔子毕生从事教育事业的指导思想。基于全民教育、大众教育和教育公平的时代背景,通过对"自行束脩以上"的争辩、对"类"的争辩、对"有教"的争辩三个方面的辨析,研究孔子"有教无类"的教育思想及其哲学内涵。在阐释"有教无类"之平等、正义价值理念的基础上,针对当下择校热与补课热、高收费与乱收费、高考加分与自主招生中的不正之风等教育不公平现象,从法律与政策支撑、亟须倾注全社会之力和对教育品质的追求三个方面,分析孔子"有教无类"教育思想的现代价值。     

Media/ting change: the print media's role in mediating education policy in a period of radical reform in Victoria,Australia

This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and communication theory, studies on media and educational reform, and the work of Bernstein, Bourdieu and Luhmann in particular, to explore how the print and media ‘mediated’ a period of educational change marked by moves to self‐management in schools in Victoria, Australia. It considers how the media was mobilized by various education stakeholders, and in turn informed relations between schools and government, through policy discourses and texts. It considers why and how particular themes became media ‘issues’, how schools and teachers responded to these issues, and how the media was used by various stakeholders in education to shape policy debates. It is based on a year‐long qualitative study that explored critical incidents and representations about education in the print media over a year in the daily press. It illustrates the ways in which a neo‐liberal Victorian government mobilized the media to gain strategic advantage to promote radical education reform policies, considers the media effects of this media/tion process on schools and teachers, and conceptualizes how school and system performance is fed from and into media representations, public perceptions and community understandings of schools and teachers' work.     

Large‐scale interventions in science education: The road to utopia?

This article provides commentary on the five articles in this issue on large‐scale interventions in science education for diverse student groups in varied educational settings. Using these articles as a point of departure, I discuss three challenges to science education research and practice. The first concerns the changed meaning of science education reform over the past two decades. The science education research and development community must be aware of the shifting policy and public awareness context of their work and react accordingly if it wishes for its work to make a difference in the lives of teachers and students. The second addresses the importance of teacher professional development and the role that well‐designed and internally valid research plays in developing knowledge in this area. The third discusses the chaotic and contradictory nature of educational policy in this country and argues that our field needs to align our research work with the ways in which real and impactful decisions are made about education in general and science education in particular. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 420–427, 2012     

Some Antecedents of Educational Philosophy in Britain with Particular Reference to Social Science

It would be convenient to pretend that the histories of educational philosophy in Britain and, by extension, the USA and Australia, were responses to a common social and intellectual history but convenience in this case could only be accomplished at the expense of explanatory power. The history of educational philosophy in these three places is parallel but not in common. Philosophy of education in Britain is more closely related to philosophy than is philosophy of education in the USA. Philosophy of education in the USA appropriated the lead of the American Social Science Association and initially retained closer connections with social science than did its English counterpart. Nevertheless, it is argued here that educational philosophy's reference to social science—Victorian and modern—is the missing explanatory element in modem histories of the discipline. The appropriation of education by social science—a common feature of the intellectual history of education in Britain, Australasia, and the USA—leavened the research agenda of educational philosophy in Britain. Peters’ educational work can be best understood as an attempt to reunite education with moral philosophy such that the study of education would resume a profile similar to its nineteenth‐century counterpart, when it was moral philosophy that provided the most interesting discussions of human nature, primitive customs, and social institutions—education among them.     

Research Schools: Grounding Research in Educational Practice

ABSTRACT— Education lacks a strong infrastructure for connecting research with educational practice and policy. The need for this linkage grows as findings in cognitive science and biology become ever more relevant to education. Teachers often lack the background knowledge needed to interpret scientific results, whereas scientists often lack an understanding of pedagogical goals. We need to build an infrastructure that supports sustainable collaboration between researchers and teachers and creates a strong research foundation for education. A primary agent of the lasting collaboration between researchers and practitioners in medicine is the teaching hospital, where researchers and practitioners work together on research that is relevant to practice and the training of young professionals. Education needs analogous institutions—research schools—that join researchers and teachers in living, community‐based schools. In these schools, practice shapes research as much as research informs practice. Research schools will provide a fundamental infrastructure for linking transdisciplinary research on learning with educational policy and practice.