Mapping the Contours of Neoliberal Educational Restructuring: A Review of Recent Neo‐Marxist Studies of Education and Racial Capitalist Considerations

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo‐Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, John Marsh's Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality, and Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. His analysis of these books focuses on how each author remains consistent or advances traditional Marxist interpretations of the role of education in capitalist society. In addition, he puts the arguments of each author into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of schooling in a racial capitalist society — what he called caste education — as a way to generate discussion around some of the inherent limitations of Marxist studies of education. Here, Pierce is particularly concerned with the ability of neo‐Marxist analyses of the neoliberal restructuring of education to articulate how white supremacy is preserved even in revolutionary critiques of capitalist schooling.     

Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens

This paper attempts to answer this question: what should ecoliteracy mean in a biocapitalist society? The author situates his analysis of this question within the general context of the neoliberal reconstruction of education in the US. Specifically, focus is given to the shared model of governmentality GE food industries and education policies both utilize to manage life in the field and classroom – one where optimizing the value of plants and people for ‘flat world’ economic competition is the defining goal. Given this landscape, I suggest that what some environmental educators have called ‘ecological literacy’ or ‘critical ecoliteracy’ must now include a dimension that rejects the ways both human and nonhumans are progressively being implicated into biocapitalist enterprises. I offer an example of how biocapitalist industries educate market understandings of life by looking at how the GE food industry’s educational projects attempt to teach students and the public to think of nature and themselves as entrepreneurial actors. In the final section, I provide an example from my research using actor network theory in learning gardens as a way to develop a theory and practice of ecoliteracy that is capable of identifying and resisting the ways both human and nonhuman life are being captured and reconstructed within biocapitalist development ventures.     

Finite-time tracking using sliding mode control

Finite-time stability involves dynamical systems whose trajectories converge to an equilibrium state in finite time. In this paper, we consider a general class of fully actuated mechanical systems described by Euler–Lagrange dynamics and the class of underactuated systems represented by mobile robot dynamics that are required to reach and maintain the desired trajectory in finite time. An approach known as the terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) involves non-smooth sliding surfaces such that, while on the sliding surface, the error states converge to the origin in finite time thus ensuring finite-time tracking. The main advantage of this control scheme is in fast converging times without excessive control effort. Such controllers are known to have singularities in some parts of the state space and, in this paper, we propose a method of partitioning the state space into two regions where the TSMC is bounded and its complement. We show that the region of bounded TSMC is invariant and design an auxiliary sliding mode controller predicated on linear smooth sliding surface for the initial conditions outside this region. Furthermore, we extend these results to address TSMC for underactuated systems characterized by the mobile robot dynamics. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by implementing it for a scenario when multiple dynamic agents are required to move in a fixed formation with respect to the formation leader. Finally, we validate our results experimentally using a wheeled mobile robot platform.     

Connecting to nature at the zoo: implications for responding to climate change

Societal response to climate change has been inadequate. A perception that the issue is both physically and temporally remote may reduce concern; concern may also be affected by the political polarization surrounding the issue in the USA. A feeling of connection to nature or to animals may increase personal relevance, and a supportive social context may counteract political tensions. Zoos may provide opportunities for both sense of connection and social support. We surveyed over 7000 zoo and aquarium visitors to examine the ways in which a feeling of personal connection among zoo visitors may encourage concern about climate change. Results show that feeling connected to animals at the zoo is significantly associated with cognitive and emotional responses to climate change, as well as with other social groupings and social responses. Overall, the zoo seems to present a supportive social context for considering the topic.     

An analysis of professional practice Ed.D. dissertations in Educational Technology

The University of Florida offers an online professional practice Ed.D. focused on Educational Technology. Twenty-three students have completed professional practice dissertations and graduated since the program’s inception in 2008. The purpose of this article is to share what these dissertations have looked like and to begin a dialogue about professional practice dissertations completed in online educational technology programs. Specifically, we (1) provide an overview of different ways professional practice Ed.D. dissertations are structured, (2) share guiding principles for professional practice dissertations in our Ed.D. program, (3) analyze the ways in which these guiding principles played out in the dissertations and (4) discuss the implications of our analysis for our program and for other online professional practice programs in Educational Technology.     

Recent Developments in the Funding of University Research

The UGC norm-based allocation of 1986, the current proposals for the rationalisation of departments, and the proposals of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils (ABRC) for R, X and T class universities are assessed against the actual operations of productive science departments and their patterns of expenditure on research as revealed born a recent sample survey. It is concluded that the UGC's norm-based allocation did not in any systematic way secure increases related to current research activity except for those cases where this came from the student number-based teaching element. Only the creation of larger departments seems likely to increase research output, and often that will best be achieved by increases in student numbers and their associated funding. Institutions similar to T class universities can be achieved by encouraging the recruitment of students at the expense of the public sector, but the distribution between R and X class universities is unsustainable.     

Positive emotions: passionate scholarship and student transformation

This paper challenges the practical and conceptual understanding of the role of emotions in higher education from the twin perspectives of transition and transformation. Focusing on the neglected area of positive emotions, exploratory data reveal a rich, low-level milieu of undergraduate emotional awareness in students chiefly attributed to pedagogic actions, primarily extrinsically orientated, and pervasive throughout the learning experience. The data conceive positive affect as oppositional, principally ephemeral and linked to performative pedagogic endeavours of getting, knowing and doing. A cyclical social dynamic of reciprocity, generating positive feedback loops, is highlighted. Finally we inductively construct a tentative ‘emotion-transition framework’ to assist our understanding of positive emotion as a force for transformational change; our contention is that higher education might proactively craft pedagogic spaces so as to unite the feeling discourse, the thinking discourse (epistemological self) and the wider life-self (ontological) discourse.