The challenge of inclusive schooling in Africa: a Ghanaian case study

This paper explores how African learners and educators work with difference and diversity in schooling populations. Using a Ghanaian case study the paper offers lessons on/about how local discourses relating to ‘inclusivity and nation building’, ‘minority’ and ‘difference’ can inform debates about educational change and guide broad policy initiatives in pluralistic settings. While difference is affirmed, in some circles it can be said Ghanaian educators have not necessarily been responsive. It is contended that Ghanaian, and for that matter, African education, since historical times, has been approached in terms of its fundamental contribution to national development. In emphasizing the goal of post‐independence national integration, ‘postcolonial’ education in Africa has denied heterogeneity in local populations as if difference itself was a problem. With this orientation education has undoubtedly helped create and maintain the glaring disparities and inequities; structured along lines of ethnicity, culture, language, religion, gender and class, which persist and grow. By pointing to how local subjects (educators, learners and policy‐makers) link identity, schooling and knowledge production this paper implicates the search for genuine educational options or alternatives for Africa.     

Fee-free education,decentralisation and the politics of scale in Papua New Guinea

Policies aimed at both reducing the costs associated with schooling (particularly through fee-free education) and decentralising responsibility for education delivery have become a central part of international education doctrine. This article draws on the ‘politics of scale’ literature to highlight how these education reforms are contested at different scales, in turn leading to uneven administrative and material outcomes. It examines education policy reforms in Papua New Guinea, which have – contra international trends – sidelined non-state actors and strengthened the state’s role in managing education services. National fee-free education policy has been contested at different administrative scales. Church administrators have rallied (without much success) at national directives; subnational administrators and politicians have had greater success, rolling back some aspects of national policy; while local-level schools have employed their own tactics to resist national fee-free education policy. In turn, this case study highlights how fee-free educational policy shapes and is shaped by conflict at multiple administrative scales. The article’s findings have implications for debates about the relationship between fee-free education and decentralisation policies.     

Searching for the public: school funding and shifting meanings of ‘the public’ in Australian education

School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the Australian Review of Funding for Schooling (the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically.     

Ethical Issues in the Malaysian Education System

Malaysia is a multi-ethnic country in which the government gives preferential treatment in education, employment, and ownership to its majority ethnic group: Bumiputera. However, affirmative action policies in the current Malaysian context should work according to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice by being based on income rather than ethnicity. Certainly Malaysian Government should be praised for giving freedom to the Chinese and Indians to select their preferred school and this is partly consistent with Amartya Sen’s view of freedom; however this article argues that these communities are apparently given constraint freedom of choice.     

Creating a multicultural curriculum in Han-dominant schools: The policy and practice of ethnic solidarity education in China

In response to the recent heightened interethnic conflicts that were regarded as threatening national unity and stability, the Chinese government issued ‘ethnic solidarity education’ as a top-down, centrally administered mandate to be implemented ‘correctly’ and in a standardised way by schools throughout China. This paper examines the policy and practice of ethnic solidarity education against the broader, historical context of ethnic relations in China. Based on empirical data obtained through extensive fieldwork in selective Beijing public schools, this study concludes that ethnic solidarity education bears resemblance to multicultural education in the western educational discourse, yet retains special characteristics as an indigenous form of education in the unique Chinese context. Although various teaching and extracurricular activities involving ethnic elements are added to the school curriculum and applauded by the Chinese educators and policymakers as important signs of ethnic integration and cultural pluralism, they tend to focus on static cultural artefacts without touching upon the deeper levels of understandings on ethnicity and the majority–minority relations, and therefore cannot create a truly multicultural learning environment.     

Teachers in the news: a critical analysis of one US newspaper's discourse on education, 2006–2007

Public education discourse in the USA has been characterized by messages of crisis shaping education policies across national contexts. Education policy solutions target a lack of qualified teachers and insufficient oversight of teacher practice as central factors in the crisis, placing teacher identity as knowledgeable, authoritative professionals at the center of educational reform debates. Mainstream news media is a key site for education policy debate. I employ critical discourse analysis of education news published in a major US newspaper, uncovering how grammar patterns in news discourse situate teacher identity in relation to knowledge and authority. I demonstrate how the paper's discourse frames teacher identity in terms of Accountability and Caring and discuss how, in the context of larger economic and social policy debates, Accountability gains authority over caring to shape education policy. I call for teachers to integrate critical participation in public education debates as key element of professional identity.     

A Critique of the Stem Pipeline: Young People’s Identities in Sweden and Science Education Policy

In this article, we develop critiques of the pipeline model which dominates Western science education policy, using discourse analysis of interviews with two Swedish young women focused on ‘identity work’. We argue that it is important to unpack the ways that the pipeline model fails to engage with intersections of gender, ethnicity, social class and nationality, and their impact on science and with debates about science as elitist and implicated in neoliberalism.     

Social justice education with Chinese characteristics: An example from Shanghai

This article analyses a Chinese approach to social justice in education using the example of Shanghai. In addressing schooling inequalities, Shanghai illustrates social justice education with Chinese characteristics, which revolves around the ideal of ‘educational balance’ (jiaoyu junheng). The ‘balance’ in question is about achieving a values-centred and all-round education in and across all schools through the cultivation of a school’s ‘inner quality’ (neihan). This Chinese formulation of social justice education is manifested through two representative policy measures: creating and strengthening ‘new high-quality schools’ and helping weak schools to level up. The Chinese characteristics of these action plans are seen in two ways: a focus on social justice between schools rather than between students; and an emphasis on the moral cultivation of students. It is argued that a Chinese model of social justice education promotes educational equity to some extent through the politics of redistribution, recognition and representation. However, a major critique is its hegemonic and top-down nature, which overlooks alternative and competitive voices—especially those of migrant children—as part of a politics of representation.     

Excavating an injustice?*: nationality/ies,ethnicity/ies and experiences with diversity of initial teacher education applicants and entrants in Ireland in 2014

Diversifying the teaching population is of international concern. Ireland has experienced significant socio-demographic change in the last decades, but we lack adequate data on the backgrounds of student teachers, especially in relation to nationality and ethnicity. In this paper, we examine the nationality/ies, ethnicity/ies and experiences with diversity of Ireland’s 2014 undergraduate primary and postgraduate post-primary initial teacher education (ITE) applicants, entrants and non-entrants, part of the focus of the Diversity in Initial Teacher Education in Ireland national research project. The overwhelming majority of respondents claim Irish only nationality, and are of ‘White Irish’ ethnicity. Respondents’ constructions of their ethnicity privilege nationality and skin colour. The exclusionary constructions of ethnicity of those self-identifying as ‘White Irish’ reveal the heavy influence of Ireland’s post-colonial nationhood. A significant proportion reported having little or no experience with groups different to their own. We end by noting implications on policy, research and ITE programme levels.     

Educating child practitioners: a (re)turn to the university disciplines

This paper analyses a specific disjunctive policy space in Scotland involving the current key children's social and educational policy agenda, Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), and a recent national report on teacher education, the ‘Donaldson Report’. In four main parts, the paper first introduces and applies in policy review and analysis a capitals frame to identify the policy–practice discontinuities currently inherent in the ‘GIRFEC-child practitioner education’ policy space, exemplified by the Donaldson Report. Then, the same capitals frame is applied to examine the capitals resources demanded in the particular ‘child–child practitioner education’ policy space previously delineated. Next, examples of policy disconnects amongst current child practice and practitioner education policy production and implementation, which warrant a concerted integrative cross-sector project to ensure coherent social and intellectual capital relations at all levels, are discussed. Finally, the paper calls for the governing professional registration bodies and universities involved in the education of child-sector practitioners to engage in the redesign of university programmes underpinned by principles of transdisciplinarity and transprofessionalism. The methodology is policy sociology and policy text analysis.     

《华文文学》杂志对马华文学的传播与研究

《华文文学》作为台港澳及海外华文文学研究期刊,对马华文学的引介起着极为重要的作用。前期《华文文学》对马华文学作品的刊载,为中国大陆对马华文学的接受与熟悉发挥了重要的桥梁作用,也为研究者们提供了可供参考阅读的文本;后期对马华文学研究类文章的刊载,对马华文学研究的进步与成熟起了重要的促进作用,成为马华文学研究的学术重镇。     

Student drug testing and the surveillance school economy: an analysis of media representation and policy transfer in Australian schools

Anxieties relating to the health, safety and security of schoolchildren have been met with a variety of surveillance apparatus in schools internationally. Drawing on findings from a content analysis of newspaper reports relating to drug testing in Australian schools, this article seeks to excavate the ways in which the media shapes, informs, reflects and instructs narratives pertaining to the use and acceptability of surveillance. Finding that a ‘greater good’ discourse prevails in debates about drug testing in schools, contrary to evidence purporting its ineffectiveness, it is argued that the phenomenon can be explained by the rapidly emerging surveillance school economy whereby education is increasingly exposed to neoliberal corporate priorities and governmental imperatives. Further, finding that policy transfer goes some way to explaining the suggested introduction of random drug testing programs in Australian schools, the article provides critical analysis to understand how surveillance practices come to be activated, understood and negotiated as they cross national boundaries.     

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.     

The changing role of the university in the production of new knowledge

Abstract

‘Internationalisation’ became a key theme in the 1990s both in higher education policy debates and in higher education research. Starting off from a heterogeneous set of phenomena, internationalisation does not merely mean varying border‐crossing activities on the rise anymore, but rather substantial changes: first, from a predominantly ‘vertical’ pattern of cooperation and mobility towards the dominance of international relationships on equal terms; second, from casuistic action towards systematic policies of internationalisation; third, from disconnection of specific international activities on the one hand and on the other internationalisation of the core activities towards an integrated internationalisation of higher education. Though higher education policy remains predominantly shaped on a national level and tends to underscore specific traditions and conditions of individual countries, the responsibility of individual institutions of higher education in Europe for their own future grows in the process internationalisation which is accompanied, among others, by growing pressure for diversity and increasing popularity of managenalism as well as by a policy of the European Commission which seems to favour de‐nationalisation of higher education.     

‘Tomorrow's Schools’ in New Zealand: from social democracy to market managerialism

This paper uses one national case to illustrate how diverse ideological agendas of central state agencies contest the discursive space within which major education policy reforms are developed. In Aotearoa New Zealand in 1988, ‘self‐managed’ schools were promoted ostensibly to allow parents more say in their children’s education and local school administration. The Tomorrow’s Schools reform policy texts included an existing social democratic partnership rhetoric, positioning principals as professional leaders working collaboratively with elected parent boards of trustees. However, the new ideology of ‘parental choice’ of school within a local schooling marketplace, underpinned by a chief executive or market managerial model of principalship, was later operationalised through mechanisms of ‘steerage’ from the centre. To explain this shift, we examine selected policy text pre‐cursors to the reforms and identify how contrasting forms of ‘principal’ and ‘teacher’ identity emerged within social democratic, neo‐liberal and market managerial ideologies. We further show that while radical (Treasury) market liberal arguments for labour market deregulation and consumer choice failed to gain widespread support, the State Services Commission preferred market managerialist strategies for promoting public accountability of schools (based on aggregate student achievement outcome data and centrally determined national educational priorities) were successfully embedded during the 1990s.     

Will gender equality ever fit in? Contested discursive spaces of university reform

Similar to other European countries, the introduction of non-academic, especially managerial, criteria in higher education has shaped and altered Austrian universities since over a decade. This paper presents the results of a frame analysis of Austrian higher education debates from 1993 until 2010. It outlines how reforms in higher education were prepared and enhanced by a new policy discourse, with a special focus on the way gender equality is framed in reform debates. Our article describes three core frames: ‘from local to global’, ‘from ivory tower to business’ and ‘from civil servant to excellence’. We cluster these three frames around imaginations of space that are embedded in the normative foundations of academia, and discuss how this links up with arguments for gender equality. We furthermore propose to analytically separate two conceptions of the university: the ‘entrepreneurial’ and the ‘managerial’ university.     

The coherence of vocational education and training in Norway and Spain: national traditions and the reshaping of VET governance in hybrid VET systems

Coherence of national education and training systems is increasingly tabled in European policy debates. Leaning on literature about the emergence and consolidation of national education systems, this article explores the rationale for VET reforms in Norway and Spain by scrutinising attempts to strengthen the coherence of their VET systems. Coherence has been sought through the unification of different strands of vocational education; initial, continuing and active labour market policies (what we call ‘horizontal coherence’) and the mainstreaming of VET curricular elements; plus the systematisation of VET practices across educational levels (‘vertical coherence’). While both countries looked for coherence, their motivations, how they operationalised the term and the emphasis of their actions differed substantially. Spain has experienced a move from the three largely unrelated strands into a more unified system; Norway from a fragile VET system to the availability of more VET courses and apprenticeship arrangements at all educational levels.     

‘Will I learn what I want to learn?’ Usable representations, ‘students’ and OECD assessment production

Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) ‘students’ are constructed, fixed and normalized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative. Based on an analysis of AHELO texts, we argue that the OECD, during the early stages of test production, fixes and circulates the meaning of ‘students’ as represented objects. We identify and analyze two distinct representational practices at work in AHELO texts: classifying and organizing, and marking. We posit that by fixing images of the student as an object of learning and as a consumer–investor subject, the OECD creates ‘usable’ representations of ‘students’ to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention through standardized testing.