This paper is a comparative analysis of the anticipatory practices deployed by two international organisations (IOs), UNESCO and the OECD, to govern education futures. I show how their coordination ...of education futures is mediated by: (1) their different histories, missions, resources and geo-political alliances; (2) use of different anticipatory practices; (3) ongoing tensions between the two organisations around who dominates future-making in education; and (4) the challenges to be negotiated when anticipated futures arrive as a problematic present. My argument develops around three moments of crisis as new arenas for what Ann Mische calls "hyper-projectivity" around futures. In each moment I explore the way UNESCO and the OECD engage in, and compete over, framing, shaping and materialising future presents. In doing so, they claim to be guardians of education futures.
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In 2018 the OECD added a set of global competence measures to its PISA programme, and reported on the outcomes in November 2020. In this paper I explore the provenance of the idea of global ...competence underpinning the OECD-PISA Global Competence framework and measure. The official account by the OECD references the OECD PISA Governing Board, Expert Panels, National Teams and Consortia engaged in the creation and delivery of this assessment tool. However, in this paper I problematise this narrative and sketch out an alternate genealogy that seems to operate in the shadowlands of the official account. I describe a web of relationships and projects and identify nodal actors like Asia Society, experts and brokers in élite US universities, agencies involved in the circulation of results. I argue that this rendering of global competence is not only provincial in that its ideational base can be linked to US corporate interests, but its pedagogical impulse is in shaping the culture of the new capitalism, on the one hand, and managing its tendencies to reduce social cohesion, on the other.
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This article examines the focus on teacher policies and practices by a range of global actors and explores their meaning for the governance of teachers. Through a historical and contemporary reading, ...I argue that an important shift in the locus of power to govern has taken place. I show how the mechanisms of global governance of teachers are being transformed from “education as (national) development” and “norm setting” to “learning as (individual) development” and “competitive comparison.” Yet despite tendencies toward a convergence of agendas, there are important differences between them. I conclude by examining the limits and possibilities of governing at a (global) distance, as well as the contradictions inherent in neoliberal framings of teacher policies to realize the good teacher.
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Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations (IO's) deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of ...sovereignty. It follows that securing hegemony over a vision of the future is important strategic work for IOs, and a source of legitimacy derived from authority beyond procedure and performance. This is called promissory legitimacy. Yet what happens when this promised future arrives and is problematic? How does an IO creatively strategise this shortfall? In this paper, we identify five strategies deployed by the OECD in its Future of Education and Skills 2030 programme aimed to re-negotiate a failed present and anticipate a new future. We also reflect on the ideational underpinnings of the OECD's new futures programme, and argue it is being mobilised to, on the one hand, get beyond the limitations of data governance, and on the other to help selectively shape a new cognitariat subjectivity engaged with immaterial labour in emerging post-industrial capitalism.
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This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as 'marketization' in the higher education sector. We do this through a ...case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of 'market making' is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in which making markets involve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector.
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The intestinal microbiota is a fundamental factor that broadly influences physiology. Thus, studies using transgenic animals should be designed to limit the confounding effects of microbiota ...variation between strains. Here, we report the impact on intestinal microbiota of co-housed versus F2-generation littermates, two commonly used techniques to standardize microbiota in animal models. Our results establish that while fecal microbiota is partially normalized by extended co-housing, mucosal communities associated with the proximal colon and terminal ileum remain stable and distinct. In contrast, strain inter-crossing to generate F2 littermates allows robust microbiota standardization in fecal, colon, and ileum sampling locations. Using reciprocal inter-crosses of P1 parents, we identify dissymmetry in F2 community structures caused by maternal transmission, in particular of the Verrucomicrobiaceae. Thus, F2 littermate animals from a unidirectional P1 cross should be used as a standard method to minimize the influence of the microbiota in genotype-phenotype studies.
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•Composition of the gut microbiota is a variable that can influence mouse phenotypes•Techniques to standardize the microbiota include using littermate mice or co-housing•The use of littermates from a heterozygous cross is optimal for standardization
Standardization of the microbiota in mouse models ensures reproducibility of findings and avoids erroneous conclusions. Here, Robertson et al. demonstrate that the use of F2-generation littermates is the superior method for standardization of the gut microbiota between experimental groups to minimize the influence of the microbiota in genotype-phenotype studies.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
This paper outlines the basis of an alternative theoretical approach to the study of the globalisation of 'education' - a Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) approach. Our ...purpose here is to bring this body of concepts - critical, cultural, political, economy - into our interrogation of globalising projects and processes within what we will refer to as the 'education ensemble' as the topic of enquiry, whose authoritative, allocative, ideational and feeling structures, properties and practices, emerge from and play into global economic, political and cultural processes In the first half of the paper we introduce and develop the concepts that will underpin our approach. In the second half of the paper we explore the explanatory potential and epistemic gain of a CCPEE approach by examining the different manifestations of the relationship between globalisation as a political, cultural and economic project and an education ensemble. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities this perspective offers.
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IMPORTANCE: Optimal use of whole-exome sequencing (WES) in the pediatric setting requires an understanding of who should be considered for testing and when it should be performed to maximize clinical ...utility and cost-effectiveness. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the impact of WES in sequencing-naive children suspected of having a monogenic disorder and evaluate its cost-effectiveness if WES had been available at different time points in their diagnostic trajectory. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This prospective study was part of the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance demonstration project. At the ambulatory outpatient clinics of the Victorian Clinical Genetics Services at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, children older than 2 years suspected of having a monogenic disorder were prospectively recruited from May 1 through November 30, 2015, by clinical geneticists after referral from general and subspecialist pediatricians. All children had nondiagnostic microarrays and no prior single-gene or panel sequencing. EXPOSURES: All children underwent singleton WES with targeted phenotype-driven analysis. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The study examined the clinical utility of a molecular diagnosis and the cost-effectiveness of alternative diagnostic trajectories, depending on timing of WES. RESULTS: Of 61 children originally assessed, 44 (21 48% male and 23 52% female) aged 2 to 18 years (mean age at initial presentation, 28 months; range, 0-121 months) were recruited, and a diagnosis was achieved in 23 (52%) by singleton WES. The diagnoses were unexpected in 8 of 23 (35%), and clinical management was altered in 6 of 23 (26%). The mean duration of the diagnostic odyssey was 6 years, with each child having a mean of 19 tests and 4 clinical genetics and 4 nongenetics specialist consultations, and 26 (59%) underwent a procedure while under general anesthetic for diagnostic purposes. Economic analyses of the diagnostic trajectory identified that WES performed at initial tertiary presentation resulted in an incremental cost savings of A$9020 (US$6838) per additional diagnosis (95% CI, A$4304-A$15 404 US$3263-US$11 678) compared with the standard diagnostic pathway. Even if WES were performed at the first genetics appointment, there would be an incremental cost savings of A$5461 (US$4140) (95% CI, A$1433-A$10 557 US$1086- US$8004) per additional diagnosis compared with the standard diagnostic pathway. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Singleton WES in children with suspected monogenic conditions has high diagnostic yield, and cost-effectiveness is maximized by early application in the diagnostic pathway. Pediatricians should consider early referral of children with undiagnosed syndromes to clinical geneticists.
•Education futures are open, risky and uncertain.•Social actors offer narrations of futures so as to limit openness.•When education futures are claimed by economic actors seeking to expand capitalist ...markets, there are competing projects around whose future this is.•Trade agreements involving education highlight claims and contestation over education futures.
This paper explores a less well-examined aspect of time in relation to higher education and the academy; that of ‘time-future’. The paper takes the case of education trade strategies being pursued by governments and allied agencies, and explores the multiple ways in which time-future is mobilised. Drawing on trade documents, government statistics, and related reports, the paper points to two time-future dynamics at work. The first dynamic focuses on the ways in which the future is imagined by strategic actors, and legitimated through creating equivalences between education trade, economic growth and prosperity. The second dynamic explores the ways in which the current round of global and regional trade negotiations colonise the future as a political resource. I reflect on how time-future is a key resource and modality of power to be claimed and cognitively shaped so as to reorient actor’s expectations towards the rhythms and demands of capitalism, and away from the temporal orders of the academy. However, efforts to commodify higher education, on the one hand, and colonise higher education futures exclusively to serve the interests of economic investors, on the other, continues to be contested. As a result, a new temporal order is yet to become common-sense, and an existing order is yet to die.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
A great deal has been written about the rise of the world-class university and global university rankings over the past two decades. Much of this work focuses on either the efficacy of the indicators ...used to measure world classness or on the purposes they serve regarding student choice in an international market. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which spatial power, particularly the politics of sight and size, brings into view and makes visible and actionable new sets of socio-spatial relations between entities. In this paper, I draw on a spatial vocabulary of sight, vision, visibility, verticality, volume and vertigo. Taken together, these modalities of space 'V-Charge' the reimagining, recalibrating and remaking of universities as a global enterprise.
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