Pedagogy in Common: Democratic education in the global era

In the context of the increasingly transnational organization of society, culture, and communication, this article develops a conceptualization of the global common as a basic condition of interrelation and shared experience, and describes contemporary political efforts to fully democratize this condition. The article demonstrates the implications for curriculum and teaching of this project, describing in particular the importance of fundamentally challenging the interpellation of students as subjects of the nation, and the necessity for new and radically collaborative forms of political and pedagogical authority that can more powerfully realize the imaginative potential of educators and students alike as global democratic actors. In this effort, familiar progressive educational ideas (e.g. the importance of the continuity of the curriculum, and the meaning and purpose of experimentalism) are interrogated and rearticulated. The article concludes with a discussion of the unique ways in which education can contribute to constructing a democratic society in the global era, and how the central aspects of such a pedagogy in common can also suggest essential principles for the organization of social movements in this context.     

Adult education as a common good: conceptualisation and measurement

The article outlines a theoretical framework for conceptualising adult education – and more broadly, lifelong learning – as a common good. It argues that the extent to which adult education as a common good is accomplished in a given society/country reflects its accessibility, availability, affordability and the social commitment to its functioning and that it depends on a country’s specific institutional arrangements. Building on this conceptualisation and using data from the Adult Education Survey (AES), the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS) for 24 European countries, the authors develop a composite index, based on these four dimensions, which measures the extent to which adult education as a common good is practiced in a given country. This index can be used to assess the effectiveness of national policies in the sphere of adult education across Europe. The results indicate substantial cross-country differences, with North European states and Luxembourg scoring best and Romania scoring worst. Finally, applying cluster analysis, the article identifies six distinctive clusters of countries with regard to the extent of adult education as a common good; the authors designate these cluster categories as reality, feasible, ambiguous, problematic, possible and invisible.     

公益性：现代教育的必备属性

公益性是我国现代教育发展的基本价值取向。然而现实中人们容易对现代教育的公益性产生误读——忽视现代教育产品公共性、现代教育投资主体国家性、现代教育受益群体的整体性,从而阻碍教育的发展。深入理解公益性在现代教育中的地位,明晰现代教育公益性特征已成为不可回避的关键问题。     

Education as a global public good: the applicability and implications of a framework

This paper addresses a growing literature on global public goods theory, in particular the use of this framework to promote the equitable provision of goods and social services, such as basic education, on an international scale. Due to a lack of research into this theory’s applicability to education, the author aims to discern how such a framework might be applied, and its possible policy implications, focusing on universal access initiatives and the debate on private provision of schooling. The paper further questions the appropriateness of using global public goods theory given certain critiques.     

Reclaiming quality in higher education: a human factor approach

Interest in quality is well established within higher education. This paper will critically review the most commonly used definitions of quality: fitness for purpose and value for money. It will point out that these two definitions are important but they ignore the emancipatory power of higher education and the development needs of academics and students. This paper will propose a new understanding of quality as a virtue of professional practice, which can be used as a useful force for individual academics and students to increase their commitment to learning and teaching. A new model of quality evaluation will be outlined as a supportive mechanism to enhance academics’ professionalism and to increase students’ capability to learn.     

Dimensions of higher education and the public good in South Africa

The focus is on the micro-possibilities of student capabilities formation as the end of public-good higher education, rather than on a systems or organizations approach more commonly found in discussions of the public good and higher education. This does not discount other valuable public-good ends. Using South Africa as a global South context, a capability-based approach to the public good of higher education is proposed for its humanizing ethic, attention to fair opportunities, and participation in terms of what students are able to do and to be in and through higher education. A capability frame is complemented by thinking about decoloniality and epistemic justice to help identify central higher education capabilities. The three proposed intersecting capability dimensions are as follows: personhood self-formation, epistemic contribution, and sufficiency of economic resources, intended to guide university practices and policy interventions in the direction of the public good. By populating the space of the public good with capabilities, a shift is made away from micro-economics which see the public good as a reductionist space of commodities and human capital development. Higher education is rather understood as having both instrumental and intrinsic value, generating an alternative logic to that of neo-liberalism, and an individualist ontology of competition and untrammeled markets. The pressures of the global context are acknowledged so that the public good is understood as both “ideal-aspirational” but also “practical-feasible” in the light of local South African conditions. An expanded capability-based framing would contribute to reducing higher education inequalities as a public-good and public-accountable contribution by universities.     

论高等教育的公益性与私益性

高等教育的公益性与私益性是可以相互转化的,是政策选择的结果。公益性始终是高等教育的本质属性,但在资源不足的情况下,高等教育的私益性生产是不可避免的。大力弘扬高等教育的公益性、正确引导高等教育的私益性是全社会的共同要求,也是政府、高校和社会的共同责任。     

Higher education for public value: taking the debate beyond New Public Management

Many higher education (HE) system reforms in the past decades have been built on the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM). However, these reforms have not allowed HE to fully take its value for society into account. In recent years a growing call can be heard to orient the HE sector towards more collaboration, a focus on a larger set of socio-economic objectives instead of on performance alone, less pressure, more trust and legitimacy. In this article, it is stated that NPM has not sufficiently enabled the creation of public value (PV) by the HE sector. This article provides (1) insight into the flaws of NPM, (2) an understanding of PV for HE and (3) a new model to study HE reforms built on the concept of PV.     

Education,Measurement and the Professions: Reclaiming a space for democratic professionality in education

Abstract

In this article, I explore the impact of the contemporary culture of measurement on education as a professional field. I focus particularly on the democratic dimensions of professionalism, which includes both the democratic qualities of professional action in education itself and the way in which education, as a profession, supports the wider democratic cause. I show how an initial authoritarian conception of professionalism was opened up in the 1960s and 1970s towards more democratic and more inclusive forms of professional action. I then show how, in the wake of the transformation of the welfare state and the rise of neo-liberal forms of governing, the democratic dimension of professionalism became distorted. I discuss three distortions: having to do with the position of clients, the nature of accountability and the status of professional knowledge. While at first sight, the developments in each of these areas can be seen as furthering the democratisation of the professions, I argue that in fact they have eroded the democratic dimension of the professions and show the contribution of the culture of measurement to this erosion process. In the final step of my argument, I suggest how a more democratic mode of professional action might be regained and how such a mode of professional action might contribute to wider processes of democratisation.     

Reclaiming literacies: competing textual practices in a digital higher education

This essay examines the implications of the ubiquitous use of the term ‘digital literacies’ in higher education and its increasing alignment with institutional and organisational imperatives. It suggests that the term has been stripped of its provenance and association with disciplinary knowledge production and textual practice. Instead it is called into service rhetorically in order to promote competency-based agendas both in and outside the academy. The piece also points to a tendency to position teachers in deficit with regard to their technological capabilities and pay scant attention to their own disciplinary and scholarly practices in a digital world. It concludes that there is a case for building on established theoretical and conceptual frameworks from literacy studies if we wish to integrate advantages of the digital landscape with thoughtful teaching practice.     

Public knowledge: public education: Northland Secondary College versus the State

Large‐scale cuts to the education budget were a primary focus for the newly elected State Liberal party in Victoria, Australia in 1992. Northland Secondary College, a Melbourne urban school of 474 students, had been selected for closure. Northland had long defined itself as a ‘community school’, with a strong commitment to and success in meeting the needs of Aboriginal (Koori) students. This local community reacted strongly to news of closure, and for a period of two years resisted the full weight of the State through a series of course procedures, and public defiance. During this period, Northland maintained a Rebel School conducted by volunteer teachers. The school and local community sought to expand the concept of accountability as defined by the State. They directly challenged the increasing trend towards centralizing, and what they perceived as the homogenization of the curriculum. At the heart of core concerns to the school community was a deep commitment to maintain and participate in decisions defining important educational knowledge. It was a staunch defence of local needs. The present corporate model of administrative governance directing State schooling proved inadequate in dealing with the plurality and hybridity of this modern community, and, in particular, one inhabited with urban Aboriginal cultures.     

The public/private divide in higher education: A global revision

Our common understandings of the public/private distinction in higher education are drawn from neo-classical economics and/or statist political philosophy. However, the development of competition and markets at the national level, and the new potentials for private and public goods created by globalisation in higher education, have exposed weaknesses in the traditional notions of public/private. For example, (1) the statist notion that higher education is always/already a public good blinds us to its role in producing scarce positional private goods, even in free systems; (2) because there is no global state, both statists and neo-liberals model the global higher education environment simply as a trading environment without grasping the potential for global public goods in education – goods that are subject to non-rivalry or non-excludability, and broadly available across populations, on a global scale. Yet higher education in one nation has the potential to create positive and negative externalities in another; and all higher education systems and institutions can benefit from collective systems e.g. that facilitate cross-border recognition and mobility. The paper sets out to revise public/private in higher education. Rather than defining public/private in terms of legal ownership, it focuses on the social character of the goods. It argues that public/private goods are not always zero sum and under certain conditions provide conditions of possibility for each other. It proposes (a) units in national government that focus specifically on cross-border effects; (b) global policy spaces – taking in state agencies, individual universities, NGOs and commercial agents – to consider the augmentation, distribution of and payment for global public goods. This paper has been adapted from a keynote address to the Conference of Higher Education Researchers (CHER), University of Twente, Enschede, 19 September 2004. The CHER conference was focused on the public/private question. Warm thanks to Erik Beerkens, Jurgen Enders, Marijk van Wende, Ben Jongbloed, Guy Neave, other colleagues who took part in discussion at the CHER conference, and the reviewers for Higher Education.