The concept of a liberal or general education as it emerged in the Western tradition is one of the most consequential and enduring in the history of education. From its origins in antiquity, the concept and the form of a liberal arts and sciences curriculum associated with it grew to become a shaping force in the formation of the universities of the Middle Ages. Largely unchanged, it remained influential for centuries to follow. With the spread of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, however, the concept and the curriculum associated with it ran into outspoken opposition. Yet once again today, the traditional concept and varying modifications of both that concept and of its curriculum content continue to be asserted all around the world. In response, discontent with liberal education and its curricular expressions is assuming new and increasingly challenging forms. One upshot of this is that opposition to the concept has a new vibrancy that is not readily quelled. This is especially evident among those arguing for innovative conceptualizations of this venerable if increasingly ambiguous idea. Yet, while such a conceptualization is at best emergent, one may detect in its evolution elements of a progressive theory of liberal education, even if there are few sustained attempts at articulating this emergent model.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to acknowledge non-Western formative influences and forms of education that are sometimes viewed as counterparts of a liberal or general education as it has evolved in the Western tradition, and which is the focus of attention here. These include forms of higher education rooted in the Confucian tradition in China, Hindi and Buddhist traditions in India, and Islamic traditions.
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Tradition and Change in the Curriculum of Liberal or General Education
D. G. Mulcahy
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Tradition and Transformation in Danish Early Childhood Education and Care
Karen Ida Dannesboe and Bjørg Kjær
Denmark has a long tradition of public provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) as part of what is known internationally as the Nordic welfare model. Both traditions and transformations within Danish ECEC are parallel to the establishment and development of this model. The emergence of child-centered pedagogy, so characteristic for Danish ECEC, is part of specific historical processes. Since the 1960s, the ECEC sector has undergone significant expansion and in 2020, most children in Denmark between the ages of 1 and 6 attend an ECEC institution. This expansion has positioned ECEC as a core universal welfare service, including a special focus on preventing injustice and inequality and on taking care of the vulnerable and disadvantaged. Early 21st-century international discourses on learning and early intervention have influenced political reforms and initiatives addressing ECEC institutions and the work of “pedagogues” (the Danish term for ECEC practitioners with a bachelor’s degree in social pedagogy). Since the 1990s, there has been growing political interest in regulating the content of ECEC, resulting in various policies and reforms that have changed the nature of Danish ECEC by introducing new learning agendas. This has been accompanied by an increased focus on the importance of the early years of childhood for outcomes later in life and on the role of parents in this regard. These tendencies are embedded in political initiatives and discourses and shape the conditions for ECEC, perceptions of children and childhood, the legitimacy of the pedagogical profession, the meaning of and emphasis on young children’s learning, the importance of inclusion, and the changing role of parents. These changes in social reforms and pedagogical initiatives interact with national historical processes and international tendencies and agendas at different levels.
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Traditions, Research, and Practice Supporting Academically Productive Classroom Discourse
Jie Park, Sarah Michaels, Renee Affolter, and Catherine O'Connor
This article focuses on both research and practice relating to academically productive classroom discourse. We seek to “expand the conversation” to include newcomers to the field of classroom talk, as well as practitioners and youth researchers who want to contribute to knowledge building in this area. We first explore a variety of traditions, questions, and methods that have been prominent in work on classroom talk. We also summarize some key findings that have emerged over the past several decades:
• Finding 1: Certain kinds of talk promote robust learning for ALL students.
• Finding 2: The field lacks shared conceptualizations of what productive talk is and how best to characterize it.
• Finding 3: Dialogic discourse is exceedingly rare in classrooms, at all grade levels and across all domains.
• Finding 4: A helpful way forward: conceptualizing talk moves as tools.
Following the presentation of each research finding we provide a set of commentaries—explicating and in some cases problematizing the findings. Finally, we provide some promising approaches that presume cultural and linguistic assets among both students and teachers, including curricular programs, teacher education, professional development programs, teacher research, and intergenerational communities of inquiry. In all of this, we try to make our own assumptions, traditions, and governing gazes explicit, as a multi-generational and multi-role group of authors, to encourage greater transparency among all who work in this important and potentially transformative field of study.
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Transformational School Leadership to Dismantle Inequitable Systems
Deirdra Preis
A key reason for the failure of U.S. school leaders to challenge systems of inequity is the lack of exposure to the theory and skill development needed to manage the resistance and political challenges that inevitably occur when interrogating unjust traditions of practice. As preparation programs aim to improve their candidates’ future success in addressing inequitable educational access, it is critical that they develop in their students the self-efficacy around relational practices and strategies needed to manage the micropolitics of transformative work. Examining how transformative K–12 school leaders effectively challenge structural inequities and manage to sustain their leadership positions during turbulent times can help to inform such curricular and instructional revisions. Some of the key practices identified by successful transformative K–12 leaders include engaging in reflection around their positionality, developing racial literacy, effectively facilitating shared visions and collective responsibility for social justice advocacy, building the capacity of stakeholders, developing critical alliances through transparent and authentic community involvement, and participating in supportive professional peer networks that offer ongoing reflection, study, and support. By providing such content and skill practice, and ensuring that instruction and mentoring are provided by faculty who are experienced in transformative leadership, leader candidates can be better prepared for the realities of this challenging work, increasing the likelihood that they will act transformatively upon assuming school leadership roles.
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Transformation in Higher Education in South Africa Toward the Decolonization of South African Universities
Ruksana Osman and Felix Maringe
Higher education in South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, is under pressure to reinvent and transform itself. Traditionally it has enjoyed the financial support of the government and has also enjoyed an autonomous existence. In South Africa, since the demise of apartheid, the education policy terrain has shifted remarkably fast and policies have required that universities respond to a national plan for higher education that commits universities to become cost- effective, massified institutions opening access to all who were historically excluded due to apartheid’s policies of educational exclusion.
Universities in the higher education sector as a whole are required to generate strategies that broaden access routes for disadvantaged groups and at the same time consider curriculum strategies that ensure success and inclusivity to such groups after access. In addition to these daunting challenges, the higher education sector has experienced a decrease in government funding and an increase in government control. Student-led protest around the cost of higher education has also introduced a new kind of pressure point on universities.
These shifts are in sharp contrast to the more elite traditional model of higher education in South Africa, which has been mostly residential institutions focusing on full-time study, with lectures, seminars, and laboratory demonstrations as the dominant forms of pedagogy. This model is also based on sets of internal rules designed to support staff to spearhead the knowledge-production processes. They function best under stable environments and tend to meander and falter when the foundations for stability are threatened.
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Transforming Special Education With an Inclusive, Rights-Based Approach
JoDell Heroux and Susan Peters
Can inclusion and special education achieve education for all? The answer: It depends. What has been called “special education” began its rounds in schools as early as the late 19th century. Inclusive education first appeared in policy documents and mission statements nearly a century later, most notably and possibly most influentially in UNESCO documents and goals of Education For All, beginning in 2002. Both vary extensively in terms of approaches to instruction, service location, vocational background and training for teachers and support personnel, and in terms of who gets included and who gets excluded, to name a few variables. The views of both also often vary by roles; for example, parents, teachers, administrators, government officials. Both also evince major differences depending on the cultural contexts, economic resources, and historical traditions and views regarding education writ large. Exploring these variations and conditions provides insights for addressing the difficulties that face collaboration or merger of special education and inclusive education in order to achieve education for all.
After these difficulties have been acknowledged, an essential starting point for change in the direction of education for all entails finding common ground between special education and inclusive education in terms of purposes and end-goals. A human rights approach to common ground, purposes, and end goals provides an essential framework.
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Trans Gender/Queer Youth
Alandis A. Johnson
Trans and gender/queer youth pose some interesting scenarios for education in both secondary and postsecondary realms. Increasing identifications outside of binaries among students, faculty, and staff members who identify as transgender, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary have pushed schools to alter the way these individuals are recognized within these systems. These changes involve deconstructing binaries and the related exclusionary processes and policies. Transgender and gender-expansive youth are challenging the ways in which gender is built into schools, highlighting underlying binaries and structural oppression in all levels of education. Key issues and debates regarding transgender inclusion in educational spheres, such as Title IX, visibility, and knowledge of transgender issues, routes to inclusion, and the fallacy of “best practice.” Generational and cultural differences related to gender recognition and identification will continue to shape educational environments and beyond for years to come.
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Forgotten but Crucial Aspects of Transition Planning for Inclusion
Iva Strnadová
Transition planning can increase positive post-school outcomes and inclusion for students with intellectual disabilities. Kohler’s Taxonomy for Transition Programming 2.0 is a useful tool for all stakeholders engaged in transition planning for this population. Grounded in research, the Taxonomy highlights five key practices: (a) student-focused planning; (b) student development; (c) interagency collaboration; (d) family involvement; and (e) program structures and attributes. Student-focused planning, and especially the student’s active involvement in transition planning, tend to be forgotten when it comes to students with intellectual disabilities.
While transition planning is oriented toward positive post-school outcomes in areas such as employment, independent living, and education, there are still two areas that remain largely ignored for students with intellectual disabilities—self-advocacy and sexuality education. Teachers, parents, and other relevant stakeholders need to provide more opportunities for development of self-advocacy skills, and for sexuality education. Kohler’s Taxonomy for Transition Programming 2.0 can serve as a useful tool when planning on how to integrate these two areas into transition-focused education.
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Transitions, Justice, and Equity in Education in Finland
Kristiina Brunila, Elina Ikävalko, Tuuli Kurki, Ameera Masoud, Katariina Mertanen, Anna Mikkola, and Kalle Mäkelä
The ethos of vulnerability plays a central role in shaping cross-sectoral youth transition policies and their implementations. Despite good intentions, the ethos of vulnerability emphasizes personal accountability and stigmatization. This is the situation in Finland, where young people tend to be recognized through the prism of inherent vulnerability, with a parallel notion of the self that is damaged and fragile. This “turn inward” to the self does not necessarily help to see problems as societal but as individual, which may perpetuate systematic inequalities.
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Translanguaging and EFL Teaching
Zhongfeng Tian and Wei Li
Translanguaging is the capacity multilingual language users have to draw on different linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, and modal resources to make meaning and make sense, transcending the boundaries between named languages and between language and other meaning- and sense-making resources. The 21st century is a postmultilingualism era that is no longer about the harmonious parallel existence of multiple languages but about the infiltration, transgression, and subversion of boundaries that are artificially and ideologically set between languages, races, and nations. No single nation or community can claim sole ownership, authority, and responsibility for any particular language, including English, and boundaries between named languages, between languages and other communicative means, and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken, or adjusted. Translanguaging captures such changing dynamics and highlights the language user’s agency in exploiting their communicative repertoire holistically and in an integrated and coordinated way. When applied to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning, translanguaging demands that not just the first language but the learner’s repertoire be visible and audible in the classroom, aiming to foster a more inclusive, equitable learning environment, especially for minoritized language speakers. Translanguaging as a pedagogical approach has been shown to deepen students’ understanding of certain content and topics, facilitate the learners’ participation and knowledge coconstruction with one another, develop their English language and literacy skills, and enhance their multilingual and multicultural awareness.
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Translanguaging in Educating Teachers of Language-Minoritized Students
Carla España, Luz Yadira Herrera, and Ofelia García
Teacher education programs to prepare those who teach language-minoritized students many times continue to uphold modernist conceptions of language and bilingualism. Translanguaging disrupts the logic that nation-states have constructed around named languages, focusing instead on the language practices of people. Translanguaging theory is changing perceptions of bilingualism and multilingualism as well as the design of language education programs for language-minoritized students. And yet, teachers of language-minoritized students are educated in programs that hold on to traditional views of language, bilingualism, and language education. In the best cases, these teachers are prepared in specialized teacher education programs that credential teachers of a second language or bilingual teachers. In the worst cases, these teachers get no specialized preparation on bilingualism at all. But whether teachers are prepared as “general education” teachers, teachers of a “second language,” or “bilingual” teachers, programs to educate them most often hold on to traditional views about language and bilingualism; they then impart those views to future teachers who design instruction accordingly.
Teacher education programs need to help teacher candidates understand their own language practices and see themselves as translanguaging beings. Teacher candidates also need to understand how the students’ translanguaging is a way of making knowledge and how to design lessons that leverage the translanguaging of students and communities to democratize schooling. It is imperative that teacher preparation programs implement a new theory of bilingualism, one that rejects the compartmentalization of languages and the stigmatization of the language practices of language-minoritized students. Providing teacher candidates with the tools to reflect on their experiences and on how raciolinguistic ideologies cut across institutions can help them not only understand but also find ways not to internalize oppressive notions of self, language practices, and teaching.
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Trauma-Informed Practice in Early Childhood Education
Elspeth Stephenson
Early traumatic experiences can have a profound impact on the developing brain causing a catastrophic effect on a child’s growth and development, the result of which can be lifelong. Early childhood educators have a critical role to play in the lives of children who have trauma histories. These educators are well positioned to undertake this work because early childhood philosophy and pedagogy align with the needs of a child who has experienced early adversity. Beliefs about the role of relationships, attachment, and felt safety are central to this work. To be effective, however, educators need to be trauma informed in their practice. Understanding how adverse experiences cause adaptation to the developing brain and impede development is a good starting place to becoming trauma informed, but translating this understanding into practice is key to success.
While there are strategies that can support educators to work effectively with children with trauma histories, strategies alone will not suffice. They cannot simply be applied to any situation. If educators apply strategies without due thought and consideration in relation to the child’s needs and context, at best they may be ineffective and at worst, there is potential to retraumatize the child. All educators and children are unique individuals and therefore bring different attributes to each situation. Educators who understand themselves and their attributes can use this knowledge, along with their understanding of context and the impact of trauma, to make informed decisions about their practice. While this reflective process can sound arduous, educators can quickly become skilled as they hone their craft and see changes to their practice bring successful outcomes for children. In this way, early childhood educators have the capacity to change developmental trajectories for children and make a difference that will be lifelong.
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Trends and Developments in Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific Region
John N. Hawkins
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
The demographic, historical, cultural, and political-economic complexity of the vast Asia Pacific Region poses a great challenge to making sense of the region’s higher education (HE) trends. Yet, several of these trends are indeed enduring and comparable. The interplay of these trends and developments continually shape the architecture of higher education in the region. A sampling of these trends focuses on one of the basic frames of higher education, namely that of increasing access, equity, and capacity. This, in turn, has led to the tension between massification on the one hand, and issues of quality assurance on the other. While national development is often the primary goal of tertiary education, regionalism has increasingly challenged these more parochial concerns. Within the region, student and faculty mobility, migration, and internationalization have emerged with greater force within the sometimes confusing context of globalization. At the upper end of the HE spectrum, the pressure of seeking to achieve excellence in research and innovation has resulted in another predicament, leading to what might be called an accelerated academy. These forces and factors, among others, are influencing the pathway of HE in the Asia Pacific region as we move into the 21st century.
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Trust in Education
Megan Tschannen-Moran
There is a growing awareness of the crucial role that trust plays in every aspect of a school’s functioning and especially to student outcomes. To trust another person or group is to be at ease, without anxiety or worry, in a situation of interdependence in which valued outcomes depend upon the participation and contribution of others. The trustor can rest assured that their expectations will be fulfilled based on confidence in the other party’s benevolence, honesty, openness, reliability, and competence. As citizens across the globe have become increasingly distrustful of their institutions and leaders, the trend away from trust creates a special challenge for schools because trust is so fundamental to their core mission of educating students. The philosopher Annette Baier observed that we tend to notice trust as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted. These days, it seems evident that trust in our society as a whole has indeed been disrupted and is in scarce supply. As contemporary society has grown more complex, as changing economic realities, changing demographics, and changing expectations in society have made life less predictable, we are beginning to notice trust much more. There are a number of things that make cultivating and maintaining trust in schools challenging. These include the effects of social media, and other new forms of information and the propensity for the news of potential threats to one’s well-being, as well as the well-being of one’s children and community to spread farther and faster than positive news.
Trust matters in schools and in our world because we cannot single-handedly either create or sustain many of the things we most cherish. Parents send their children to schools, trusting that they will be safe from harm, as well as guided and taught in keeping with our highest hopes for them. Schools are also invested with a significant share of a community’s collective resources in the form of tax dollars, school buildings, and local employment opportunities. In addition, schools are charged with keeping and promoting a society’s shared values and ideals. They foster and protect the collective ideals of respect, tolerance, and democracy, as well as the vision of equity of opportunity. Indeed, the future of a society rests with the quality of its schools. It is evident, then, why trust has become such a pressing issue for schools in these challenging and turbulent times.
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University Governance and Management in Southeast Asia
Molly N.N. Lee and Chang Da Wan
In the past two decades, nearly all the countries in Southeast Asia have undertaken higher education reforms such as the massification, marketization, diversification, bureaucratization, and internationalization of higher education. All these reforms are aimed at widening access to higher education and diversifying its funding sources, as well as improving the quality, efficiency, and productivity of the higher education sector. Under such circumstances, much research has been done on how the governance and management of universities have changed over the years in these countries.
The governance of universities focuses on the role of the state in providing, regulating, supervising, and steering the development of higher education in the country. The relationship between universities and the state revolves around the issues of autonomy and accountability. An emerging regional trend in the reforms of university governance is an increase in institutional autonomy in return for more public accountability. Several countries have shifted from a state-control model to a state-supervising model and from public provision of higher education to the privatization of higher education, the corporatization of public universities, and the establishment of autonomous universities. To ensure public accountability, most universities are subjected to both internal and external quality assurance.
With the massification of higher education, universities usually enroll large numbers of students and become more complex organizations. In the context of governmental budget cuts, many universities are under great pressure to do more with less, to find ways to be less wasteful, and to develop better management in order to replace the missing resources. Various universities have adopted new public management techniques and a result-based management approach to improve efficiency and effectiveness. A central feature of new managerialism is “performativity” in the management of academic labor and the pressure for “academic capitalism.”
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University Social Responsibility
Montserrat Vargas Vergara
University social responsibility is an approach that goes beyond understanding the university as a transmitter of content and the training of future professionals. As an institution, it has a social mission: to positively transform and promote the social, economic and environmental development. It draws on the morality, ethics and responsibility of the entire university community to promote a culture and awareness of evaluation and self-assessment. It is a holistic vision that helps to design structures and governance, training and transfer plans, which enable and allow the development and active participation of all members of the society towards which it is projected.
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Urban Charter Schools
Manya Whitaker
Urban charter schools are public schools located in major metropolitan areas with high population densities. The majority of urban charter school students identify as Black or Latinx and often live in under-resourced communities. Urban charter schools are touted as high-quality educational options in the school choice market, yet debates about the merits of charter schools versus traditional public schools yield mixed results that substantiate arguments on both sides of the political aisle.
However, even high-performing urban charter schools have a bad reputation as mechanisms of school segregation and cogs in the school-to-prison pipeline. Higher than average test scores and graduation and college enrollment rates do little to mollify those who complain about severe discipline, racial segregation, unqualified teachers, teacher attrition, rigid scheduling, and a narrow curriculum. Urban charter schools’ emphasis on standardized testing and college preparation may overlook the culturally relevant educational experiences that low-income, racially diverse students need to compete with their wealthier, White peers.
As such, education reformers have offered a myriad of suggestions to improve urban charter schools. Most prominently is the need to racially and economically desegregate urban charter schools to enhance the social and material resources that supplement students’ learning. This includes increasing teacher diversity, which research demonstrates minimizes the frequency of suspensions and expulsions of racial minority students. Urban charter school teachers should also be knowledgeable about the sociocultural landscape of the community in which their school exists so that they understand how students’ out of school lives affect their learning processes. Finally, curricular revisions are necessary to support students’ post-high school goals beyond college enrollment. Enacting such reforms would facilitate equitable, rather than equal, learning opportunities that may help narrow racial and economic achievement gaps in the United States.
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Urban Inequalities in Swedish Schools
Nihad Bunar
Segregation, aspects of school choice policy, and symbolic representations are principal structural traits, although not the only ones, that generate and sustain the system of differences and urban inequalities in Swedish schools. Pertinent to all three traits are objectively and symbolically constructed boundaries between places, institutions, and groups. Segregation in an urban context means not just a physical separation of groups with unequal access to material resources and the means of their acquisition (education, network), but also a symbolic collapse of a society into place-making dichotomies: we and them, Swedes and immigrants, suburbs and inner-cities. Assets ostensibly appreciated in the school market, such as a good school and a positive school culture, express the arbitrary nature of their symbolic construction. What is recognized as a good school is equally a matter of statistical figures proving its competitiveness and the assumed qualities of its student composition.
Major policy interventions for reducing urban inequalities in schools could be divided into two segments: (a) the reinforcement-oriented policy provides additional support to schools and students in structurally disadvantaged areas, for example, more school personnel, higher salaries for teachers, more teachers in Swedish as a second language; (b) the close down and disperse-oriented policy identifies the very existence of schools with persistently low results in urban contexts as an inequality generating factor. Consequently, in the name of integration and reducing inequalities, those schools are increasingly being closed down and their students dispersed elsewhere. Neither policy has proven its capacity to unwaveringly address urban inequalities in Swedish schools.
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Urban School Reform in the United States
Tiffanie Lewis-Durham and Craig Peck
In the United States, policymakers have exhibited a resilient confidence in the idea that reforming urban schools is the essential key to improving the life chances of children, especially Black and Latino youth. Since the mid-1960s in particular, this resonant belief, as articulated in different forms by politicians, interest groups, local communities, and the broader public, has served as motivational impetus for small- and large-scale school change efforts. Despite such apparent unanimity regarding the importance of city schools, disputes have emerged over the proper structural and systemic alterations necessary to improve education. Often at issue has been the notion of just who should and will control change efforts. Moreover, vexing tensions have also characterized the enacted reform initiatives. For instance, urban school policies created by distant, delocalized outsiders have routinely engendered unanticipated local effects and fierce community resistance. In addition, particular urban school reforms have manifested simultaneously as a means for encouraging social justice for marginalized youth and as mechanisms for generating financial returns for educational vendors. Regardless of such tensions, faith in urban school reform has persisted, thanks to exemplary city schools and programs that have helped students thrive academically. For many reformers, such success stories demonstrate that viable routes toward enabling academic achievement for more children living in urban areas do indeed exist.
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Values-Based Leadership and the Quest for Inclusive Organizational Practices
Heather Rintoul and Anthony H. Normore
Values-based leadership is, at its core, decisional leadership. Traditionally, educational leadership has tended to fall into a range of rationality dealing with consequences and consensus. This “do things right” approach has come under intense scrutiny by decision makers searching for more ethically justifiable responses through a new vision of education and schooling, a “do the right thing” style of decision making. Decisions based in principle—that is, morals and ethics—are commonly deemed as being authentic, fulfilling, and more justifiable than decisions based on rationality and preference. Embedded in this new moral urgency lies an inherent tension in that “to do the right thing” routinely begs the question “the right thing for whom?” Differences have arisen in terms of what values-based leadership and inclusion means—whose values, who is included, how to address leadership for inclusive practices, thus rendering conceptualization and implementation of inclusive practice qualitatively different according to context. The achievement of all students must be viewed both as an economic and values-oriented imperative consistent with inclusive practices. The term, inclusion is socially constructed and can carry with it stigmatizing and exclusionary effects that ultimately result in perpetuating oppressive forces on already marginalized individuals.
Values-based leadership has an emphasis on school settings that are welcoming and affirming to all students, especially those most at risk for failure. Its underlying beliefs and assumptions guide practices and policies of inclusive practices and sound moral decisions. Moral decisions are made, not in isolation, but rather through a journey of interaction and association with others. Unfortunately, this interpersonal journey is often fraught with anxiety because everyone’s experience is sourced in a different worldview. Unravelling the intricacies of resolution possibilities has become increasingly complex because often there may be several equally appropriate responses to any dilemma; therefore, the decisional challenge becomes how to adjudicate between and among possibilities. Values-based leadership for inclusive practices concerns various marginalized groups including English-language learners, those who experience gender discrimination, those who are in the foster care system, and those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. The broader conceptualization of inclusive schools adds to extant discourses about students with exceptional needs and provides effective strategies that school leaders operating from a social justice framework can implement to create more inclusive school environments for all students.
