Education policy-making and time

This paper examines the global policy convergence toward high-stakes testing in schools and the use of test results to ‘steer at a distance’, particularly as it applies to policy-makers’ promise to improve teacher quality. Using Deleuze’s three syntheses of time in the context of the Australian policy blueprint Quality Education, this paper argues that using test scores to discipline teaching repeats the past habit of policy-making as continuing the problem of the unaccountable teacher. This results in local policy-making enfolding test scores in a pure past where the teacher-as-problem is resolved through the use of data from testing to deliver accountability and transparency. This use of the database returns a digitised form of inspection that is a repetition of the habit of teacher-as-problem. While dystopian possibilities are available through the database, in what Deleuze refers to as a control society, for us the challenge is to consider policy-making as a step into an unknown future, to engage with producing policy that is not grounded on the unconscious interiority of solving the teacher problem, but of imagining new ways of conceiving the relationship between policy-making and teaching.     

Tracking Students Through Life: A Critical Structural Analysis of Academic Tracking of Mexican Immigrant Students in the United States and Korean Immigrant Students in Japan

Students in the United States and Japan from high and middle socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are afforded greater academic opportunities due to the systemic presence of hegemony in public schools (Darvin and Norton in J Lang Identity Educ 13(2):111–117, 2014). Minority and immigrant students, the majority coming from low SES, are more likely to suffer the negative effects of tracking. This paper explains how Mexican immigrant students in the United States, and Korean students in Japan are tracked into lower-level courses throughout their educational careers. Using critical structuralism as a theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the two educational systems and explains the implications of tracking on students’ access to higher education. The paper presents mediating mechanisms against the negative effects of lower-level tracking, while arguing for college preparatory education for Mexican and Korean immigrants in the U.S. and Japan respectively.     

A roadmap for offering MOOC from an LMIC institution

MOOCs are massive open online courses that are globally accessible, free of charge. Given their cost-free and open accessibility, it is surprising that only a few institutions have offered MOOCs from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Pakistan recently made this short list of LMICs as the first two MOOCs were launched from the country, in 2014 and 2016. Drawing from that experience, the organizers of that course present a roadmap for LMIC institutions for developing a MOOC, focusing especially on the technological and pedagogical limitations that an LMIC institution might find deterring.     

Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum

Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is “the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world.” 1 1. Treasures from Our West (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1992), 44. The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museum's rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence.     

Radiating Emergency: The Perils and Promise of the Broadcast Signal in the Atomic Age

This essay argues that the development of CONELRAD marked a pivotal—and often overlooked—moment in the history of media and communications in the United States. As the nation's first coast-to-coast emergency broadcast system, CONELRAD established a new paradigm of networked communications for a new world order. Through close critical examination of the institutional events and discursive controversies surrounding CONELRAD's development, I show how those events and controversies were inflected by both contemporaneous atomic anxieties and older hopes and fears associated with over-the-air communications. I also suggest how they articulated, in the domain of electronic mass media, the politico-legal theory and practice of the state of exception.     

Mapping the Cyber-Stakeholders: U.S. Energy Policy on the Web

This article looks to decentered hyperlinking patterns on the worldwide web as a site where media researchers can investigate the treatment of social issues by websites. Such “issue networks” are offered in contrast to the increasingly portalized and commercial nature of information architecture and interfaces on the worldwide web. The article searches for commonly linked sites on the issue of the Bush-Cheney energy policy in an attempt to uncover the hyperlink patterns and debate among the most interconnected sites.     

Fostering Community College Leaders: An Examination of Leadership Development Programs

The study reported in this paper identifies leadership development practices within community colleges by surveying North Carolina community college presidents and evaluating an individual North Carolina community college's leadership institute. The results of the study indicate these community colleges indeed have an interest in leadership development activities for its employees, and the examined leadership institutes are quite effective and beneficial for its participants. Based upon these findings, two sets of recommendations are offered for fostering leadership initiatives within community colleges, namely, a focus on more significant topics for community college employees and developing a leadership learning community within a community college.     

Seeing Silence: Filmic and Acoustic Convergences in the Work of Thierry Knauff and Francisco López

Analysing the work of Spanish composer Francisco López and the Belgian film maker Thierry Knauff's 2000 production, Wild Blue: notes à quelques voix, this paper aims to go beyond the Deleuzean methodology that it employs. Deleuze argues, in Difference and Repetition, that artistic production deploys an active form of repetition that creates difference in itself and not a banal Platonic form of repetition based on an originary identity. Finding this process at work in the texts studied, we argue that of vital importance in these works and (although it is not explicitly stated) in Deleuze's own theory here is a reflection on the concept of texture. In deploying an artistic form of repetition that is infused with a deep sense of texture, both López and Knauff distance their works from the documentary realm in which they appear to be grounded. This, however, only increases their potential political efficacy which, rather than working according to extensive and limited, therefore, principles, is transmitted via an intensive mode.