Creative Arts Personal Pedagogy vs Marketised Higher Education: A battle between values

The ongoing marketisation of higher education in England can be understood both conceptually – in terms of its ideological commitment to competition and accountability; and practically – in terms of the way that it has altered higher education structurally in a variety of ways. Methods of standardisation and quantification offer validation and reward to institutions through criteria aligned with marketised principles, leading to institutions shaping their operations to suit these forms of justification. Historically, many arts subjects have operated conceptually and organisationally outside the traditional higher education paradigm, and pedagogic approaches and values that are attributable to this subject area could clash with marketised understandings of education, which are becoming more prevalent and influential. This article presents analysis of reflections from creative arts educational practitioners working within higher education institutions in England on explorations of an ontology of the creative arts, as well as experiences of the marketisation process. A series of values relating to the concept of ‘the personal’, inherent to the creative arts are discussed and an exploration of how these principles clash with the priorities of the marketised educational economy are articulated. The values and principles that are inherent to educators and practitioners working in the creative arts are competing with ‘marketised’ motives imposed on them by the institutions in which they work.     

The governance of decentralised cooperation in collective training systems: a review and conceptualisation

Collective training systems are based on the cooperation of multiple public and private stakeholders in order to work. However, such cooperation is not self-sustaining and depends, for instance, on public policies, capable intermediary organisations and shared logics of action. In this conceptual paper, we first review the political economy literature on cooperation in collective skill formation and find that it has given insufficient attention to the systematic comparative analysis of cooperation at the decentralised level as well as the actual social practices of cooperation. The paper then develops a multidisciplinary analytical framework that allows future research to examine decentralised cooperation at the regional, sectoral and occupational levels more systematically. This framework is grounded in a synthesis of three strands of empirical research on vocational education and training, namely the comparative political economy literature on governance, corporatism and coordination, institutional labour and societal economics as well as the educational science literature.     

In praise of the present: the pupil at centre in Swedish educational politics in the post-war period

According to an influential narrative in Swedish educational historiography, the Swedish educational system underwent a drastic change during the 1990s, moving towards a more individualistic and marketised system. Without denying the relevance of this perspective, this article argues that we can trace antecedents to the reforms undertaken in the 1990s far back in post-war education policies. It maintains that the endeavour to democratise the educational system during the post war years when radicalised, started to counteract these democratic tendencies. Applying what French historian François Hartog names ‘regimes of historicity’ as an analytical tool, it argues that a politically pertinent shift took place in the 1970s. Since then, an increasingly stronger emphasis on the present at the expense of both past and future has contributed to an undermining of the centralised comprehensive school.     

Research‐capacity building,professional learning and the social practices of educational research

There have been numerous attempts in the past few years within education research—and social science research more generally—to alter the character of research practice(s). In particular, there has been a systematic effort to address perceived shortcomings in research practice through a series of ‘research‐capacity building’ initiatives, aimed at the restructuring of professional learning. In this article the authors explore empirically the ways in which different modes of professional learning are implicated in the social practices of education research. These considerations lead to the conclusion that the currently dominant approaches to research‐capacity building are based on an underestimation of the difficulties in influencing the professional learning of educational researchers significantly and, thereby, changing the practices of educational research. More realistic expectations of these forms of research‐capacity building, in turn, suggest the need to develop alternative approaches that acknowledge the exigencies of the current social organisation of educational research more fully.     

全球化视野下的教师教育技术能力构建

全球化是未来发展的必然趋势,为迎合全球化的发展趋势,我国需要进行教育改革,并且已经体现在教育信息化的过程中.该文试图从教师教育技术能力建设的角度,思考在现代教育发展过程中,教师如何适应教育领域所产生的巨大变化,通过巧妙选择与合理接受新的教育模式与方法,使学习更加有效.     

Education with production in Zimbabwe: an evaluation of teachers’ and pupils’ attitudes and perceptions

The terms community development and lifelong learning have been in use for several decades and refer to different areas within the field of adult education. This paper sets out to explore the relationship between these two concepts. It examines the ways in which community development work contributes to the development of an overall system of lifelong education. Recent writing on the idea of the learning society points towards a more holistic view of education, which acknowledges learning in all its forms and venues and which values the many and varied ways in which people learn. The nature of this rapidly changing society demands that individuals and communities take up this challenge, so that they can play their part in shaping the future. This paper is based on research which was carried out in the early 1990s, under the auspices of the Community Research and Development Centre, by one of the authors (RM) as part of a DPhil study. It was constructed with a view to exploring the need for a more holistic, integrated approach to meeting the educational needs of those involved in adult education, community development and community regeneration in Belfast. The research set out to investigate the relationship between the various forms of learning, through an examination of organizations engaged in providing formal, non‐formal and informal adult learning opportunities in Belfast. The results confirm that traditional providers of adult education no longer hold a monopoly over learning and that there is an emerging sector of community and voluntary organizations engaged in providing learning opportunities for adults in their communities. There is some indication that whilst the relationship between traditional and non‐traditional providers is complex, the opportunities for learning which they offer are complementary. The voluntary and community sector emphasizes issue‐based and action‐oriented learning within a democratic, participative culture. Non‐formal providers often seek to support such groups, by providing more structured learning situations. Their programmes frequently offer an alternative adult education to that of the formal providers, who are more concerned with traditional ‘liberal adult education’. Whilst formal providers may try to be more community‐based, they are severely confined by their bureaucratic, hierarchic structure. Informal providers, however, also offer opportunities for more formal adult learning opportunities, through links with formal providers. The existence of this network suggests the basis for a system of lifelong education, which incorporates the range of adult learning opportunities.     

Decision-making in Context: Swedish and Finnish Teachers’ Perceptions of Autonomy

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results from a survey investigating 708 Swedish and 1583 Finnish teachers’ perceived autonomy with a focus on the teachers’ perceptions of who makes the most important decisions in school. Teacher autonomy is seen as exercised at different levels; by teachers individually in the classroom or by teachers as a collective in school; and in different domains of teachers’ work, since the degree of decision-making by teachers is likely to differ between educational, social, developmental and administrational issues. Finnish and Swedish teachers’ perceived autonomy varied in somewhat different ways between the domains. Finnish teachers generally perceived themselves to be more individually autonomous, while Swedish teachers were more collegially oriented.     

A critical policy analysis of local religious education in England

ABSTRACT

This critical policy analysis investigates the opinions and activities of Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs) in England. It uses a critical approach to educational policy to examine the diffuse power structure of SACREs and give voice to those local councils. Using data gathered in an online survey of SACREs, conducted between January and May 2017, it critiques the activities of SACREs and, in identifying what they see as their future role, questions whether the complex, producer-based governance structure of religious education is preferable to a simple, neo-liberal centralised legal settlement. It suggests that those individuals and groups which are successful in surviving in the increasingly competitive, marketised, local RE policy landscape become intrinsic parts of the national neo-liberal solution.     

Building collective leadership capacity using collaborative twenty-first century digital tools

The current research explores how using collaborative twenty-first century digital tools developed the collective leadership capacity among participants in an educational leadership course. A qualitative interpretive approach was used. The data show how learning within the digital collaborative spaces was multidirectional and enhanced the possibilities of each student’s learning and practice. Communicating, curating and sharing knowledge, led to the development of new insights and support of mutual practice. The authors argue that the group’s collaborative endeavours produced substantive collective knowledge that elevated practice, and in so doing created collective leadership capacity within educational institutions and organisations in Trinidad and Tobago.     

I,Teacher: re‐territorialization of teachers’ multi‐faceted agency in globalized education

Analysis of teachers’ agency as multifarious change, embedded in educational reform in the global era, stands largely unexamined in educational policy. Although the concept of teachers as agents has political implications, beyond this, examining teachers’ agency offers ways of describing and reviewing changes to teachers’ work and relations within evolving education systems. Local systems draw from globally orientated education policies, which continue to influence to the way that local systems redesign education. In the global context, education systems are complex interactions between structure and agency, evidenced as ‘multiplicity undergoing change’. In other words, there is dynamic and dialectic interplay between structure and agency. Teachers’ agency, germane to dynamic interplay, means that teachers are not only engaging in the reproduction of structural change aligning globalization‐driven reforms to their work and practice, but also, in adapting and reacting to new structural conditions, they are transformed through their actions. In this paper, the focus becomes teachers’ agency as a framework for understanding how teachers are redesigned and reassembled to do things differently within restructured education systems. Finally, the discussion considers the possible consequences of teachers work and practice, given teachers’ agency relative to the macro policy of superfigures and the transitional national/global structures.     

Nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers as a way of understanding responses to change

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers. The aim is to understand the role of nostalgia as a mechanism for adapting to or resisting educational change. The paper is based on the secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 Estonian vocational teachers. In the teachers’ narratives, the nostalgia for the former vocational education system, which provided more autonomy and empowerment for teachers in their work, was overlaid with the nostalgia for a society with more stable family and work-life patterns and trusting attitudes towards vocational teachers. Although there were examples where the nostalgic narratives were strategically used to legitimize resistance to change, in most cases, nostalgia tends to serve as the mechanism for making sense of the educational changes teachers have been faced with. Nostalgia also contributes to making sense of oneself as a teacher in a new situation and collective identity building. It is argued in the paper that we should acknowledge the positive functions of nostalgia and create support mechanisms to facilitate sense-making and critical reflection upon the changes for teachers. Nostalgia should be recognized as a productive force indicating the contradictions in present reforms and practices and opening up new directions.     

Migrant teachers: how American schools import labour

This article considers the growth of ‘family literacy programmes’ in the UK and the implications this has for the relationship between the home and the school. We argue that most programmes are informed by a view of educational deficit, itself influenced by a marketised view of education which regards families as consumers’ of education. We contend that this ‘family’ is constructed in a way that privileges the patriarchal, nuclear, middle‐class family and makes a clear distinction between the public and the private sphere. This leads, we suggest, to a model of family literacy which imposes school‐based literacies on subordinated cultures and non‐nuclear families in ways that are culturally reproductive. We discuss an alternative, culturally productive, approach which focuses on home‐based literacies in ways which genuinely reflect the lived experiences of children and their families. Only in these types of programmes, we argue, will the values and practices of the home and community environment affect schooling in ways which give all families, however constructed, a genuine ‘voice’ in their children's education.     

Foreign Universities in China: a case study

The international dimension of higher education has expanded rapidly in recent decades and private provision is becoming increasingly widespread in response to the diverse pressures of globalisation, rapid expansion in demand and increased pressures on public finances. As higher education has become marketised, opportunities for international providers have increased dramatically. Foreign providers may opt for delivery locally or remotely and via a variety of different legal and organisational arrangements. The focus of this article is on foreign provision of HE with specific reference to China and the UK. In the period post-Mao, the policy environment for higher education in China has changed dramatically, culminating in 2003 in the decision to allow foreign universities to formally establish partnerships with Chinese universities for the delivery of higher education. The development and operation of the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, is discussed in order to provide more detailed insights into the nature and challenges of delivering foreign HE provision in a Chinese context.     

SENCOs: vanguards or in vain?

In Sweden today, special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) are educated at universities to help resolve educational problems related to children in need of special support at three levels, that is, the organisational level, the classroom level and the individual level. Before the education of SENCOs was created in the early 1990s, special teachers were the occupational group that worked primarily on an individual level. Children's school problems were then seen as individual deficits. SENCOs can be seen as vanguards in changing an educational system from primarily focusing on an individual perspective to a broader focus on the entire learning environment. How has the occupational role of SENCOs affected schools? The overall aim of this study is to investigate possible changes within a school system when the introduction of a new occupational group, SENCOs, challenges established structures. More specifically, this paper studies how different occupational groups view where and in what ways SENCOs work and should work. Three different questionnaires are the basis of this analysis of SENCOs' present situation within the Swedish educational system. A number of interesting findings were detected in this study. For example, several occupational groups respond that SENCOs should work with individually taught special education. Meanwhile, a pattern emerges in which SENCOs seem to have partly established a new work role. However, little is known about how these changes affect children in need of special support.     

Similar work,different pay? Private school teacher working conditions in India

As the private education sector grows across the globe, private providers by extension are becoming significant employers of teachers. In India, more than 3 million teachers are employed in the private sector, contributing to meeting the rapidly expanding educational demands and learning needs of children. Teacher working conditions are crucial to ensure teacher retention and success within the education system. We use the 2011–2012, nationally representative employment data from India, to investigate private teacher working conditions. We conduct a series of regression analysis to account for the differences in demographic attributes of public and private teachers, differences in rural and urban growth of private schools and cross-state variations. We find that, compared to public school teachers, private school teachers experience less favorable monetary and non-monetary working conditions including less access to paid leaves, pension and health care. They also experience lower job security in terms of the existence of a contract and the length of contract period. Private school teachers also have a lower access to teacher unions and thus weaker collective bargaining to negotiate their working conditions. Private teachers are more frequently likely to seek additional work and alternate work. Some noteworthy differences in teacher demographics in rural and urban areas (urban teachers are more likely to be female, somewhat older, and more educated) notwithstanding, these patterns of public-private teacher working conditions are consistent across rural and urban location. We conclude with reflections on potential explanations for these results and suggest steps for future research.     

Curricular Reforms in Latin America with Special Emphasis on the Argentine Case

The purpose of this article is to describe the effect of the curricular reforms introduced in Latin America in the 1990s. Special emphasis is placed on the Argentine case. Therefore, this work initially makes a historical synthesis of the curricular policies in the region, from the creation of modern education systems by the end of the nineteenth century, up to the present. Secondly, the proposals for education reforms during the 1990s are put forward, with an emphasis on the Argentine experience. The search for some degree of decentralisation of the curricular policies and, at the same time, the emergence of centralised systems of educational assessment, are the issues treated in this section. Lastly, the work discusses the concrete effects that the reform policies have had in the Argentine case. The central hypothesis is that far from a decentralisation of decision-making responsibilities in terms of curriculum, the system is hyper-regulated as a consequence of the interaction of several factors, many of which are related to the centralised tradition which has characterised the development and management of curriculum in most countries in the region.     

Equity and marketisation: a brief commentary

Beginning with a reflection on the Participation and Equity Program (PEP) in Australia in the 1980s, this response describes the distinctive ideological shift from a social democratic to a market conception of equity in education over the past three decades. This shift has been accompanied by changes in the techniques of educational governance, from the collaborative approach of the PEP, which emphasised the importance of trust in teachers as professionals, to new managerialism focused on efficiency and accountability. Market reforms in education have continued to use such traditionally socially democratic notions as equity, but have been enormously successful in re-articulating their meaning. A commentary is provided on the papers in this Special Issue and their collective analysis of governmental strategies that have led to this re-articulation of equity; the extent to which these strategies have been successful; the consequences they have had on students and school communities, and for the work of teachers and schools; and possibilities for creating new approaches in education that undermine the seemingly hegemonic neo-liberal imaginary and work towards a more progressive democratic view of educational equity.     

Gender,school management and educational reforms: a case study of a primary school in Hong Kong

Across the globe, many countries have incorporated new managerialism and marketization to reform their education systems. Feminist studies have already pointed out that these changes are gendered and masculinized and have documented their impacts on women teachers in secondary, higher and further education. Yet interestingly, while primary teaching is a feminized occupation, the ways that these changes and the associated practices are gendered and affected women teachers are relatively under‐researched . This article, based on a case school in Hong Kong, attempts to fill this gap. By teasing out the gendered assumptions embedded in management strategies, it will show how an entrepreneurial school has attempted to succeed in a competitive educational market by exploiting young women, discriminating motherhood and forging competition among women of different educational qualifications. While making visible the patriarchal interests and masculine norms of the school, the article also aims to illuminate the contradictions and tensions inherent in, or generated, by those strategies.     

高校研究生党员的管理与教育工作探析

面对新时期研究生党员管理与教育工作中出现的新情况、新问题,在总结党的理论与实践工作的基础上,提出目前研究生党员工作的新思路、新途径:以先进性教育为核心,做好与理想信念教育、科研能力培养、人文精神教育“结合”的文章;改革教育模式,增强研究生党员教育的针对性;加强研究生组织建设,使研究生党员工作落到实处。