Neoliberal contradictions in two private niches of educational ‘choice’

This article brings together ethnographies of two privileged educational settings in the United States – a private school in California’s Central Valley following the progressivist Sudbury model, and an affluent New England boarding school’s summer enrichment program. Each of these institutions serves as an alternative to and/or extension of publicly accessible education institutions during a neoliberal era of marketization and growing educational inequality. By comparing findings from ethnographic studies of each institution, we find that both celebrate open access and socially responsible pedagogical values in ways that obscure mechanisms of exclusion and an entrenched individualist ideology. We discuss two particular contradictions that manifest in both settings: first, a discourse of openness and inclusivity that belies the ways in which access is mediated by constructions of who best ‘fits’ the special learning community; and second, an outspoken allegiance to socially engaged values of diversity and democracy that belies the ways in which these values are commodified and appropriated for students’ individual advantage(s). In comparing such sites, we argue for the importance of tracing the mechanisms of advantage in under-researched ‘niches’ of the dynamically shifting and unequally accessed neoliberal marketplace for educational opportunity.     

Students' Perceptions of Different Tertiary Learning Environments

In this study of students' perceptions of six different tertiary learning environments, 1,249 students indicated the behaviours and practices that helped or hindered their learning and why. Irrespective of the type of learning environment, students felt that their learning was helped when learning experiences were practical and experiential. Students also felt that their learning was helped when the presentation and explanation were clear. These learning conditions clarified their understanding and consolidated their learning. Learning was hindered when the pace of presentation was inappropriately fast or slow and the presentation was unclear. Learning in each particular type of environment was also helped or hindered by conditions and behaviours idiosyncratic to that environment. These conditions and the reason for their effects are identified and discussed. Although many are predictable, they reinforce the notions, first, that different learning environments are designed to, and in practice do, produce different learning outcomes and, second, that students are capable of discriminating between what they consider to be good and bad educational experiences. What students regard as “good”, however, provides a challenge for tertiary educators and staff developers.     

Heirs and Spares: Elite Fathers and Their Sons in the Literary Sources of Umayyad Iberia

ABSTRACT

In the medieval Islamic world, elite men were the benchmark of hegemonic masculinity and social power. A presumption of masculine authority within the household shaped the way early medieval rulers were described by chroniclers, and how medieval fathers related to their sons. The formal and informal ways in which they interacted with lower status men – whether their clients, their courtiers, or their sons – were hedged about with the symbolic language of gender. The article focuses on the ways in which certain Andalusī literary sources talk about relations of fathers and their sons with the ruling Umayyad family, to offer an additional dimension to our picture of how the dynasty conceptualised and legitimised its power.