Rural youth out-migration and education: challenges to aspirations discourse in mobile modernity

ABSTRACT

We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two central narratives in rural education today relate first, to the economic and social problems faced by challenged ‘left behind’ communities faced by depopulation and restructuring, and second, ‘boomtown’ communities that experience rapid infusions of wealth and population. We offer two linked case studies from Australia and Canada that draw on what we call a rural sociological imagination to interrogate how education is framed in contemporary convergences of history and biography in rural locations. These framings complicate and even confound meritocratic and human capital assumptions that underpin contemporary educational policy discourse, particularly as it relates to rural education.     

The role of archbishop Walsh in the resolution of the Irish University question

Abstract

This paper traces the evolution of early childhood care and education (ECCE) in Ireland over the course of the last century. Changing conceptualisations of the nature of childhood provide the context for understanding historical and contemporary approaches to ECCE. Historically, young children's care and education were treated as separate entities, with ‘care’ provided within the home and ‘education’ outside the home. However, the contemporary perspective recognises that young children's learning occurs on a continuum from birth, with care and education being interdependent. Although a distinct ECCE sector is beginning to emerge, prompted by developments at policy, practice and research level, there is considerable scope for further progress. Given ‘where we have come from’ and ‘where we are currently at’, future directions and recommendations for ECCE are elucidated.     

Machine behaviourism: future visions of ‘learnification’ and ‘datafication’ across humans and digital technologies

ABSTRACT

This paper examines visions of ‘learning’ across humans and machines in a near-future of intensive data analytics. Building upon the concept of ‘learnification’, practices of ‘learning’ in emerging big data-driven environments are discussed in two significant ways: the training of machines, and the nudging of human decisions through digital choice architectures. Firstly, ‘machine learning’ is discussed as an important example of how data-driven technologies are beginning to influence educational activity, both through sophisticated technical expertise and a grounding in behavioural psychology. Secondly, we explore how educational software design informed by behavioural economics is increasingly intended to frame learner choices to influence and ‘nudge’ decisions towards optimal outcomes. Through the growing influence of ‘data science’ on education, behaviourist psychology is increasingly and powerfully invested in future educational practices. Finally, it is argued that future education may tend toward very specific forms of behavioural governance – a ‘machine behaviourism’ – entailing combinations of radical behaviourist theories and machine learning systems, that appear to work against notions of student autonomy and participation, seeking to intervene in educational conduct and shaping learner behaviour towards predefined aims.     

What can we learn from Plato about intellectual character education?

Abstract

In the Republic, Plato developed an educational program through which he trained young Athenians in desiring truth, without offering them any knowledge-education. This is not because he refused to pass on knowledge but because he considered knowledge of the Good as an ongoing research program. I show this by tracing the steps of the education of the Philosopher-Kings in Plato’s ideal state, to establish that the decades-long educational regime aims at training them in three types of virtue: (i) Moral Virtue; (ii) the Cognitive Virtue of Abstraction; (iii) the Cognitive Virtue of Debate.

Plato’s theory of education has much to teach us about intellectual character education today. The Platonic educational program does not advocate the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner but rather focuses on building the learners’ epistemic dispositions. Building upon the Socratic Method, Plato’s educational program does not ‘spoon-feed’ knowledge to the learners but rather fosters the growth of intellectual virtues through problem-solving.

I explain ways in which fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving could be applied in classrooms today. I conclude that Plato’s rigorous educational program is of definite merit for contemporary virtue education, especially since Aristotle offers us surprisingly little on how to educate for intellectual virtues.     

Towards decolonial praxis: reconfiguring the human and the curriculum

ABSTRACT

This theoretical inquiry applies threads of Sylvia Wynter’s intellectual project to scholarship in curriculum studies to consider how Wynter’s insights might urge new potential in educational theorising and practice. The central concern driving Wynter’s intellectual project is that our present understanding about what it means to be human is entrenched in epistemological legacies of colonialism that preserve a Western bourgeois genre of Man. This essay begins by detailing Sylvia Wynter’s rigorous and innovative intellectual project that reworks the category of the human. We argue that contemporary curriculum is based upon this Western genre of the human and explore the limits of multicultural curricula. Synthesising Wynter’s interrelated lines of thought – how the notion of being hybridly human calls forth a conceptualisation of humanness as a collective act – we argue that her revised category of the human is a necessary means to radically reimagine and decolonise curriculum.     

Promoting the development of backbone teachers through University-School Collaborative Research: the case of New Basic Education (NBE) reform in China

ABSTRACT

The image of backbone teachers has long informed the modern-era Chinese educational system. Backbone teachers play leadership and modeling roles in school-based groups of teachers focusing on research, lesson planning, and grade development. China’s New Basic Education (NBE) reform, which differs from previous Chinese reforms, aims to systematically transform schools in order to respond to contemporary social and economic changes. NBE views the development of individual subjectivity as education’s ultimate goal. Teachers’ roles need to shift from transferring knowledge to students to constructing knowledge with students and from teacher-as-curriculum-implementer to teacher-as-curriculum-maker and knowledge constructor. Backbone teachers are foundational to the NBE reform. In this article, we introduce the NBE initiative, and elaborate how NBE nurtures backbone teachers so they can ‘model as leaders; [and lead] other teachers as backbones’ in the reform. To end, the national and international implications associated with our case are discussed, along with future research suggestions.     

Cosmopolitan nationalism in the cases of South Korea,Israel and the U.S

Abstract

In this essay we develop the concept of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, offering a working definition and suggesting ways sociologists of education might draw on it in their future work. We show how it is a useful analytical lens through which to examine contemporary policies and practices that navigate global processes (ranking systems, mobility of people, expectations for futures) but also take account of nationalistic tendencies, as well as local and national attempts to challenge persistent inequalities within education systems. By using policy examples from three countries (South Korea, Israel and the US), we illuminate how cosmopolitan nationalism is evident across various initiatives in these countries, and the varied implications this has for education systems in terms of equality, access and quality.     

Historicizing tianrenheyi as correlative cosmology for rethinking education in modern China and beyond

Abstract

The Chinese tianrenheyi thesis bespeaks a correlative cosmology irreducible to the Western metaphysics. This article historicizes tianrenheyi for new implications to help rethink the given concepts of ‘person/thing,’ ‘environment/nature,’ and ‘relationality’ in contemporary ethical and environmental education in three steps. First, it turns to Yu Ying-Shih’s writing for a historical and ethical picture of tianrenheyi as an ‘Axial breakthrough’ in Confucius' time and with direct relevance to Confucian person-making education. Second, it moves on to Roger Ames’ unpacking of tianrenheyi as hospitalized in a ‘correlative cosmology’ and ‘Confucian relational personhood’ to help us re-understand Confucian ‘person’ as being relational. Finally, it shows how these re-invoked philosophical–ethical–cosmological theses expose a ‘foundational individualism’ which grounds and confines current educational thinking to an anthropocentric (dis)ordering. As an alternative, this article calls for a productive symbiotic conjoining between humans and their cultural–natural environs toward nurturing today’s youth into ecologically literate, responsible, and responsive co-beings.     

Participatory action research and the public sphere

Some action research today lacks a critical edge. This article identifies five inadequate forms of action research, and argues that action research must be capable of ‘telling unwelcome truths’ against schooling in the interests of education. It reasserts a connection between education and emancipatory ideals that allow educators to address contemporary social challenges. It suggests how educational trends in recent decades may have led to the domestication of educational action research, and concludes with three messages about quality in educational action research. It re‐thinks educational action research initiatives as creating intersubjective spaces for public discourse in public spheres.     

The Luddite Revolt continues

The bicentenary in 2011 of the Luddite Revolt prompts us to ask ‘what would Ned Ludd think of today’s automated styles of distance education?’ He would no doubt echo the common criticism that educational technologies create an impersonal style of teaching and learning, and devalue the teacher. He would probably agree that online methods have major potential for millions of distance‐based students who cannot attend classroom‐based education and training; but he would emphasise the need for quality assurance and cost‐effectiveness studies in distance education implementation. He might also ask why anyone would encourage the development of e‐learning in countries where the Internet is largely inaccessible. This article uses the Luddites’ views of workplace automation to explore how global distance education practices might be improved. It suggests that the intentions of the original Luddites were laudable and worthy of application in distance education today.     

Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology

ABSTRACT

As social science fiction, this paper imagines three possible futures for education and technology. Among the most important technologies emerging today are data-aggregating technologies such as AI, affective computing, adaptive or predictive software, clouds and platforms. The paper is not, however, directed at specific technologies, but at indeterminate sociotechnical configurations. Set in 2040, it offers three ‘histories’ of the 2020s. Might students become (i) ‘smooth users’, improving themselves in the pursuit of frictionless efficiency within a post-democratic frame created by large corporations, (ii) ‘digital nomads’, seeking freedom, individualism and aesthetic joy as solopreneurs exploiting state regulations and algorithmic rules while stepping out of the state and deeply into the capitalist new economy, or (iii) participatory, democratic, ecological humans embedded in ‘collective agency’ that see institutions as spaces for exploring more equitable ways of living? The paper reflects on the future research and the political, educational and technological decisions which would make each of these three fictional future histories more or less likely.     

The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism and the Figural Child

This article contributes to work on temporality in education. Challenging the future‐oriented focus in contemporary education, the authors question how ideas and assumptions regarding the future—centred on the Child—can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’. The argument seeks specifically to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational discourse and privileges a certain future—making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. Juxtaposing Lee Edelman and John Dewey, we draw out connections and disconnections between their disparate philosophies, illustrating the ways in which educational futurism ignores or overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of children and the impact of such queerness on broadening discussions of the future of children and their educations.     

Neuroscience and Education: Blind Spots in a Strange Relationship

This article—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix ‘neuro‐’ is ubiquitous today and therefore concepts like ‘neuropedagogy’ or ‘neurodidactics’ seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of the article the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; a brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be made in order to demonstrate how the results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty in integrating neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of ‘native concepts’. In contrast to them, educational theory has much more difficulty with such integration, as will be shown in the third part of the essay. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to dominate education rather easily and without great resistance, especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning—mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere ‘relationship problem’. On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education might be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself, with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention.     

Beyond workforce preparation: contested visions of ‘twenty-first century’ education reform

ABSTRACT

Contrary to educational policy and research assumptions about an immanent ‘twenty-first century’ future, this article uses the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ to trace how nonprofit actors in California invented and materialized distinctive visions of educational progress. Drawing on interview and ethnographic fieldnote data, I illustrate two contrasting sociotechnical visions: A Silicon Valley vision that aimed to reduce inequalities in test-based outcomes by disseminating ‘achievement technologies’; and an Oakland vision that aspired to address systemic environmental, economic and educational inequities using ‘civic technologies’. The diversity of these futures, and the distinctive kinds of digital technologies that co-produced these visions, trouble assumptions about ‘technology’ as an unquestioned good and problematize constructions of the ‘twenty-first century’ as an ostensibly shared, democratic future. I conclude by encouraging educational researchers to clarify a politics of the ‘twenty-first century’ and explore how ‘bounded imaginaries’, like those evident in the Oakland case, offer a potentially fruitful basis for reframing global education technology policies.     

The imagined community of sexually liberal citizens: educational reforms since the 1970s

Recent integration discourses in Europe locate problems of equality, gender, and sexuality among migrant youth. Educating and testing the values of future citizens is supposed to guarantee their conformity with ‘western’ and ‘modern’ values. By analyzing educational reform discourses in multicultural Luxembourg, the paper aims to challenge these contemporary narratives in two ways: (1) In a historical analysis, the paper traces conservative reform resistance in the case of sex education which is often overlooked due to the focus on migrants; (2) In placing sex education’s reform legitimation and resistance within (a) broader educational reform discourses of inequality and citizenship and (b) contemporary narrations of the reforms and their taboos, the paper reconstructs how liberals and conservatives join an alliance over sexuality education of ‘the Other’. The sociological–historical discourse analysis critically questions the ethnicization of sexuality by disclosing its homogenizing use to cover conservative resistance within the citizen’s community.     

Education as if people matter: John Macmurray,community and the struggle for democracy

The educational writings of John Macmurray, one of the finest philosophers of his generation, have a special relevance for us today. In similar circumstances of international crisis he argues for the central importance of education addressing fundamental issues of human purpose—how we lead good lives together, the emphasis on wisdom rather than knowledge alone, the advancement of a truly democratic culture, and the overriding importance of community in human flourishing. A pioneering advocate of education of the emotions, he champions the development of imagination, spontaneity and authenticity as key to educating ‘the capacity for change itself’. For Macmurray, educators must place relationships and care at the heart of all they do. Overemphasis on technique and its typical separation from wider human purposes is emblematic of much of our contemporary malaise. An inclusive, caring community is the precondition of our human being and becoming. The paper concludes by taking some of Macmurray’s key philosophical insights and developing a framework which enables us to make judgments about whether or not contemporary approaches to education support or diminish our lives as creative, caring human beings within a context of social justice and democratic human fellowship.     

Educational Plasticity: Catherine Malabou and ‘the feeling of a new responsibility’

Abstract

This paper attempts to reintegrate the concept of plasticity into educational philosophy. Although John Dewey used the concept in Democracy and Education (1916) it has not generated much of a critical or practical legacy in educational thought. French philosopher, Catherine Malabou, is the first to think plasticity rigorously and seriously in a contemporary philosophical context and this paper outlines her thinking on it as well as considering its applicability to education. My argument is that her definition not only successfully reintroduces the concept in a way which is generative for contemporary educational philosophy and practice but that it also significantly extends the remit of educational plasticity as previously conceived by Dewey. This paper will examine the concept of educational plasticity as providing an opportunity as well as ‘the feeling of a new responsibility’ towards the plastic subject in philosophical approaches to education.     

The politics of education and the misrecognition of Wales

Abstract

This paper examines the positioning of the Welsh education system within contemporary policy debate and analysis. It begins by outlining some of the ways in which education policy and provision in Wales differs from that of its neighbour, England, and then goes on to critique how these differences have been represented in both the media and by members of the educational research community. Indeed, the paper argues that these representations constitute a form of misrecognition. It is tempting to counter this misrecognition with assertions of the superiority of the ‘Welsh way’—and certainly pronouncements of a ‘crisis’ in Welsh education appear to be as much politically-driven as evidence-based. However, such an approach would underplay the very real challenges that face Wales—challenges which are both like and unlike those facing England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The paper concludes that we need a serious engagement with national divergences across the four nations of the UK—as well as elsewhere. The case of Wales highlights the need to undertake not only comparative analysis but also relational analysis if we are to enhance our understanding of the changing politics of education.     

Unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in China: Historical,social and value perspectives

Abstract

This study concentrates on exploring the ‘logic’ of modern universities in China-a working concept that promotes a more in-depth discourse on the implicit illustrations of the ‘logic’ of universities in contemporary China. Drawing on the logic model, we explore the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of university and examine how the concept of ‘logic’ of modern universities to be perceived, challenged and negotiated through the historical, social and value perspectives. The historical logics, social logics and value logics contribute on unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China. We suggested that the ‘logic’ of university has important conceptual and practical implications for higher education, especially the importance of explicitness. The ‘logic’ of modern university in China is subject to offer a platform where expectations of university students are elaborated. In addition, the study also seeks to offer an insight into the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China.