Group items tagged

I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of 'metacritique' - where the essential quality to be encouraged in students is a flexibility of thought and the ability to negotiate a range of different critical modes.

There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that proponents of evidence-based education unknowingly promote a colonial discourse and material relations of power that continue from the American-European colonial era. I posit that this colonial discourse is evident in at least three ways: (1) the discourse of civilizing the profession of education, (2) the promotion of colonial hierarchies of knowledge and monocultures of the mind, and (3) the interconnection between neoliberal educational policies and global exploitation of colonized labor. I conclude with the decolonizing implications of revealing some of the colonial vestiges in educational policy, research, and neoliberal reform

"The purpose of this paper is to explore the dominant positions in the debates on globalization in American social studies education. Specifically, the paper illustrates that, first, globalization is conceived of as more of an unprecedented new age and less of a historical development. Second, it is conceived of as more of a natural process and less as an ideological project. All in all, this paper argues that globalization should be approached as a historic and discursive condition in the field of social studies education. To do so, educators should include more skeptical perspectives and critical voices about globalization. Also, they need to approach the vocabulary used to frame globalization discursively, rather than as an objective fact. The paper contends that the different positions taken in the debates on globalization are part and parcel of the social imaginary of globalization. The paper has ramifications not only for American social studies education but also for related subjects such as civics and citizenship education elsewhere."

"What has upped the stakes in this absurd drama is the cultural dominance of hope and success in a neolibera...l age, now the mandate, measure and mantra of the corporatizing university. We live in the depressive ruins of the university, an entity dedicated to the rabid pursuit of illusory success when any substantive mission that might give that success substance has long since been mortgaged to market values (see Readings 1996 and Werry and O'Gorman 2009). The fetishization of excellence and outcomes, the prevalence of 'audit culture' (Strathern 2000) and prevailing instrumentalism and vocationalism, all institutionalize, codify and restigmatize failure. Now the encompassing regime of the test eclipses all other ways of understanding and valuing schooling: through standardized testing, student evaluations and bureaucratic measures of school 'performance', the threat of failure is the defining condition under which we (not just students but also teachers and institutions) operate. In these contexts, accidental failure is perilous, and the strategic, emancipatory or experimental use of failure - however much it is still necessary - is freighted with risk, danger and difficulty. The right to fail (with all its promise of inclusiveness, generosity, freedom) can only be claimed at an ever-mounting cost."

This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged backgrounds. These students are more likely to attend lower-status institutions and engage with an externally focused curriculum. The paper argues for greater attention to agency, and community and familial capital, in conceptualising the resilience of those from less privileged backgrounds. While the recognition of 'voice' is important, a curriculum that acknowledges the context independence of knowledge is essential if these students are not to be further disadvantaged.

It seems that everywhere one looks these days, the debate over the "crisis in the humanities" is raging unabated. The profession, as all our readers have undoubtedly noticed, is in a full-on identity crisis: Who are we as a discipline? What is our work? Who do we serve? What values undergird our practice? These perennial questions and others are more insistent than ever, especially as they intersect with the economic issues that dominate higher education today.

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which neoliberal globalization is produced through educational restructuring and new modes of urban development. Neoliberal globalization, however, is a variegated process wherein local social hierarchies articulate with state policies and global capital. This study shows how caste and class relations in the education sector in Andhra Pradesh are instrumental to forming Hyderabad's connection to the global economy. The contradictions of these regional realignments of education, geography and economy are manifest in the uneven development of the region and the rise of new socio-political struggles for the right to the city.

Although Detroit is not a centre of global finance, and plays a declining role in global production, it nevertheless participates in the present remediation of the relationship between cities and the globe. Manoeuvring to reposition the city as the global hub of mobility technology, metropolitan Detroit's neoliberal leadership advances particular development strategies in urban education, housing, infrastructure, and governance, all with implications for social exclusion. This paper analyzes Detroit's neoliberal policy complex, uncovering how rituals of place-making and suburbanite nostalgia for the city intersect with broader struggles over the region's resources and representation.

"This essay addresses the question of how to best teach interdisciplinarity through a detailed discussion of a common upper-division gateway course for multiple majors housed in an interdisciplinary studies unit. It argues for a shift in the problematic within which discussions of interdisciplinary pedagogy generally take place by emphasizing the practice of interdisciplinarity itself."