61-70 of 1,211 Results

Article

Examining Challenges and Possibilities in the Objective of a Decolonized Education  

Marlon Lee Moncrieffe

This article examines challenges and possibilities in the objective of a decolonized education. Beginning with key referents to the term decolonized education, this article then provides a unique presentation of decolonizing the education of Eurocentric knowledge created through colonialism, empire, and racism. This process is shown as enacted through a decolonial consciousness framed by a historical, social, cultural, intellectual, emotional, and political disposition which takes action to reverse colonial knowledge. The article applies this decolonial consciousness in a review and analysis of the intergenerational educational experiences of migrant 20th-century African Caribbean people across the United Kingdom, and the ethnogenesis of their Black British children in the face of a White British-centric school system of epistemic inequality. The article provides a critical review on the challenges and possibilities in advocating for decolonized education for the greater inclusion of Black British experiences against national curriculum policy discourses given by U.K. government over the last few decades. The critical focal point of the article is on the aims and contents of the primary school history curriculum and the uncritical teaching and learning perspectives in the delivery of this curriculum. Challenges to decolonizing education and curriculum teaching and learning are presented, discussed, and analyzed through U.K. conservative/liberal democrat coalition government curriculum reforms of 2013 centered on restoring education and curriculum teaching and learning through an ethnic nationalist monocultural version of British national identity (whiteness) at the expense of multiculturalism (cultural diversity). This curriculum hierarchy of whiteness is contrasted by presentation and analysis of evidence-based research that decenters curriculum whiteness. Following this discussion is a review and analysis of debates and discussions in the U.K. Parliament held in 2020, forced by heightened public appeals for a decolonized curriculum. Finally, this article concludes by reviewing examples of continued professional development in teacher education and research that seeks to advance and extend decolonial praxis.

Article

Shadow Education as Sociological Field  

Karen Dooley

Research on curriculum and shadow education (also known as private or supplementary tutoring) is increasing and diversifying. Shadow education can be understood as out-of-school formal education. Although separate from the school program, it is directed toward that program. Shadow education often targets aspects of the curriculum of mass schooling that are most tightly controlled by the state through curricular prescription and high-stakes assessment. In terms of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, that control can be understood as the “institutionalization” of curriculum in an educational “field.” Internationally, shadow education suppliers variously prepare students for assessments that are conducted in school, are authorized by the state to award the institutionalized cultural capital of grades, or are otherwise involved in partnerships with schools. Since the 1990s, policy-oriented researchers (many influenced by the research synthesis work of Mark Bray in forums of global educational governance) have addressed impacts of shadow education on curricula. They have identified risks to the curricular work of state, bureaucracy, and school, highlighting impacts on the efficacy of systemic equity measures designed to extend the benefits of schooling to all. More recently, Young Chun Kim, Jung-Hoon Jung, and colleagues have been bringing postcolonial, feminist, and critical traditions of curriculum scholarship to the study of shadow education. Offering a critique of the Eurocentric normativities of global agenda in educational practice and research, they celebrate the use of shadow education in East Asia, and studies of the benefits of such. Neither of the two extant strands of research on shadow education and curriculum have attended to curriculum as institutionalized formal education. To rectify this, it is useful to articulate concepts about the making and remaking of the content of formal education developed by Michael Connelly, Jean Clandinin, and Water Doyle to Bourdieusian theory. This enables understanding of the curriculum-making work of instructors and students, as well as program writers and policymakers, in fields and subfields of education that involve school and shadow education organizations. Among other things, this perspective offers ways of understanding the work of shadow education in the construction of subject matter content in instructional, programmatic, and institutional domains of curriculum.

Article

Ojibwe Language Education in Minnesota and Wisconsin  

Mary Hermes

The Ojibwe language, also referred to as Anishinaabemowin, is the language of the Ojibwe people in the Great Lakes region of North America. It has many mutually intelligible dialects and variations, making it one of the largest Indigenous languages in North America. While Ojibwe is an endangered language, with most speakers in the United States over the age of 70, it is also one that is being revitalized. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Ojibwe language is very widely taught and supported in both formal and informal educational contexts. It is taught in many preschools, elementary schools, and secondary schools and in tribal colleges and universities. Outside of institutions, families and individuals have made great strides to reclaim Ojibwe as their home language. Language camps, family language gatherings, and language tables are popular and can be found throughout the year. One of the most outstanding examples of reclamation is the Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion Institute in northern Wisconsin. Waadookodaading impacts the entire area’s Ojibwe language-learning communities by showing that an immersion school can indeed produce highly proficient second-language speakers. Immersion schools, preschools, and family language camps are numerous throughout the midwestern United States and Canada, and many families now trying to use Ojibwe as their home language. However, the economic hurdle remains; that is, jobs that demand Ojibwe language as a daily useful skill are sparse. Although there are many institutions that teach Ojibwe as a subject, this teaching can sometimes only be a doorway to language appreciation rather than fluency. Despite these challenges, the resilient spirit of individuals connecting language and identity loss directly to the colonization of Ojibwe and other Indigenous people is a fierce one.

Article

Sociology of Gender and Education  

Mohammad Naeimi and Jón Ingvar Kjaran

Sociology of gender and education is an interdisciplinary subfield of inquiry in sociology that is situated in feminist sociological theories and education/pedagogy/schooling. The field investigates complex, multileveled, and unequal distributions of power in educational spaces regarding gender constructions, identities, and characteristics such as femininity, masculinity, non-normativity, and nonbinarism. More precisely, sociology of gender and education deeply inquiries how and to what extend education systems and schools, as modern institutions of society and public sectors, embody power and resources to reinforce and deploy the social order built historically around male gender privilege while maintaining women’s and other marginalized groups’ issues at the periphery. The researchers of this field, therefore, by touching upon historical, political, and sociocultural accounts, highlight and criticize the heteronormative, patriarchal, and male-centered inherence of the educational environment that (re)produces gender distinctions, gender inequality, and gender-based violence. These gender inequalities can be found in areas and aspects of education including curricula, learning material, teacher-student interaction, and school culture.

Article

Systemic Supports for Antiracist Practice in International Baccalaureate Classrooms  

Whitney M. Hegseth

When considering how to (re)build educational systems for equity, one might explore the potential of a system’s supports to facilitate changes in perceptions and pedagogy in classrooms, so that both become increasingly antiracist. A disciplinary incident in an International Baccalaureate (IB) elementary classroom in Washington, D.C., helps illustrate how the IB system’s educational infrastructure can support teachers in (re)framing and responding to problems in their classrooms. The infrastructure that may support such (re)framing includes system-level guidance around (a) outcomes, (b) instructional methods, and (c) the use of local resources. Although the IB system is not yet an antiracist system, its educational infrastructure can support a transformation in perception and pedagogy for IB teachers. This existing infrastructure, then, has the potential to help IB teachers and schools move toward increasingly antiracist practice. Exploring such a synergy between infrastructure and antiracist practice may help the IB system, and other educational systems, in their efforts to (re)design system supports to redress long-standing inequities in schools and society.

Article

1964 Freedom Schools in the United States  

Kristal Moore Clemons

The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project served thousands of children and adults in over 40 Freedom Schools created to combat voter suppression and encourage youth to engage in the Civil Rights Movement. The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project included three main initiatives: Freedom Schools and community centers, voter registration on the official state rolls, and a freedom registration plan designed to independently elect a slate of delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Voter registration was the cornerstone of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and approximately 17,000 Black residents of Mississippi attempted to register to vote in 1964, but only 1,600 of the applications were accepted by the registrars. The Freedom Schools utilized a curriculum focused on the philosophical tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, arithmetic, reading, writing, and African American history. The purpose was to supplement what children in the various counties in Mississippi were not receiving in their traditional public school setting. Marian Wright Edelman, activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), reinvigorated the contemporary Freedom Schools movement in the 1990s. The CDF’s Black Community Crusade for Children saw the CDF Freedom Schools program as an intergenerational collaboration between Civil Rights Movement–era activists and younger generations.

Article

Leadership That Bridges Arts and Social-Emotional Learning  

Marco A. Nava, Imelda L. Nava, and Jan Kirsch

Over the last 40 years, due to the combination of cuts to school and district budgets and an overemphasis on standardized testing, arts instruction has been severely cut back in public schools. Minority and low-income students are the ones most negatively impacted, as the schools they attend generally have lower standardized test scores. A study, Arts and Social-Emotional Learning (ASEL), provided training for 44 elementary school administrators serving high-needs students. Through a theoretical framework of social-emotional and brain-based learning, participating administrators received 40 hours of professional development that supported them in creating safe classroom learning environments to foster creativity, innovation, and collaboration. The research may provide insights to assist school and district leaders to provide all students with equitable access to the arts and social-emotional learning.

Article

Systems Theory Approaches to Researching Educational Organizations  

Raf Vanderstraeten

In modern society, organizations are present in almost every social domain. From the end of the 18th century onward, education has predominantly taken place in school organizations. Of course, education still takes place within families, but to send a child to school was from around that time onward no longer seen to reflect unfavorably on its family. Schools are no longer a symptom of the family’s failure. The family and the school, rather, have become perceived as different but coexisting settings within which education takes place. Moreover, the way school organizations operate has generally come to be seen as more in accord with the needs of our modern “(post)industrial” society. Educational organizations, such as schools, build upon their own decision-making histories, but the organizational order which they produce is thought to be in line with the kinds of order that dominate in other social domains. More so than families, schools are expected to prepare children for the present and the future. Using systems theory, the consequences of the organizational framing of education can be examined more closely. Developments within systems theory draw particular attention to the relation between organizations and their environment. Informed by this literature, we discuss, on the one hand, how the relation between schools and society can be adequately conceptualized, and, on the other hand, how the growing societal status of school organizations is affecting nonorganized families. Rather than focusing on the ways in which school organizations adapt to their environments, the interest in systems theory approaches is shifting to the ways in which the environments of school organizations must adapt to the expansion of these organizations. Topics that may be fruitfully tackled in future educational research are also explored.

Article

Teacher Education in India  

Sunil Behari Mohanty

In the last part of the 19th century, the consecutive model of teacher education followed in England was introduced in India by the English rulers. In the 1960s, the concurrent model-integrated teacher education program found in the United States was started by a private college at Kurukshetra, Haryana State. After 2 years, admission to this course was closed. In 1963, the National Council of Educational Research and Training launched pre-service teacher training program through this integrated B.A./B.Sc. and B.Ed. course meant for school leavers along with a 1-year B.Ed. for graduates in its four Regional Colleges of Education. The concurrent model for secondary school teacher training could not even draw the attention of the governments of the states in which these colleges are located. In spite of the efforts of the central government to bring uniformity, after-school education came under the concurrent list of the constitution of India, could not be successful. The complexity found in the school system is also reflected in the teacher education system. Central government schemes to improve quality of a certain number of state government teacher training colleges could not succeed. Transferring the task of controlling curricula for secondary school teacher training from state governments to universities also did not succeed, as some universities utilized B.Ed. courses for untrained teachers as a source of revenue generation. The Indian central government tried to regulate teacher education by having a statutory body-National Council for Teacher Education. This body increased the duration of the B.Ed. course through correspondence to 2 years, while face to face mode B.Ed. course continued to be of 1 year duration. In 2014, this body replaced 1 year B.Ed. course by 2 year B.Ed. course without increasing appropriate duration of B.Ed. correspondence (distance mode) course. The new education policy of 2020 has suggested implementing a 1-year B.Ed. course for postgraduates to be delivered by multidisciplinary institutions. The policy has made the future teacher education scenario more complicated by hoping that by 2030 all teacher training shall be provided through integrated teacher training programs.

Article

An Overview of Historical Transitions in Politics of Education in Spain  

Gonzalo Jover and Mariano González-Delgado

Politics of education constitutes a major line of research in Spain in recent years. This interest is the result of a long process. Enlightened thought and the emergence of new ideas led to thinking about the need to develop a national education system. The 19th century witnessed the birth of just such a system, along with the unfinished debate between liberals and conservatives on who should control education (church or state) and how it should be funded. By the 20th century, the education system had become one of the main resources for achieving social modernization in Spain and grew accordingly. Despite the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), this push for modernization carried on into the Franco dictatorship, with the typical peculiarities of a totalitarian regime. By the end of World War II, the Spanish education system was characterized by following the development of educational policies inscribed in the model of Western societies, or what has been called “global governance in education.” This conception of education was continued during the restoration of democracy in 1978. Despite its intention of configuring an education system based on the agreement between the major political parties of the day, the Constitution of 1978 did not manage to end the “school war,” which has caused considerable instability in the system. Since the end of the 20th century, the Spanish education system has been inserted in the context of international trends such as the resizing of political spaces, the push of the neoliberal global economy, and the move toward multicultural societies. The battle of statistics, figures, and scores has led to a supposed depoliticization of the debate. In face of this alleged depoliticization, an argument can be made in favor of resituating the politics of education as a field of knowledge that concerns social aspirations forged in the course of history and ethics.