How Many Brains Does It Take to Build a New Light: Knowledge Management Challenges of a Transdisciplinary Project

ABSTRACT— The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) carried out the Learning Sciences and Brain Research project (1999–2007) to investigate how neuroscience research can inform education policy and practice. This transdisciplinary project brought many challenges. Within the political community, participation in the project varied, with some countries resisting approval of the project altogether, in the beginning. In the neuroscientific community, participants struggled to represent their knowledge in a way that would be meaningful and relevant to educators. Within the educational community, response to the project varied, with many educational researchers resisting it for fear that neuroscience research might make their work obsolete. Achieving dialogue among these communities was even more challenging. One clear obstacle was that participants had difficulty recognizing tacit knowledge in their own field and making this knowledge explicit for partners in other fields. This article analyzes these challenges through a knowledge management framework.     

MODERN CITIZENSHIP AND MASS HIGHER EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES

The following essay is an answer to the question of how the problem of defining American ‘nationality’ or citizenship has affected schooling and education since colonial times. Three traditions of American citizenship are identified: the ‘Atlantic’ inheritance of civic humanism which emphasizes public duties and responsibilities; the history of pluralism in the United States, which emphasizes the opposite, that is to say, group differences; and liberalism, which stresses individual rights, privileges, freedoms and merits. These three traditions of citizenship have produced innumerable dilemmas and conflicts in the provision for public education and are currently unreconciled, especially because of the politics of ethnicity and gender which characterize ‘fin de siècle’ America. One lesson is the difficulty educational systems have in maintaining ideals and goals separate from the wider political culture of which they are part.     

From learning to labour to learning for marginality: school segregation and marginalization in Swedish suburbs

In this article, using data from ethnographic research, we try to present some glimpses of the way education is described as an experience and possibility ‘from below’, by pupils who grow up and study in schools in the most segregated and territorially stigmatized suburbs on the outskirts of our major cities. What we feel they describe is an experience of schooling for surviving the social and economic consequences of curtailed citizenship in a post‐industrial society rather than one of schooling that offers possibilities of integration and full citizenship or social transformation. Our findings have significant policy implications in this respect. Sweden has historically pursued projects aimed at educational inclusion but has recently taken a significant turn toward neo‐liberalism and educational consumerism, since which time various disadvantaged groups have become increasingly concentrated compared with others in under‐achieving schools in an economically threatened public sector. The article discusses some aspects and possible consequences of this development.     

Hegemony of the “Great Equalizer” and the Fragmentation of Common Sense: A Gramscian Model of Inflated Ambitions for Schooling

Increasingly over the past 50 years, the mission statement of schooling in dominant US-American discourse has coalesced around a Great Equalizer narrative of education; that is, it has identified schools as the primary means through which individuals can achieve social mobility. In this article, I employ a Gramscian framework to describe how this dominant yet illusory definition of purpose disorients well-intentioned educational actors and often pits them unwittingly against each other. I show that as a result of a false narrative about what schools do for society, a fragmented common sense has arisen amongst teachers, politicians, scholars and activists to the detriment of a collective theory of change. To guard against fragmentation and avert educational actors' consent to a hegemonic social order, I argue that the first step toward collective resistance is acknowledging the limited impact schools have on the socioeconomic layout of society. Accordingly, educational actors hoping to ameliorate inequality must agree upon more realistic—and less tangible—cultural goals for schooling, such as inculcating critical citizenship and fostering civic participation.     

Speaking back to Manifest Destinies: a land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry

This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism shapes place in the social studies curriculum, producing understandings of land and citizenship in educational settings. To do this, the author uses the emergent framework of land education to move forward the important projects of place-based education, especially its potential for centering indigeneity and confronting educational forms of settler colonialism in environmental education. To emphasize how place-based education can intersect with land education, the author outlines how a concept of place, informed by Indigenous knowledge, renders settler colonialism visible. The author then describes how current models of place-based education differ from land education in a number of ways. Finally, using a land education approach, the author demonstrates how schooling, through social studies curriculum, transmits a settler colonial land ethic that must be made explicit in order to decolonize settler colonial relations attached to current pedagogical models of place. The author insists land education – like environmental education – must take place across the curriculum (k-16). However, land education implies a commitment to begin to understand the process of decolonization that takes seriously the centrality of settler colonialism.     

¡No cierren nuestra escuela! farm worker mothers as cultural citizens in an educational community mobilization effort

Mexican immigrant farm-worker mothers’ class, race, citizenship status, and jurisdictional status of their town in a Northern California community rendered them invisible. However, when the school board decided to close the elementary school the mothers mobilized. Drawing on these mothers’ fototestimonios we examine how they, as cultural citizens, resisted local practices of educational inequity. They wanted to ensure an education for their children. The fototestimonios reveal how farm-worker mothers: (1) negotiated as a collective with the school board; (2) sought negotiation and schooling alternatives; and (3) expressed cultural citizenship through collective efforts to be included within the US polity.     

Neoliberalism, Social Darwinism, and Consumerism Masquerading as School Reform

Education reform policies harvested from neoliberalism, social Darwinism, consumerism, and free-market ideologies have begun to replace the pragmatic progressivism of the pre-World War II era. In this article, I use three federal and state education reform policies and programs—No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core State Standards Initiative, and national standardized testing—as examples of market-oriented ideologies embedded in the reforms. Further, I rely on Critical Social Theory, following Freire, as a framework to examine how the education policies and programs intersect to potentially impede access to quality education opportunities for children from impoverished backgrounds. I use Freire’s conception of Critical Social Theory because of his focus on how education should be used as a transformational mechanism to improve lives rather than a tool to train and inculcate children to imitate and be subservient to the dominant culture. I argue that some federal education policies enacted since 2002 provide examples of the confluence of ideologies that are creating a new meritocracy-based system. The meritocracy-based system will disproportionately penalize poorer students who have less access to out of school experiences that prepare them for formal schooling. Based on punishment triggers embedded in state and federal education policies, a cycle of educational austerity ensues when a student does not achieve a mandatory achievement benchmark. The cycle of austerity can doom some students to under-achievement in the short term and to becoming under-educated in the long term.     

What do citizens need to know? An analysis of knowledge in citizenship curricula in the UK and Ireland

Contemporary citizenship education tends to focus on the development of skills through real experiences, which has led to a relative neglect or simplification of knowledge and understanding. This article outlines a framework for analysing citizenship curricula drawing on Young’s notion of ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and on Shulman’s account of subject knowledge, which includes substantive concepts and epistemic criteria. These ideas are used to analyse the citizenship curricula in the four nations of the UK and Ireland to assess the extent to which they provide an adequate account of knowledge and understanding of citizenship. The article concludes that it is important to reconsider the relationship between the genuinely educational aspects of citizenship education (where ‘powerful knowledge’ opens up new and diverse understandings) from the normative aims, which are more akin to a form of socialisation (where ‘knowledge of the powerful’ closes down certain possibilities).     

Pre-service English language teachers’ collaborative development: the emergence of research,rehearsal and reflection (3R) model from an activity theory perspective

This study aims to understand how pre-service teachers’ activities shape (and are shaped) by the norms of schooling embedded in the national educational system from an activity theory lens. The data are obtained from video-recordings and bi-weekly reflective journals in microteaching sessions, lesson plans, classroom observations, and post feedback sessions. The analysis points to the stages, micro- and macro-networking levels that lead to the collaborative teacher development, and the emergence of a model in the growth of pre-service teachers. Overall, it is found that the development of pre-service teachers depends largely on the norms of schooling embedded in the national curriculum and the nature of training they received at undergraduate level. The paper concludes by confirming Engeström’s statement that understanding the evolution and historical change of pre-service teacher education in a special context might help investigate how activities change, develop, and interconnect with social and material structures.     

On the Teaching of Grammar

Abstract

Globalization significantly influences the very notion of citizenship that is no longer universally seen as only a nation-related concept. Therefore, the discourse of global citizenship is getting more attention in programmatic educational texts and curricula. This study investigates how teachers use the conceptual framework of global citizenship in the social studies classroom, and what curricular devices and pedagogies social studies teachers use to address aspects of global citizenship. The study demonstrated that social studies teachers frequently use information about international issues in their classrooms, and there is a tendency to incorporate global and international perspectives into citizenship education. However, educators need more rigorous assistance to teach emerging types of citizenship. The study demonstrates that despite the fact that participants rarely use the term global citizenship in their instruction, they provide rationales that correspond to the notion of global citizenship.     

Curriculum Change as a Form of Educational Policy Legitimation: the case of Spain

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how the main changes in the last Spanish Educational Reform become new forms of state educational control. The article introduces a specific sociological perspective to analyse these changes in semiperipheral social formations. Macro‐contradictions embedded in the process of mass schooling in Spain draw a framework to understand the context and the logics of curriculum change. The extremely acute state legitimation crisis in semiperipheral societies has effects on the structure and the content of curriculum change. These effects are analysed, on the one hand, at the level of educational policy, and, on the other, at the level of school practices, showing the importance of cultural obstacles for curriculum change through teachers’ beliefs and practices.     

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.     

Education,skills and citizenship: an emergent model for entrepreneurship in Tanzania

Educating for citizenship is most often associated with a discourse of liberalism in which knowledge, skills and values of equality, rights, justice and national identity are taught. A competing neoliberal discourse with values of self-improvement, responsibility and entrepreneurialism is now quite pervasive in educational policies and practices, shifting goals and processes of education for citizenship. In Tanzania, neoliberalism's influence is evident in the private provision of schooling and pedagogy and curriculum oriented toward skills development. Neoliberal policies have created an opening for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to fill a need by providing secondary education as well as technical and entrepreneurial skills in efforts to make graduates more employable. This paper examines how an NGO entrepreneurship education programme integrated into formal secondary education in Tanzania articulates new goals and values of citizenship. In this model, learning is tied to markets; becoming a successful citizen includes acquiring business skills; and citizenship values include economic sustainability and self-reliance. This model of entrepreneurship education produces a paradox in educational goals for citizenship in that it aims to secure rights to education and provide for material needs while it also subjects young people and schools to economic and social risks tied to flexible and unstable markets.     

Capacities and Behaviour of Quality Classroom Teachers

This study focussed on the capacities and behaviours of quality teachers. Four key capacities were identified as being characteristic amongst the five quality teachers who were observed in action which were then related to their behaviour. Prominent amongst the findings was the conclusion that these teachers had high cognitive ability which allowed them to develop critical powers of observation, reflection and analysis; they had strong philosophies of education; they had developed a bicultural approach, and possessed a strong sense of humour and a well developed social conscience. Above all else they cared about the learning outcomes of their children. Their approach was child‐centred and they encouraged students to set goals, to review progress, to challenge, and to solve problems. The article concludes with a discussion of its relationship to, and differences with, the parent CERI/OECD study of which it was part.     

Shifting paradigms: Emerging issues for educational policy and practice

Abstract

Within the current national context of educational reform, educators are generating a new paradigm about teaching and learning. This shift is occurring as a consequence of rethinking nearly all aspects of schooling. The new paradigm is competing with, an older one. Time will tell whether or not the new one will replace the old one, but clearly they cannot coexist because they are so fundamentally different. The new paradigm is based on the latest research on cognitive developmental and constructivist theory, and the old paradigm is based on reductionist principles and behavioral theory.

This article creates a framework for understanding the paradigm shift, describes how the shift applies to instructional practices, synthesizes several principles and indicators that can guide the observation of teaching, and discusses issues yet to be resolved.     

School Context and Charter School Achievement: A Framework for Understanding the Performance “Black Box”

This article explores the relationship between charter school racial composition, school environments, and student achievement. We offer an original framework for understanding school context and its influence on schooling outcomes. We conclude that policymakers could better attend to the persistent educational inequality that has shaped U.S. schooling if when designing school choice plans they took account of student racial composition even in a postdesegregation environment.     

Fostering Global Citizenship Education for Teachers Through Online Research

Abstract

This article is based on a study involving 126 International Baccalaureate (IB) teachers in more than 30 countries who, through the use of asynchronous online discussion forums, shared how they teach and simultaneously reflected upon how they conceptualize global citizenship. Data analysis revealed that participants developed new understandings about open-mindedness, interconnectedness, and cross-cultural learning experiences. Online data collection in educational research offers great opportunity for furthering professional development in global citizenship education.     

TRAINING UNIVERSITY MANAGERS

Dr. Raoul F. Kneucker, Secretary General of the Austrian Rectors’ Conference and member of the Advisory Committee of CEPES, is at present chairman of the OECD/CERI Programme “Institutional Management in Higher Education”. Here he analyses the situation in the OECD member countries and calls for improved training of “managers in the service of universities”.     

Schooling citizens: policy in practice in South Africa

The notion of ‘student citizen’ is implicit in a range of national and provincial policy documents in South Africa, with citizenship promoted as both an expected outcome of schooling and an encouraged practice within schools. This paper provides an account of how policy on student citizenship was translated differently into practice in four secondary schools in Cape Town, each with a different former racial categorisation under apartheid. It argues that student engagement with citizenship varied considerably between the schools and in many cases was significantly different from the policy framework. Influencing factors included staff–student relations, socio‐historical contexts and how diversity was played out in the schools.