This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
In The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (2008), Van Jones envisions the possibility of a green economy that addresses not only the current environmental crises but also the promise of the green economy to lift out of poverty those low-income communities and communities of color that have been so devastated by industrial capitalism. While Van Jones, an advocate of natural capitalism and the first African American author of an environmental best seller, recognizes the role of green job training programs in the preparation of workers for green construction, alternative energy (e.g., solar, wind, geothermal energy installation), and sustainable agriculture and food systems, he does not address the curriculum and instruction appropriate for such job training programs. In this article, an overview is provided of the historical roots for critical Vocational-Technical Education and Training (VTET) and of how VTET is situated in the current discourse of the green economy. In doing so, it is posited that a critical vocational-technical education provides the promise of helping to address not only the environmental and socio-economic problems of the day, but also the educational problems associated with neoliberal policies and practices.
Article
Critical Vocational-Technical Education and Training: Learning for Economy, Equity, and Environment
James Gregson
Article
Epistemology and Teacher Education
Matthew Smith
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
For teachers to effectively engage in given pedagogical practices, they need to have beliefs that support these approaches to teaching. These are not philosophical beliefs per se; rather, they are the individual understandings that teachers hold about the nature of knowledge and knowing, which underpin and guide their actions and which are referred to as personal epistemologies. A wide range of paradigms for understanding and studying personal epistemologies is evident in the research literature in this field, but these different perspective and approaches—while varied in outlook and conclusion—point to how important it is that initial teacher education courses allow for the development of sophisticated personal epistemologies through explicit teaching that enables students to think ontologically and epistemologically, and that teacher educators initiate and sustain reflective and discursive practices throughout their courses to promote the best possible outcomes for the children that student teachers will go on to teach in their subsequent careers.
Article
Pacific Research Methodologies
Sereana Naepi
Pacific research methodologies refer to Indigenous research that is conducted from the ontological and epistemological standpoint of Pacific peoples. Pacific research methodologies are an act of decolonial resistance that recognizes the legitimacy of Pacific ontologies and epistemologies, enabling research that is truly reflective of Pacific peoples. They are a response to colonial research patterns that have framed and stereotyped Pacific peoples in problematic ways. Pacific research methodologies are a resurgence practice that empowers Pacific people to define and critique the Pacific from a Pacific viewpoint. They include but are not limited to vanua, kakala, talanoa, ula, and fa’afaletui. They can be regionally specific, such as the vanua or kakala, and they can also be pan-Pacific and refer to shared values, such as respect, reciprocity, communal relationships, collective responsibility, gerontocracy, humility, love and charity, service, and spirituality. Pacific duality means that Pacific research methodologies can be both pan-Pacific and regional. Pacific research methodologies continue to be developed as more Pacific people enter the research space.
Article
Transnational Curriculum Formation and Change
Noel Gough
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
Although much curriculum work continues to take place within national borders (often informed by governmental policies and priorities), accelerating processes of economic and cultural globalization, together with an increase in various types of cross-border movements of people, resources, ideas, and images, are blurring nation-state boundaries and destabilizing national authority in curriculum decision-making.
Typically, transnational work is understood as acting across national borders with a view to optimizing the interrelationships between local, national, regional, and global spheres of curriculum formation and change. This is distinguished from international collaboration (actions taken by conventional nation-states) and supranational work, which includes initiatives and interventions by broader global institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, UNESCO, OECD, and so on. The involvement of supranational institutions such as the World Bank and IMF has tended to support curriculum policies derived from neoliberal economic perspectives, which focus on the measurable production of human capital. Transnational curriculum work encourages critical examination of the impact of globalization in relation to national and international debates on such matters as human rights; social justice; democratization; national, ethnic, and religious identities; issues of gender and racial justice; the concerns of indigenous peoples; and poverty and social exclusion. Transnational curriculum work is also a response to the discourses of standardization and homogenization of curriculum thinking that characterize modern nation-states.
Article
World-Systems Theorizing
Thomas Griffiths
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
World-systems theorizing has its roots in dependency theorizing and the critique of modernization theory, rejecting its claimed linear process of economic development for all nation-states. A founding premise of this work, established well before the advent of globalization studies, has been the need to take the world-system as the primary unit of analysis for understanding social reality and social change. As an approach for understanding systems of mass education, world-systems theorizing has taken on two broad trajectories. One of these, world-culture theory or neo-institutional analysis, has centered on identifying examples of global convergence at the level of education policy, explaining these in terms of a world culture of education that has spread across nation-states through their participation in international agencies and organizations. An alternative approach, world-systems analysis, takes the historical development and operation of the capitalist world-economy, across core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones of the world-economy, as the starting point for understanding the nature and function of mass education systems. This work includes the particular construction of knowledge structures and subject disciplines, and their function within the operation of the capitalist world-system. Where world-culture theory downplays the causal power of economic structures, world-systems analysis highlights the interaction between economics and an accompanying world cultural framework under historical capitalism, whose core features can account for the nature and purpose of education. Educational applications of contemporary world-systems analysis extend to work within the broader field of critical education to transform society. Specifically, these applications examine the potential for systems of mass education to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to understand existing social reality, to imagine more equal, just, democratic, and peaceful, alternative world-systems, and to take action toward their realization.
