This paper uses a critical framework integrating Capability, Feminist and Critical Pedagogic theories to challenge the reductive focus within sustainability discourses on the physical environment, ...and education’s typical ‘development’ focus on economic growth. The paper presents three main arguments. First, it argues for holistic or ecological concepts of both ‘development’ and ESD, focusing on enlightened political participation, emancipation and social transformation as the basis of ecological sustainability. Second, it challenges the limitation of such agendas to wealthy countries while ‘development education’ thinking applied to poorer countries is almost entirely economic. Third, it explores the political educational mandate that flows from this position. The three arguments are developed by examining successes and shortcomings in emancipatory educational projects in South Africa, Latin America and the Arab world. These projects, previously documented, are analysed using comparative ‘glocalization’ tools to reveal context-specific ways that innovative vertical and horizontal collaboration has created responsive new forms of educationally-mediated politically sustainable ‘development’ – focusing on equality, particularly gender. The analysis shows that educating for ecologically sustainable development based on enlightened and equal political participation has no less a place in ‘developing’ countries than it does in richer ones although constraints, and therefore means, may be situationally distinctive.
A review essay on books by 1) Zembylas and Keet Eds, Critical human rights, citizenship and democracy education (2018); and 2) Walsh and Black, Rethinking youth citizenship after the age of ...entitlement (2018).
This article is a study of the competing academic and professional identity frameworks of lecturers whose discipline has only recently become part of the business of higher education. The article ...engages with important questions about higher education change and purpose, standards and parity among disciplines. Taking a critical ethnographic approach, it combines policy discussion of shifting higher educational and nurse education regimes with an insider investigation into the attempts of a group of new nurse lecturers in a pre-1992 English university to make sense of their work and identity in an already contested site. These experiences and perceptions are analysed from the perspectives of autonomy, status and rival knowledge regimes. By underlining the diversity of lecturer experiences in these terms, the article contributes to discussion of new stratification. It suggests that despite the apparent merging in many respects of professional and academic frameworks, higher education practitioners in such newly ' academic' disciplines can still find traditional professional identities more reliable conferrers of meaning than academic ones.
This article explores how higher education is being conceptualized as part of a neo-liberal 'feminist' social change project in the post-imperial context of the Arab Gulf. Challenging the tendency to ...essentialised treatments of gender and women in Muslim countries, it makes visible the diverse experiences and views of a particular group of Gulf purposively sampled women - students, graduates and academics - as it explores how they are situating themselves against available feminist narratives, how they are seeing themselves as citizens and political actors, and how higher education's spaces and constraints are mediating these processes. A conflicted picture emerges, of mass higher education helping provide women with radical ideas and ambitions, and helping to make public demands and assert self-representation, while their freedoms to act are limited by underlying hegemonic structures that are still predominantly male and against which women variously rationalize their strategic conformity.
This paper contributes to discussions about the nature and scope of higher education (HE) business in light of some of the emerging ways in which countries seem to be reframing the impact of ...globalism. In particular, it develops a discussion about spatialities and temporalities of HE policy by drawing on the Kingdom of Bahrain's distinctive approach to free markets, transnational capitalism, trade of international services and foreign influence. The paper draws on key HE policy documents and regulatory frameworks issued by the Higher Education Council in Bahrain. In the paper, we ask about priorities that drive HE investment in Bahrain, as well as their impact on the role of international input in HE policy building. We find that policymaking in Bahrain is driven by 'nationalisation' as a pragmatic strategy at the time of transition to a knowledge economy. We also find that these goals are transient, thus providing suggestions for policy analysis from the perspective of time intervals in a space.
This paper examines the spread of English as a medium of higher education in the Arab world, addressing questions about the relationship between higher education, language shift and cultural ...(re)production through such post-colonial educational bilingualism. Drawing on exploratory ethnographic research, it documents how both Arabic and English have been implicated in the re-configuring of collective identities through mass higher education in one Arab Gulf country against a context of rapid modernisation with a regional undercurrent of recurrent pan-Arab and Islamist-tinged nationalism. It examines how far the resulting linguistic-cultural dualism amounts to a loss of linguistic-cultural diversity, and how far there is a linguistically-framed discourse of resistance to such a process. Theoretically, the paper engages with discourses relating to socio-cultural reproduction, collective identity, educational standardisation, change and cultural chauvinism, and markets. It offers insights into the potential for both language and higher education to act as tools or fields for cultural transformation and for resistance identity construction.
This paper considers the ways in which Arab education systems have responded to the challenges of modernity alongside framing structures of religion. Focusing mainly on the tertiary education sector, ...it offers a critical overview of the way in which Arab education authorities have sought, collectively and individually, to address both secular and religious fundamentalist demands. It analyses policy and culture in response to econopolitical change, and to shifting perceptions of the functions of education. Engaging with ideas about the relationship between secularism and modernity, it argues that regional patterns of infrastructural engagement with religion have more to do with politics and power than with ideological foundations of culture and society, and challenges, as others have done, the essentialist association of modernity and secularism.
This article contributes to the emerging theoretical construct of what has been called 'transnational academic capitalism', characterised by the blurring of traditional boundaries between public, ...private, local, regional and international, and between market-driven and critically transformative higher education visions. Here we examine how these issues are reflected in higher education policy in the Arab Gulf, asking: what kinds of capital are being constructed and traded? By and for whom? What is the relationship between higher education competition, governance and the public good? We find contradictory trends, which we see as strategic ambivalence pointing to country-specific readings of similar regional markets and attempts to hedge bets between rival forms of apparent capital. The exploration offers a counterpoint to more widely cited examples, hereby helping to shape new paradigmatic 'glocalised' understandings of this field.
Developing the educated citizen Alexiadou, Nafsika; Findlow, Sally
Annales. Series historia et sociologia,
2014, Letnik:
24, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper explores questions of citizenship and the role of universities in the context of the policy changes in the UK and in Europe over the last two decades. Twenty five years after the political ...transitions in Eastern Europe, and 70 years since the end of the Second World War, Europe is more united than ever before. New political, social and economic configurations across the continent are bringing expectations and pressures to its citizens and institutions, with universities at the front of many economic and social projects. What do these new conditions mean for citizenship in the context of European universities, and how do member states respond to this changing context? The article will use England as a national case study within the EU to illustrate the tensions between the humanistic visions still carried out by many universities, although interpreted differently across the sector, and the pressures for the creation of the ‘knowledge economy’ that are shared at the national and transnational levels.
L’articolo tratta le questioni, legate alla cittadinanza e al ruolo delle universita nel contesto dei cambiamenti politici in Europa e nel Regno Unito negli ultimi due decenni. Venticinque anni dopo la transizione politica nell’Europa orientale e 70 anni dalla fine della II Guerra Mondiale l’Europa e piu unita che mai. Le nuove condizioni politiche, sociali, economiche sull’intero continente creano nuove pressioni e attese che si trasmettono sui cittadini e sulle istituzioni, mettendo le universita a capo di numerosi progetti economici o sociali. Ma che cosa rappresentano in realta queste nuove condizioni per la cittadinanza nel contesto delle universita europee e come gli Stati membri dell’Unione Europea rispondono alle condizioni che cambiano? L’articolo tratta queste tematiche sull’esempio dell’Inghilterra come sistema di istruzione devoluto del Regno Unito all’interno del territorio comunitario. L’esempio dell’Inghilterra presenta le tensioni tra le idee umanistiche all’interno di alcune universita e le pressioni riguardanti la creazione dell’“economia della conoscenza”, che caratterizzano il territorio nazionale e transnazionale nel campo dell’istruzione.
ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: This paper explores questions of citizenship and the role of universities in the context of the policy changes in the UK and in Europe over the last two decades. Twenty five ...years after the political transitions in Eastern Europe, and 70 years since the end of the Second World War, Europe is more united than ever before. New political, social and economic configurations across the continent are bringing expectations and pressures to its citizens and institutions, with universities at the front of many economic and social projects. What do these new conditions mean for citizenship in the context of European universities, and how do member states respond to this changing context? The article will use England as a national case study within the EU to illustrate the tensions between the humanistic visions still carried out by many universities, although interpreted differently across the sector, and the pressures for the creation of the `knowledge economy' that are shared at the national and transnational levels. // ABSTRACT IN ITALIAN: L'articolo tratta le questioni, legate alla cittadinanza e al ruolo delle università nel contesto dei cambiamenti politici in Europa e nel Regno Unito negli ultimi due decenni. Venticinque anni dopo la transizione politica nell'Europa orientale e 70 anni dalla fine della II Guerra Mondiale l'Europa è più unita che mai. Le nuove condizioni politiche, sociali, economiche sull'intero continente creano nuove pressioni e attesse che si trasmettono sui cittadini e sulle istituzioni, mettendo le università a capo di numerosi progetti economici o sociali. Ma che cosa rappresentano in realtà queste nuove condizioni per la cittadinanza nel contesto delle università europee e come gli Stati membri dell'Unione Europea rispondono alle condizioni che cambiano? L'articolo tratta queste tematiche sull'esempio dell'Inghilterra come sistema di istruzione devoluto del Regno Unito all'interno del territorio comunitario. L'esempio dell'Inghilterra presenta le tensioni tra le idee umanistische all'interno di alcune università e le pressioni riguardanti la creazione dell'"economia della conoscenza", che caratterizzano il territorio nazionale e transnazionale nel campo dell'istruzione.
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