Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

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

Globalizing Education Policy. Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard. New York: Routledge, 2010. 228 pp. $45.95 (paper); and Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. David Harvey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 352 pp. $27.50 (cloth). The authors of the texts reviewed here situate current Education and social policies within the rise of the neoliberal state and describe how Friedman's free market capitalism became the dominant view of society not only in the United States, but also throughout much of the globe. Rizvi and Lingard explain how neoliberalism became the dominant "social imaginary which is, as Taylor (2007) defines, the way in which large groups of people "imagine their social existence-how they fit together with others and how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (19). The concept of social imaginary is useful in placing how people think about the world within the context of culture, economic, and political events. Social imaginary differs from social theory in that it is held by large groups of people, and often communicated in stories and anecdotes. However, although it may be less theoretical, it is no less powerful because it shapes how people think of the role of government and the "nature and scope of political authority" (Rizvi and Lingard 2010, 13). It reminds us that how people view the world is largely contested not theoretically, but at the level of lived experience. Consequently, scholars and members of the Educational community must explicitly engage in problematizing our social imaginaries.

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of 'accountability' they risk speaking past one another, having some of these distinctions in mind and not others. Furthermore, often these distinctions are vague and cross-cut each other in ways that are as yet unclear. The field could benefit from having a comprehensive framework in which to place these distinctions and to view their relations. My aim in this article is to provide an analytical tool by which to classify important debate about what accountability in higher education has been and ought to be. Beyond organizing such debate, this schema will serve the purposes of revealing ambiguities in terms, conflations of ideas, assumptions that warrant questioning, and gaps in present research agendas.

This article uses four academics' gendered and cultural responses to life in a university in Aotearoa New Zealand under the new managerialist regime. Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) requires academics to submit evidence-based portfolios every six years to categorise and rank them, with government funding assigned accordingly. When the authors met as members of a writing group, the talk often turned to negative aspects of PBRF. Using co-operative enquiry, the four co-researchers began writing observations of their individual experiences, differences and identities to help them reflect and understand the impact of the changed environment. The four phases of writing as enquiry were: deciding on a focus, writing observations, engaging with the written accounts and interpreting the outcome through metaphor. The article process facilitated a positive outcome by helping the authors regain a sense of collegiality and mutual support, along with a sense of preserving their academic identity by writing and publishing as a group.

So I come to you tonight in part with an academic analysis of current discourse. But more than that I come to you with an invitation. An invitation to participate in a loosely coordinated set of efforts, a national coalition and a national campaign, a national caucus, if you will, of academic labor seeking to reframe and redirect public discourse and public policy about higher education. A national coalition and campaign that are underway. Central to that campaign is entering in a systematic, coordinated, collective way, the national conversation about higher education. That conversation is being advanced and defined outside of the academy by foundations such as Gates and Lumina, by governors and state legislators, and by the Department of education and Congress. It is a conversation that is being defined within the academy by academic managers. It is a conversation that is framed by a neoliberal political economy that privileges the private over the public (which is remarkable given the collapse and bail-out of Wall Street), that features large corporate, for-profit employers, but that ignores small and medium-sized business, not-for-profit organizations, and not-for-profit employees. It is a conversation that calls for students (as customers) to pay more to get less, that overlooks the persistent gap between what we promise and what we deliver to various student populations, that are the growth populations of the future, lower income students, students of color, and immigrants. It is a conversation that is defined by absence, by an absence of professional voice, an absence of imagination, and an absence of a sense of the possible. It is a national conversation defined by a politics of scarcity, and by a narrow view of what we do in higher education, of the functions we serve.

This article aims to introduce corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an ideational concept that is being globally and regionally engineered by an epistemic community of elite stakeholders that include business, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and government. The concept of CSR engineering seeks to address gaps in the literature that neglect the emergence of a highly integrated network of elite brokers committed to neoliberal ideology and the manufacturing of ethical corporate governance. Conclusions are drawn from 60 semi-structured interviews with key CSR stakeholders and well over 250 'off-the-record' conversations held at 60 industry-led conferences. The findings suggest that when powerbases within the elite networks are exposed, the Western nation-state is revealed as the most dominant stakeholder.

Since the late 1990s, the intersection of education and migration policies in Australia has shifted international students from transient consumers to potential citizens. This article analyses responses to the 'problem' of international students as consumers, workers, and migrants, particularly the conceptualization of their rights and protections, and the ways students have been positioned as both passive subjects and activist citizens. The article provides a theoretical review of academic, government, community, and media responses to international students in general and the consequences of the education-migration nexus in particular. It argues that discourses of human rights and consumer rights have become increasingly interconnected in these debates. This analysis adds to the emerging literature on changing conceptions of rights and citizenship in neoliberal contexts, and also illuminates the social and political consequences of the education-migration nexus in Australia. This will have resonance for countries who have implemented a raft of similar policies.

This article tries to look into the question, to what extent have British universities become the new recruiting grounds of Islamism, if at all, making a shift from Mosques. It argues that both Islam (the religion itself) and Islamism (the political ideology) coexist at the university level. At universities both moderate thinkers and Islamists are invited to give their speeches, a small few of whom openly advocate terrorism or what Islamists would call "martyrdom." The article moves away from the traditional reactive explanations and tries to give both an active and reactive explanation as to what causes Islamism in Britain among British Muslim university students and analyzes the causes within the broader framework of identity issues and socioeconomic marginalization. It has been advised that social policy workers in Britain dealing with ethnic minorities collaborate with security officials while dealing with the problem of Islamism.

Educational outcomes related to sustainability often include affective attributes such as values, attitudes and behaviours. Educators in higher Education who attempt to research, monitor, assess or evaluate learning of affective attributes can face a bewildering array of methodologies and approaches and a research literature that spans several fields of enquiry. This article provides an overview of affective learning in the broad area of Education for sustainable development, guidance for university teachers and researchers contemplating measuring affective attributes and a frame-work of affective attribute measurement based on the Krathwohl et al. (1964) taxonomy.

Interdisciplinary approaches are often seen as necessary for attacking the most critical challenges facing the world today, and doctoral students and their training programs are recognized as central to increasing interdisciplinary research capacity. However, the traditional culture and organization of higher education are ill-equipped to facilitate interdisciplinary work. This study employs a lens of socialization to study the process through which students learn the norms, values, and culture of both traditional disciplines and integrated knowledge production. It concludes that many of the processes of socialization are similar, but that special attention should be paid to overcoming organizational barriers to interdisciplinarity related to policies, space, engagement with future employers, and open discussion of the politics of interdisciplinarity.

Although globalisation has been an increasingly important characteristic of United States higher education for over two decades, there has been little historical analysis of the process or its origins. This article argues that beginning in the early 1970s, institutional, national, and international events established a powerful context for the development of college and university goals that focus on globalisation. These goals are substantially different from the goals of improving the democracy and opportunities for full citizenship articulated in the report of the 1947 President's Commission on Higher education and subsequently affirmed in other national reports as late as 1971.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several researchers showed the importance, in the United States, of the number of times scholars' publications are cited for determining their bargaining power in academia. Not surprisingly, the question was soon raised whether citations are a good measure of scholarly merit. Are women at a disadvantage in male-dominated fields, such as economics? Studies had shown that authors tended to cite a larger proportion of publications by authors of the same gender. This paper examines whether women's disadvantage in garnering citations has been reduced by the increasing representation of women in economics and finds that this has been the case in both labor economics and economics in general, albeit not to the same degree.

This paper analyses the way in which global university models are adopted in research universities in Indonesia and Malaysia. It first provides the global context in which these models have evolved and the processes through which they spread. How these global models interact with local policies and institutions is the topic of the empirical part of the paper. Even though the global discourse is apparent and similar in different countries, local adoption is path dependent and embedded in wider structures. This might result in dissonance and discrepancy in the implementation phase, an outcome which is inevitable, but not necessarily harmful.

With strong intention to enhance the global competitiveness of their higher education systems, the governments of Singapore and Malaysia have made attempts to develop their societies into regional hubs of education; hence transnational education has become increasingly popular in these societies. In order to attract more students from overseas to study in their countries (or create more educational opportunities for their citizens), these governments have invited foreign universities to set up their campuses to provide more higher education programs. In the last decade, the proliferation of higher education providers and the transnationalization of education have raised the concerns regarding the search for new governance and regulatory frameworks in governing the rapidly expanding transnational education organizations in these Asian societies. Higher education governance has become more complex in Singapore and Malaysia amid the quest for being regional hubs of education as nation states have to deal with multinational corporations when they are becoming increasingly active in running transnational education programs. This article sets out against this context of growing trend of transnationalization in education to compare and contrast the models and approaches that Singapore and Malaysia have adopted to govern and manage the diversity of players in offering transnational education programs.

In early 2011 the World Bank will approve a new education sector strategy amid trends that mean that international goals on education will not be met. Zoe Godolphin of the University of Bristol argues that the Bank's proposed approach fails conceptually because it does not accept that education is a human right. It also fails pragmatically because it continues to advocate a template approach instead of supporting genuinely country-driven priorities in education planning

This study aims to understand Korean students' motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in-depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research-centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push-pull model of transnational higher education choice-making, this study situates Korean students' aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge-degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students' qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students'

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.

Ten years have passed since the signature of the Bologna declaration. Seventeen countries have joined the process; since then, several new action lines have been added and the original action lines have often gained a new and more sophisticated content. The 2009 Bologna Stocktaking exercise included the traditional quantitative indicators, the criteria this time being designed to evaluate the goals set for 2010. In addition, particular emphasis was put on qualitative analysis on this occasion to provide a realistic picture of what has been achieved and which initiatives will take more time than anticipated to implement. The 2009 stocktaking shows that while there has indeed been important progress since 1999, following progress since 2007, not all the goals of the Bologna Process will be achieved by 2010.

Higher education (HE) in China has been transformed from elite to mass education over the last decade due to commercialisation and funding reform. Many questions have been raised regarding the impact of HE expansion on social justice: what are the implications of the distribution of HE resources on regional inequality? How does it influence different social groups in terms of access to HE? What are the financial implications on different regions and social groups as a result of the funding reform? Based on the official data by region in 1998 and 2006, this paper aims to address these questions and describe how HE has changed over time, both spatially and inter-temporally. Our research results suggest that HE reforms have disadvantaged poor people in impoverished regions despite the availability of HE opportunities for them.