Critical policy analysis has emerged as a prominent tradition of research in the field of education. Beginning in the 1980s in response to the failings of more traditional forms of policy analysis, this work typically examines the kinds of discourses and power relations that may be at play through the construction and function of policy. It is critical in orientation and interested in the social, cultural, and political context of policy as well as how analyzing policy may reveal opportunities for social change and reform. In contrast to traditional approaches which take policy problems as given, research in this tradition interrogates how discourse, language, and text set the context for how policy problems and solutions are conceptualized and how and why particular issues come to be framed as objects of concern. Critical policy analysis encompasses a range of different methodological approaches rather than a single method, with the approach taken dependent on the nature of the policy under analysis, the site of its production, the purpose of the research, and the positionality of the researcher. Four particularly prominent and generative approaches to critical policy analysis in educational research include (a) analysis of how policy is formed and operates across local and global contexts; (b) the What’s the Problem Represented to Be? approach; (c) research on networks and mobilities; and (d) research drawing on Indigenous Critical Discourse Analysis. Each of these approaches offers insights for understanding problems of inequality and power in education and their origins and reproduction within and in relation to policy.
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Critical Policy Analysis in Education
Kate O'Connor and Sophie Rudolph
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Career Change Teachers: Caveat and Opportunities in Workforce Planning for Schools
Babak Dadvand, Merryn Dawborn-Gundlach, Jan van Driel, and Chris Speldewinde
Teacher shortage has emerged as a significant policy concern in post-pandemic times, prompting governments to attract more individuals into the teaching profession, including those with career experiences outside schools and the education sector. The term “career change teachers” refers to those who enter teaching often later in life after spending some time in other professions. Career change teachers have qualities that make them particularly attractive candidates for teaching, including a strong sense of purpose and a commitment to care, up-to-date content knowledge, practical skills that can make learning more engaging and meaningful for students, and a broad set of organizational skills from their previous career or careers. Various incentives from governments throughout the world and a growing number of alternative pathways into teaching that combine intensive studies with teaching duties have offered more flexibility for individuals to undertake their Initial Teacher Education (ITE) mid-career. However, front-focused policy solutions that prioritize teacher recruitment over teacher retention tend not to address the revolving door of admission and attrition. Loss of investment occurs when new teachers, including career changers, leave the profession prematurely because they are not adequately supported during their transition into study and teaching. A retention-focused workforce planning strategy is needed, one that addresses the structural and education system-level contributors to high teacher turnover. Such a strategy will have implications for the types of support provided to career change teachers in their transition into ITE and teaching.
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The Destructive Long-Term Impact of Disasters on Black and Brown Schooling Communities in the United States
Cassandra R. Davis
Recent research shows that hurricanes, tropical storms, and flooding are likely to increase in quantity and intensity. Yet, despite the frequency of these hazards, there is little work that documents the relationship between disasters, low-income communities of color, and schooling. There is a dearth of literature documenting how these communities in high-impacted areas are affected, recover, and remain resilient following a storm.
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Mestiza Methodology as a Hybrid Research Design
Amanda Jo Cordova
Chicana feminists such as Maylei Blackwell, Cherrie Moraga, and Anna Nieto-Gómez of the 1960s Chicano Movement called for a gendered critique of racial activism mired in the stultification of Chicana leadership, ultimately galvanizing epistemology and theory grounded in a Chicana way of knowing. In particular, the introduction of a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in the 1990s to the field of education centered the reconciliation and healing of education, knowledge, and knowledge holders dehumanized by the exclusionary logics of colonialism pervasive in educational spaces. Consequently, crafting research methodologies of a Chicana hybrid nature, both locating and healing the fractured embodiment of knowledge educational actors draw upon, is critical to the groundwork of a more socially just educational system. Focused on the hybridity or the duality of knowing and the damage created by the colonial separation of such knowledge from knowledge holders, methodologies must be curated to locate and fuse back together what was torn apart. Mestiza Methodology was developed to locate the liminal space in which Chicanas collectively recount experiences leading to the separation of who they are and what they know in the academic arena as a means to recover, reclaim, and reconcile oneself to the pursuit of an education decolonized.
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Coloniality, Student Mobilizations, and Higher Education
Leigh Patel
Higher education in many spaces worldwide has been a contested space and therefore marked by student protests against colonialism and its articulations of oppression since formal education was established. In times of social movements and change, protest in the streets also spread to college campuses, sometimes in global waves. The premiere institutions in the United States, the Ivy League, were built almost exclusively using enslaved labor. Both private and public colleges in Canada and the United States and other settler colonies occupy Indigenous lands, severing land from relation to First Peoples through ongoing genocide and erasure. Colonization and totalitarianism have prompted student protests in many regions of the world and at various times in history. Because higher education is itself is a contested space in various nation-states, long-historied traditions of student mobilizations have agitated higher education’s practices borne of occupation, extraction, and exclusivity. Changes in admissions policies, faculty hiring and retention, government support, and curriculum have all been impacted by student mobilizations. These changes have been subject to being tampered down by the sheer bureaucratic weight in higher education, but they have also made important changes in access to the knowledge systems that are taught in college classrooms and the impacts that graduates make beyond their college years. Dating back to the 1600s, student protest and mobilizations have been informed by internal political education that has shaped the design of public pedagogies through the form of protests. In lyrical fashion, student mobilizations, often formed in opposition to the university, have much to teach about collective struggles for freedom that are intertwined with learning.
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Social Sciences Education in New Zealand Schools
Genaro Oliveira and Bronwyn Wood
Prior to colonization, tangata whenua (people of the land) in Aotearoa (New Zealand) developed robust knowledge traditions. Formal social sciences education in New Zealand began with the schooling system introduced by European settlers in the late 19th century. It has been subject to recurrent review and reform since its foundation. The Education Act of 1877 led to the first formal national curriculum that introduced geography and history teaching in primary schools. During the first half of the 20th century, social sciences education in New Zealand saw a greater emphasis on citizenship education due to increasing migration and geopolitical changes resulting from the two world wars. Enduring and contentious curricular changes would follow the recommendations of the Thomas Report (1944), which introduced social studies in secondary schools as a new integrated school subject to promote learning across the social sciences.
Since the 1990s, the social sciences have been named as one of New Zealand’s eight curriculum learning areas. Social studies (junior social sciences) remain as a core integrated subject taught compulsorily from years 1 to 10 (primary, intermediate, and junior secondary years), while a suite of discrete social sciences disciplines is optional for students at senior secondary levels (years 11–13). For almost 80 years, social sciences curricula have been the primary vehicle for citizenship education. The most recent curricular reforms have emphasized the importance of Mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) to promote culturally-responsive social sciences learning in commitment to Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural foundations.
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Governance in Higher Education
Jung C. Shin and Glen A. Jones
Governance has become a commonly used and studied concept within the scholarship of higher education, in large part because the term is defined broadly to include the relationships between institutions and the state, the development of system-level policies and the influence of external stakeholders, as well as institutional decision-making arrangements and structures. The concept is therefore understood as involving both multiple levels of power and authority and multiple agents and actors. It has increasingly been used as an umbrella concept in the analysis of major policy changes and reforms that are central to the study of higher education, including funding, quality assurance, and accountability. Neoliberalism and the adoption of New Public Management have transformed the governance structures and arrangements within many systems by valorizing the role of markets, strengthening the role of institutional managers as the state-centered systems decentralize elements of authority, focusing attention on institutional performance measures, and linking performance to state funding mechanisms. Government coordination of higher education has become increasing complex given the development of multiple institutional types (institutional diversity) and the positioning of higher education as a core component of national research and innovation systems. In many systems, coordination now includes multiple agencies. Institution-level governance has also been transformed in many jurisdictions with structural arrangements that reinforce the importance of central management operating under the oversight of a corporate board representing external interests and stakeholders. There has been a general decline in the influence and authority associated with traditional collegial decision processes. Research has highlighted challenges related to the understanding of governance effectiveness and the relationship between governance reform and institutional performance. There has also been an increasing interest in comparative international scholarship to identify common trends, although there is also an increasing recognition of how governance has been influenced by differences in the history, traditions, and sociopolitical contexts of national systems. A multitude of issues are deserving of greater attention within governance scholarship, including the influence of major political shifts within national governments, international rankings, and the quest for the improvement of institutional performance on system- and institution-level governance.
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Institutional Dis/Continuities in Higher Education Changes During the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods in Kazakhstan
Gulzhan Azimbayeva
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) higher education system has undergone radical change since the perestroika period—the Gorbachev period (1985–1991). Perestroika means restructuring in Russian. In this period, the institutional context of higher education was fundamentally transformed by the major upheavals of the political and socioeconomic institutions of the USSR. The changes in the USSR higher education had a major impact on the higher education of Kazakhstan—a former Republic of the USSR. Thus, to understand the changes in higher education in Kazakhstan, it is important to locate them in the stages of the collapse of the USSR. It could be argued that the “institutional dis/continuities” theory would allow a careful examination of the educational changes in the postsocialist context. The “institutional dis/continuities” of the perestroika period draw on path-dependency and critical juncture concepts within historical institutionalism theory. Perestroika period can be seen as a critical juncture in the historical development of higher education. Also, the policy choices which were made during the perestroika period could establish further path-dependencies in policy-making.
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Experiences of Gender and Sexual Minority Students and Teachers in Catholic Schools
Tonya D. Callaghan and Jamie L. Anderson
Caught between the religious edicts of the Vatican and the secular laws of the state, Catholic schools around the world respond to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) students and teachers in contradictory and inconsistent ways. The oppression of nonheterosexuals in Catholic schools is incongruous in democratic nations such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, which value and protect the individual rights of equality, freedom, and justice. In Canada, Britain, and some Australian states, governments have even offered apologies for historical acts of discrimination against LGBTI people, such as the criminally convicted and those purged from public service and the military for being nonheterosexual. Despite these governmental apologies and other progressive acts of legislation related to student-led gender and sexual orientation alliances and the banning of conversion therapy, Catholic schools still exist in these nations and continue to receive government funding while violating the basic human rights of LGBTI students and staff members. The intolerance toward gender and sexual minority groups could be due to the church’s decree to “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which is untenable for many Catholic students and teachers. As they struggle with how to respond to LGBTI people in their schools, Catholic education leaders tend to abandon the tradition of Catholic teaching involving justice for the weakest and turn instead for guidance to the formidable canonical law on the topic of homosexuality and gender identity. In so doing, they also disregard secular human rights legislation in their jurisdictions. Many people saw great hope in Pope Francis’s welcoming tone toward LGBTI people in 2013, but since then he has made unambiguously anti-LGBTI statements. If this kind of religiously inspired heterosexism in Catholic schools is to be challenged and changed, then it is important to examine how it operates and how widespread it is on a global scale.
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Marginalizing Palestinians in Historic Palestine (Israel) Through Education
Ilham Nasser and Mohammed Abu-Nimer
The article is an analysis of the Palestinian Arab education system, in particular the curriculum, and ways it was dealt with after the Nakba (Catastrophe) and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The relevant Israeli government policies that impacted the Palestinian minority who remained in historic Palestine are introduced. The authors delve into methods in which the Israeli state managed, and is still managing, the education of this national minority within a Zionist ideological framework embedded with Jewish religious and national values and themes. We describe the mechanisms through which Israel maintains a tight grip on the Palestinian minority through a security management apparatus employed in the education system to monitor teachers’ employment and staffing of those who are friendly and submissive to the policies of the government. Evidence for the continuous attempts to erase the Palestinian national and cultural identity through the curriculum, and textbooks is provided in content such as history, civics, and Arabic language. The authors address the initiatives taken by the Palestinian minority allies to react, resist, and organize. These include efforts to claim back the education space, as in the case of parents offering alternative schooling and nongovernmental entities and initiatives with a purpose of moving the community into a Palestinian self-steering education system. Recommendations on steps and initiatives to elevate the educational experiences and academic attainment of the next generations of Palestinian youth are provided, without denying them their right to learn their national and cultural heritage.
