As global citizens, we have an increasing international interdependence that now impacts the way we solve problems and interact with one another. Intentionally planed travel abroad has the potential to transform lives by creating a greater global and personal awareness, where adolescents see themselves as not just members of their local community, but also a global community. In an attempt to prepare students for an international and interdependent world, one inner-city nonprofit agency partnered with a local university in South Texas to provide overseas experiential learning opportunities paired with service-learning projects. Through one innovative program, more than 600 students have traveled to more than 20 countries as a full-immersion experience, most of which were centered on service-learning opportunities. The students in this program had the opportunity to examine their prejudices, assumptions, and fears while learning about themselves and developing deeper relationships with members of their school and local community through global outreach.
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The Impact of International Experiential Learning and the Community and University Partnership Supporting Global Citizenship in U.S. Schools
Elisabeth Krimbill, Lawrence Scott, and Amy Carter
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Utilizing Participatory Action Research to Build an Inclusive Classroom Community in France
Nicole Eilers
Inclusive education is increasingly prioritized in legislation and policy across the globe. Historically, the concept of inclusion within educational contexts refers primarily to the placement of students with disabilities in general education classrooms. More recent descriptions of inclusive education focus on ensuring that all children can access and participate in physical, social, and academic aspects of the classroom. However, a growing body of research suggests that students continue to experience exclusion even within educational contexts that express a commitment to inclusion. In France, a growing number of private, independent schools seek to create the inclusive environments that, despite the ministry of education’s initiatives focused on inclusion, the public school system does not yet provide. One such school engaged in a participatory action research project to create an inclusive classroom that responded to the evolving needs and interests of the community, resulting in a sense of belonging for all members. As all classroom community members (students, families, and teachers) participated in the project of creating an inclusive classroom, the elements of participatory action research allowed inclusion to become a flexible, ongoing, and reflexive practice of identifying and responding to contextually specific needs of classroom members. Approaching inclusion as a participatory action research project in the classroom offers a promising approach to moving beyond interpretations of inclusion that fail to actively address pervasive inequalities and their impact on classroom experiences.
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Gender-Equitable Schooling in Brazil
Ellen Belchior Rodrigues
Brazil has done much to overcome gender inequalities rooted in settler colonialism. The implementation of social justice policies has tremendously promoted access to education, most recently to Black Brazilians, Indigenous peoples, and sexual minorities. The country offers free public education from kindergarten to college; college quotas for low-income transgender students; a monthly stipend for each underprivileged child a family maintains enrolled in school; and a national high school curriculum that includes sociology, philosophy, African history, history of Indigenous peoples, and human rights. These would not have been achieved without the efforts of the women’s rights movement and Black women’s rights movement. Brazilian women reversed the gender gap in education and paved the way for employment and political participation throughout the 20th century, attaining higher rates of retention, graduation, and schooling. Despite achievements for cisgender women, transgender students and other sexual minorities still don’t feel included in school environments. Schools can be one of the most difficult spaces for LGBTQIA+ youth in Brazil, who may be daily targets of verbal, psychological, and physical violence. These behaviors are rooted in an education system that, since its creation in the 1600s, predominantly focused on the education of Portuguese settlers’ children, namely, White boys. Two hundred years later, White girls were allowed in the classrooms, only to experience another layer of the patriarchy: Schools were scarce because the girls could only be taught by female teachers, a rarity during the colonial period, and the academic curriculum was limited and often focused on the skills of housewifery. Aimed at creating subservient wives and mothers, the Brazilian schooling system failed entire generations of women by denying them access to math, sciences, or most other subjects available to men. During the entire 1800s, White women lagged behind in access to higher education, employment, and political participation. In the meantime, Black, brown, and Indigenous people in Brazil suffered under slavery for nearly 400 years. Slavery legally ended in 1888, but cruelty and discrimination remained pervasive in society, further silencing claims for racial justice and widening the social and economic gaps in the country. Thus, the understanding of gender-equitable schooling in Brazil is only possible through the historical lenses of how its society perceives gender, race, and sexuality. This historical perspective explains how Brazil developed its teaching curriculum based on social justice principles. The history of Brazil’s educational system cannot be described without acknowledging the traumas inflicted by colonialism and slavery. However, history also explains how the country uniquely stands out as a model for thinking about the connections among education, racial and social justice, and gender inclusivity.
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The Contents and Discontents of Madrasa Reform in India
Arshad Alam
Madrasa reform in India is a deeply contested issue. While the state has from time to time attempted to introduce various policies for madrasa reforms, its attempts have been, at best, half-hearted. Moreover, the state and the pro-reform voices have been uninformed about the deeper complexities within the madrasa system. For example, in treating madrasas as a homogenous entity, the reform policy has singularly failed to target the most deserving. There does exist a case for madrasa reforms, however, given that there are clear correlations between Muslim educational lags and contemporary madrasa education. A passionate defense of madrasas as being cultural institutions might therefore be counterproductive to the educational futures of children studying in these institutions. A certain a-historicity associated with the madrasa reform project has meant that the political economy that sustains this kind of education has largely escaped the attention of policymakers in India. It is equally true that the Muslim community has not been supportive of any such state policy. Owing to a number of factors, Muslims, led by the ulema, have been deeply suspicious of the state intruding into their religious space. Following a modernist logic, they argue that matters of religion, including the question of madrasa reform, should be left to them. This, however, is not to say that they blindly oppose any madrasa reform whatsoever, but they have their own notions about what constitutes “proper” madrasa reforms.
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The Origin and Development of Comprehensive School Reforms in Sweden and Other Nordic Countries
Ulf Blossing
The Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have all based their school systems on a vision of inclusive and comprehensive schools with no streaming and easy transition between the levels. In Sweden, “A school for all” was the concept and vision for school reforms during the postwar period from the 1950s to the 1980s. This vision originated in egalitarian philosophy and the development of the welfare state. The implementation and reforms have gone through three phases: (a) implementing and supporting enactment of the comprehensive school reforms from 1950 to 1980 approximately; (b) decentralizing and implementing new public management and local accountability from 1980 to 2010 approximately; and (c) evaluating, correcting, and considering new measures from 2010 onward approximately. Political and economic premises have changed the prospects of implementing “school for all.” There are diverse developments in Nordic societies and schools, which, however, are not as dramatic as those in some other countries currently in 2021. Nevertheless, the question of equity in the school system and its importance for a democratic society needs to be raised.
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Using Proven Programs to Improve Educational Outcomes
Robert E. Slavin
One of the most important problems in improving educational practice and outcomes is the very limited role that evidence plays in decisions about adopting books, software, professional development, and other materials and services. Instead, these are sold using relationship marketing in which sales reps work to build friendships with key decision makers. Word of mouth among educators with similar jobs also has a powerful influence.
Why should evidence of effectiveness be a major criterion in the selection of educational products and services? The most important answer is that programs with a strong evidence base that are implemented as they were in the validating research are likely to produce better outcomes for children. Further, making evidence a basis for program adoption would put education into a virtuous cycle of innovation, evaluation, and progressive improvement like that which has transformed fields such as medicine, agriculture, and technology.
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Children’s Rights, Student Voice, Informal Learning, and School Reform
Roseanna Bourke and John O'Neill
Children’s conceptions and experiences of learning greatly influence how and what they learn. Traditional forms of schooling typically position learners at the periphery of decisions about their own learning. Curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices emphasize the attainment of system-mandated learning outcomes, and this emphasis predetermines much of what is deemed by adults to be important or worthwhile student learning. Children consequently come to view their school learning in fragmented, individualistic, and narrowly adult-defined and controlled ways.
Many state schooling system settings permit only limited choice and decision making by children. However, the history of compulsory education also contains numerous instances of schoolchildren organizing and taking collective action against the wishes of adults on issues that are of concern to them; and of states, communities, and individual schools where radically different schooling approaches have been attempted, both inside and outside the publicly funded system. These “free,” “alternative,” or “democratic” schooling initiatives are part of long-standing “progressive” education counter-discourses that aim to demonstrate the benefits of child-centered and even child-determined schooling. Such initiatives have encountered both resistance and support in schooling systems and consequently offer useful lessons with regard to contemporary discourses around children’s rights and student voice, as well as their contribution to schooling system reform.
In recent decades, the combined effects of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and growing scholarly interest in “student voice” research and reform efforts in ordinary schools have increased expectations that children should have a meaningful say in their learning at school. The UNCRC underpins polity efforts to facilitate young people’s active participation in decision making in areas that affect them across the social agencies. Although contemporary “student voice” initiatives offer some promise for more of a “partnership” between adults and children in the ordinary school, they are often conceptualized and enacted at a superficial or tokenistic level. In continuing to position children simply as students who need the protection and direction of adults, schools fail to give adequate attention to the rich ways in which out-of-school learning contributes to a child’s holistic identity, to the learning strategies young people use in their day-to-day lives outside of compulsory schooling settings, and how these might help shape children’s agentic participation in meaningful decision making about what and how they learn while at school.
A greater focus on the discursive processes of informal and everyday learning in family and community, and on the learning strengths or funds of knowledge children acquire in these settings, encourages the kinds of school and classroom conditions in which children and young people actively explore aspects of their world that interest them, experience agency in and commitment to their learning, and make choices about who they spend time with and what they prioritize in their learning. Informal learning affords young people the ability to naturally self-assess their learning and develop sophisticated understandings about what works for them and why. When young people actively engage with physical, technological, and social spaces, to advance their learning, they also learn to appreciate the utility of the tools and people around them. All these competencies or capabilities have relevance for what occurs in formal schooling settings also.
Getting to know about the informal learning experiences of young people outside school influences the ways teachers think about who their learners are, learning as a phenomenon, and about the pedagogical repertoire they use to develop and enhance children’s capabilities. These pedagogical insights enable teachers to subtly or radically change their approaches to learning, the interactional framework of the classroom, and the teachers’ relations with families and with the local community that children negotiate each day.
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Food Security, Gender, and Education
Hester L. Furey
“Food security” is a term that came into use in the second half of the 20th century as government leaders and nongovernmental organizations began to apply systemic thought to global issues of availability of food, the safety and nutritional sufficiency of available food, and the stability of individuals’ access to it. Hunger and starvation as global problems began to be studied at the end of World War II. Concerns about global food supply management prompted the establishment of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and increasing levels of policymaking and intervention, enacted through a series of conferences and culminating in a World Food Summit in 1996. Although world food production increased by 50% in the decades following WWII and the 1990s were believed to be a “golden age” of food security, the United Nations believes that before the 2020 world health crisis some 815 million people experienced chronic hunger. Spikes in unemployment such as those associated with the 2008 world financial crisis and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic cause accompanying increases in food insecurity. Global climate change continually challenges efforts to address food-related crises, and at the same time rising numbers of refugees add to the numbers of people who would be food insecure even if all other conditions were optimal.
Awareness of the special role of gender within this field has only begun to develop since the first decade of the 21st century. Although the field of food studies is older, most academic studies of food focus on histories of specific commodities, regional folkways, and/or food and literature. Systemic studies of food policy outcomes have not examined gender as a vector of knowledge until about 2010. Consequently, this more specialized field of knowledge remains in an early stage of development, with activists at the forefront more often than academics. Considerable pushback has emerged against the idea that experts should educate locals about food, and many food activists now argue that education should arise from those in production rather than those who create policy.
Women represent 60% of all people living with hunger and food insecurity. They also make up at least 60% of agricultural workers. Most of these women growing food are feeding families and regions rather than aspiring to be participants in global economies. As women they experience food insecurity because of cultural gender biases, and as farmers they are twice disadvantaged because neither agriculture nor women’s production within families tends to garner widespread respect or wealth. Gender-blindness has plagued efforts to resolve these issues even when the UN and others have placed women’s progress at the forefront of millennium goals. Organizations charged with analysis of poverty and hunger still operate using out-of-date analytical tools that themselves perpetuate sexist discrimination. “Global” does not necessarily mean more progressive or inclusive. Despite the discourse of goodwill, in practice the unquestioned dominance of WWII-era paradigms of large-scale agricultural production and food supply chains has limited rather than supported collective ability to effect change. In the final years of the 20th century, a growing number of alternative voices such as the anti-globalist scholar Vandana Shiva and fair trade and sustainability groups like Café Campesino began to introduce dissenting ideas about food security using the terminology of food sovereignty and biodiversity, tying these concepts to the empowerment of women, local communities, and “eaters.”
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Masculinities and Teacher Education
Darrell Cleveland Hucks
Teachers’ values and beliefs shape learning environments and reinforce and support their expectations of students’ behaviors. Overtime, students’ behavior undergoes a norming process that influences their understanding of gender roles and gender identity. While there have been political shifts since the early 1980s around gender roles; for many in 2021 these traditional dichotomous notions of gender roles for boys and girls still exist in schools. Many boys are still encouraged to be tough, strong, and emotionally devoid of feelings. For girls, many are encouraged to be polite, sweet, and emotional. Boys are still given a pass for being aggressive, and it is still quite acceptable for girls to be passive. This non-inclusive gender binary continues to damage us as adults and promotes behaviors that do not allow for the complexities regarding gender identity, and then add the factor of race to the mix, and it gets even more complicated and, all of this left unchallenged, can lead to toxic behavior. Various examples of toxic masculinity can be found in the now readily available videos of police officers’ negative engagement with people of color around the globe. Teachers still have tremendous opportunities to intervene and educate students at all levels in ways that embrace difference and create a more empathetic society—will they do it? And what are the implications for changes that must occur in how they are prepared via teacher education programs to work with diverse learners?
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Online Education and Women’s Empowerment
Tabassum Amina
Formal and informal online learning spaces have evolved into important sources of knowledge that are accessible to many, require limited mobility, and provide ubiquitous learning opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has led to a major jump in the increase of online learning to make learning available, accessible, and possible to the diverse learner population globally. Reducing the gender divide in access to knowledge and information has been the goal of many initiatives, and understanding how access has evolved and improved women’s opportunities to learn and be empowered is key to analyze the changing society. Women are empowered when they have access to learning and access is enhanced through the use of formal and informal online learning spaces and programs. With the knowledge gained, women’s capability is boosted with informed choices, active roles in the workforce, advancement in academics, and increased participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. Online learning can encourage and motivate women to actively participate in social or cultural movements as well as modify their roles as childbearers, caregivers, and home managers. Women empowerment and gender equality has been the focus of research for decades, but with the rise and availability of ubiquitous learning possibilities, women empowerment through the utilization of online learning opportunities is becoming an area that has much need for understanding. In the past, women were more passive about their marginalized position in society. However, women in the 21st century are more aware and active, and are disrupting their marginalized status with their increased use of digital spaces and online learning possibilities. They explore different sources of knowledge and information and join in different online education opportunities for formal and informal learning. Women not only empower themselves with the exploration of online resources but also others when they teach online, actively share information on social media, and participate in online discussion forums.
