Group items tagged

"To ratify possibilities for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorising there is a need to forgo the exclusionary preoccupation with English and Western critical theories. The debates informing the international circulation of Bourdieu's (1977, 1993, 1999, 2004) ideas provide methodological lessons for moving from critical sociology of education to educational research for critique. This study reports on the use of Chinese metaphors to critically theorise evidence of Australian education. It provides an analysis of the translation of Chinese metaphors, their use as theoretical tools and the preempting of the antagonistic reception of Chinese metaphors by Western Anglophone educators. A worldly education of linguistic connectivities and critical theorising is shown to engage in the reflexivity necessary for making Chinese research students' bi- or multilingual competence a presence in Australian teacher-researcher education. At the, same time they are articulating claims for reconfiguring its internationalisation."

"Speaking as an ex-administrator and a tenured professor with a long and varied service record, I want to suggest that service is that part of our collectively negotiated professional workload through which autonomy is most likely to be protected from further erosion if exercised accountably. Service (to the university and the profession) is the least valued of our three areas of responsibility when we consider that typically it "counts" for 20 percent of our workload and annual performance evaluation (APE), two matters of university self-governance over which the academic unit still exercises considerable control and discretion at most universities in Canada. We do ourselves and our profession a lot of damage when we limit our use of collective agreements to punish-and-grieve or grieve-and-punish manuals when they can be key mentoring documents for the profession. Having "paid one's dues" is only the beginning, not the end, of understanding and accounting for our roles in collective institutional governance. Service is the perfect place to learn about and to practice autonomy in the university, because it is through service that we act on what our own academic units have determined to be our workload and the terms of our performance evaluation. The bulk..."

"For Congress 2011, held at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton the ACCUTE Committee for Professional Concerns (CPC) organized two panels, "Situating Sessionals" and "The Corporate University." As I was preparing to present my own paper on "The Corporate University" panel, and while I was in the initial stages of bringing together contributors for this readers' forum, I was also in the thick of working on behalf of my university's faculty association as we negotiated a new collective agreement (which is likely why the term "negotiating" found its way into the title of this forum). Thus, at the time, I was philosophically and substantively absorbed in the idea of the collective rights and responsibilities of the..."

"An integral part of the "American Dream" is the idea that post-secondary education dissolves long-standing class hierarchies. Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility, however, college education has reinforced class stratification the last six decades. Today, seventy four percent of those attending colleges classified as "most competitive" come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile. A vicious circle is established in which, as children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, an even more unequal and economically polarized society is crafted."

"This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater "intellectual diversity" in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self-regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do."

"This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging 'culture of fear' in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy."

"Universities, particularly research-intensive ones, have responded to a variety of external and internal influences by retooling their missions, culture, and organizational structures to generate revenue from market opportunities. This has resulted in the marketization of higher education: organizational practices that blur the boundary between knowledge-driven and profit-driven institutions. This blurring has spurred debates and uncertainties over the scope and boundaries of the 21st century university. We argue that these debates spring from institutional boundary work at the intersection of the three main missions of the contemporary academy: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. These missions can sometimes create areas of synergy, but also tensions that are particularly acute where market logics and business-oriented practices contradict academic values. Within knowledge production, a key dilemma is the extent to which knowledge advancement should aim for transcendence versus revenue generation. Within student learning, the dilemma involves incommensurability between the ideals of democratic citizenship and demonstrable return on investment. Within the social charter mission, the dilemma is over whether the university can serve the public welfare while also facilitating the growth of local and national economies."

"The emerging economies of the BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India and China - will, it is assumed, lure back home both students who go abroad to study and some graduates who have settled in the West, because of their dramatic economic growth and expanding higher education systems. The problem is that data seem to show this is not the case. The brain drain, now euphemistically called the brain exchange, seems to be alive and well. International Higher Education published research last August by Dongbin Kim, Charles AS Bankart and Laura Isdell showing that the large majority of international doctoral recipients from American universities remain in the United States after graduation."

"This article presents an empirical study of transnational higher education in China at the institutional level. The units of analysis are the Chinese partner universities of transnational higher education programs. Through comparison of research universities and teaching universities, the study finds that transnational higher education programs are developed and perceived differently by these two categories of universities. For teaching universities, transnational higher education is mainly used to expand enrollment. It is the most active internationalization activity on campus. For research universities, especially top research universities, transnational higher education's major function is to provide academic opportunities for those aspiring for advanced professional degrees. It is only one of the many internationalization activities on campus. Teaching universities tend to use transnational higher education more to generate revenue and reduce cost."

"This article adopts the critical theory approach to reflect and analyse the impacts of globalization on the internationalization process of higher education in the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that globalization forces many of the higher education institutions in the region to follow global practices and ideologies of the Anglo-American paradigm without developing their own unique systems and honouring the rich cultures of their own countries. While higher education institutions are indulging in internationalization in terms of marketization and economic pragmatism, they have to ask themselves, 'What is missing in the process of internationalization?' This article argues that internationalization of higher education contributes to building more than economically competitive and politically powerful states. It represents a commitment to the development of an internationalized curriculum where the pursuit of global citizenship, human harmony and a climate of global peace is of paramount importance."

"This article offers an analysis of conservative critiques of education with particular attention given to how policy problems are framed to build public consensus. It investigates how conservatives claim political legitimacy and describe education and social problems in ways that promote a conservative agenda. Using a case study of the Australian Howard Government's education policy, the article draws on Lakoff's work and particularly his 'moral accounting schemes' to identify the politics that are not always apparent in debates, but which nonetheless play a powerful role in popular and policy understandings of schools and universities and which help shape policy solutions to the problems those educational institutions are said to face."

"As economic conditions around the country (and world) impose increasing limitations on funding for higher education, it is worthwhile to review some of the major reasons that higher education costs are so high and rise so rapidly. An understanding of these reasons is critical to making rational responses that preserve (and perhaps even strengthen) important components of institutional mission. This is, of course, a subject that has been extensively written about over the past several decades by many authors, but since responses to the current economic situation seem to generally ignore what is known about the problem, perhaps another brief review is justified. Interested readers will find my many earlier takes on this issue collected here"

"While the economic benefits created by international education export are well documented, few systematic and qualitative analysis studies have been conducted to examine how academic staff perceive the presence of international students in their institutions. Using interview data from 80 academic staff from different disciplines in one higher institution in Australia, this study examines whether the presence of international students has an impact on staff teaching practice. Some of the academic staff reported that they made no adjustments to their teaching. They treated all students as one student group. Other staff members said that there have been changes in their teaching in response to the presence of international students in their classroom. The paper discusses some of the underlying causes of these responses, and implications for the practice of international education. The discussion of the findings is informed by Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, which helps us understand how people respond to cultural differences."

"Japan's current education system has its origins in postwar reform, overemphasizing individualism and underemphasizing on Japan's history, traditions, and culture, resulting in the continuing decline in scholastic, physical, and socializing ability to date. This essay reviews the IIPS proposal on educational reform, which was supervised by former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, with the addition of the author's personal views. The IIPS proposal set the ultimate goal of education in Japan to be raising healthy people who have self-confidence and pride as Japanese who can thrive in the era of globalization. Then, the proposal presents what a Japanese should learn and how he should serve at each life stage beginning with early childhood education through the compulsory education period, adolescence and young adulthood, maturity, and into the elderly period. Moreover, the organizational reform on administrating education policy is presented, with a focus on abandoning the current board of education system."

"In Not for Profit (2010), Martha Nussbaum has diagnosed that alongside a global economic crisis, a less visible, more insidious catastrophe is also affecting Western societies, namely the underfunding of the arts and humanities. Working against the increasing commercialization of the academy, Nussbaum sets out a vision of the arts, and especially literature, as central to the functioning of a healthy democratic society, first because they underpin skills of reasoning, argument, and critique, and secondly because they cultivate imaginative, caring, and empathic citizens. Nussbaum's passionate defense of the humanities coincides, and to some degree overlaps, with the emergence of the medical humanities over the past decade or so. Tying the notion of the "healthy" society more particularly to health-care institutions and systems, the medical humanities have pointed to a contemporary crisis of care in Western societies that emerges out of a number of factors, including the increasing bureaucratization and privatization of care services, and the fragmentation of the patient among subspecializations. Having thus diagnosed an ailing system of health care, the medical humanities have, like Nussbaum, prescribed the reading of literature as the cure, asserting that it is particularly good at making better health-care professionals by widening perspective and developing the sensibilities.1 In other words, literature is seen to be valuable because it can help doctors and other health-care practitioners to nurture an empathetic response to the suffering of those who are in their care. What seems emergent, then, across Nussbaum and the medical humanities, is a nexus of concern with a prevailing "health" crisis (whether of democracy or of systems of care), for which the revitalization of the humanities emerges as the necessary panacea, because the arts, and especially literature, make us more enlightened and"

"As the only state university that bears the name of the country, the Universitas Indonesia (UI) has played an important role in the history of the Indonesian nationalist movement for over half a century. Now located at two sites, one in the center of the city and the other on the outskirts, the history of this leading state university-its architecture and location, as well as its campus life and student movement-reflects the clashes of various forces and competing ideologies. This study looks at the relationship between public space and nationalism in Universitas Indonesia in an interdisciplinary perspective. It relates architecture and urban history with the operations of power and memory in a campus, which is seen both as an arena of struggle as well as containment. In that sense the campus is a reflection of public space in a broader sense. This paper raises a question about the kind of civic space emerging from the tension between the physical structure and environment of the campuses and the inner space of campus politics and students movement."

Using the case of education, we consider how global cultural and economic forces affect national education spending policies. Our analysis includes both an historical analysis of the construction and transformation of ideas about education at the global level and a statistical assessment of the implementation of conflicting approaches to state education funding within countries. In the historical analysis, we show how the idea of free education, although institutionalized in international law, was subject to powerful challenges from international financial institutions, which advocated user fees for public services, including education. Ultimately, the principle of free education prevailed despite the financial clout behind the opposing view. Using data from poor- and middle-income countries from 1983 to 2004, we also show that the presence of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) advocating child rights was linked to an increase in the levels of state funding for education. This suggests that embeddedness in global discourses, as evidenced by country-specific linkages to INGOs, is critical in making governments more accountable for supporting institutionalized ideas concerning education.

"This article explores the presence of US institutions of higher education in Eastern Europe as one facet of the neoliberal global environment. It draws on policy documents, institutional statistics, materials produced by interest groups and NGOs, official mission statements, press releases and media coverage, and personal narratives. The American University in Bulgaria is examined as a case of this wider phenomenon. Exclusively structuralist, critical analyses of such institutions can easily lead to conclusions of homogenization and dominance through the hegemony of 'exporter' education institutions and programs. Post-structural analysis-attuned to multiplicities of meanings, nuances of context, and complex interplays of power and knowledge claims-allow for more attention to the local dynamics, while human interpretation and agency may point the way to more hopeful roles for US institutions of higher education abroad. In turn, these roles may challenge the one-way deterministic flow of influence suggested by structuralist analyses."

"Public-private partnerships in education (ePPP) are acquiring increasing centrality in the agendas of international organizations and development agencies dealing with educational affairs. They are designed as an opportunity to correct inefficiencies in the public delivery of education and to mobilize new resources to increase the access to and cost-effectiveness of education in low-income contexts. This article explores the emergence of ePPP as a 'programmatic idea' and, in particular, the semiotic strategies by means of which this idea has been located in the global education agenda and promoted internationally among practice communities by a network of policy entrepreneurs. The analysis is supported by extensive fieldwork and by a new approach to the analysis of the framing and mobilization of new policy ideas, which incorporates literature on agenda setting, policy entrepreneurs, and policy frame analysis. The approach reveals the complex way in which policy ideas, political actors, institutions, and material factors interact to strategically put forward new policy alternatives in developing contexts."

"The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, 'academic development' has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge."