The majority of European countries consider themselves as monolingual nation-states. Some exceptions are countries composed of different linguistic territories, such as Belgium and Switzerland. Another form of exception is countries where certain territories are inhabited by linguistic minorities who are granted particular linguistic rights. Monolingualism with exceptions for special constellations or cases is therefore considered the “linguistic normality” in European nations. This understanding of normality is also reflected in the nations’ public institutions and is particularly pronounced in the national education systems.
The linguistic reality in Europe, however, contrasts with this notion of normality. Since time immemorial, the regions that have become European nation-states have been characterized by linguistic diversity, not only across but also within their boundaries. Since the second half of the 20th century, however, the number of languages that are vital and used daily has considerably increased. The most important driver of this development is international migration. Some European countries—Germany in particular—belong to the most attractive immigration destinations of the world. Despite of this reality, European national education systems largely persist in their monolingual mindset—or in other words: in a monolingual habitus.
This ambiguity can be amply illustrated by the example of the German education system. Education research shows that it belongs to the causes of educational disadvantage for children from immigrant families. This is precisely why innovation initiatives have been launched to mitigate the risks to teaching and learning associated with multilingualism, while making the best use of the resources offered by linguistic diversity to all children—be they growing up in monolingual or multilingual families.
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Multilingualism in Monolingual Schools and the German Example
Ingrid Gogolin
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School Choice Policies in Postapartheid South Africa
Bekisizwe S. Ndimande
School choice is a fairly new phenomenon among Black communities in postapartheid South Africa. “Choice” has historically been state-determined; in other words, parents were instructed where to send their children to school based on race and based on the urban/rural homeland division of Black South Africans. Even after 1994, the new and democratically elected government gave very little direction to schools or school districts as to school choice for the purpose of desegregating public schools; there was no bussing, for example, as in the United States when desegregation started in the 1960s. Nor was there a strong rezoning policy that would force White public schools to give Black students access to White schools. In theory and according to the law, parents could choose to send their children to any school regardless of race. In practice, White schools determined who gained access to their schools through self-created policies based on high tuition fees, exclusive language policies, and self-defined “catchment areas” from which students would be chosen. Together, these strategies effectively excluded the Black poor, even though it provided access to the small numbers of Black middle class parents in the mainly English-medium White schools.
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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.
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Teach For America
Spencer J. Smith
Since its founding in 1989 by then–college student Wendy Kopp, Teach For America (TFA) has influenced education policy and public perceptions of schooling both in the United States and abroad. By placing recent college graduates as full-time teachers in schools located in low-income communities, TFA attempts to solve educational inequity. This work has often met with resistance from teacher educators and traditional teacher preparation programs. Central to this resistance is the brevity of TFA’s training. TFA recruits, called corps members, undergo a 6-week training the summer before stepping into a K-12 classroom they control. Over 3 decades, TFA has responded to some of these criticisms and has changed. Even though TFA teachers make up a small proportion of teachers in the United States, scholars still study TFA since many elements of contemporary U.S. schooling are encapsulated within the TFA program. Understanding TFA’s history is necessary for the way scholars and educationists engage with the organization to think about issues in education, including the effect of teachers on student achievement, the standardization of neoliberal schooling, appropriate responses to academic achievement gaps, and the use of culturally responsive pedagogies and cultural competency in classrooms of historically marginalized students. Importantly, these issues are not just entirely theoretical when TFA actively influences public policy and TFA alumni create new school networks, lead large school districts, and become education scholars themselves. Additionally, TFA’s international expansion in 2007 means that TFA’s influence can be felt globally.
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The Global Response of Universities and Colleges to the COVID-19 Pandemic and Their Post-Pandemic Futures
Gwilym Croucher
For universities and colleges around the world the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption. The pandemic created challenges and possibilities, as well as amplifying existing trends for higher education institutions. The initial pandemic-related disruption affected universities and their students in many countries and had widespread effects on their operations and teaching. In particular, the temporary closure of campuses had implications for the “on campus” experience, and the closure of inter- and intra-national borders reshaped patterns of the international movement of students. The widespread and rapid shift to online education showed possibilities and limitations for technology-enhanced learning. In addition, the pandemic had an impact on government priorities for funding higher education when many were faced with unprecedented fiscal pressures, leading to funding reductions for some universities.
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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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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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NCPEA to ICPEL: Professional Organization of Educational Administration Leadership
Rosemary Papa, Theodore Creighton, and James Berry
The story of the creation of the field of educational administration, management, and leadership from the 19th to the 21st century is best understood through the lens of the first professional organization founded for school leaders, formerly known as the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA), now the International Council of Professors of Educational Leadership (ICPEL). The mission of the ICPEL is to advance the field of educational leadership/administration/management through research, teaching, and service as a means to better prepare aspiring and practicing educational leaders/administrators. The difference between the NCPEA of 1947 and the ICPEL of 2022 can best be summed up as the same intent to improve K–12 education by training school leaders but a different organizational structure to deliver member services.
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Vietnamese Education and Neoliberal Policy
Jim Albright
Any nation’s educational policies are forged in settlements that serve as a discursive frame, which is subject to inherent destabilizing tensions and contradictions bounded within identifiable historical and geographical periods. Vietnamese policymakers have viewed education as central to nation building, which was first realized through the forging of a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist educational settlement when independence was attained in 1946. Then a second settlement was achieved as part of its neoliberal Doi Moi policy pivot in the late 1980s, which has led to the nation’s global political, economic, and cultural integration. This pragmatic resetting, aimed at nation building through increased foreign investment and scientific and technical links with regional competitors and Western liberal democracies, swept aside past presumptions while retaining a strong one-party state.
Vietnam’s initial revolutionary educational settlement was forged in the years prior to 1945 and 1954. One of its achievements was the use of Vietnamese as the principal language of instruction in education. Pre-independence, in the late 1930s, mass education drives were important influences on this new policy. The French colonial regime was compelled to use Vietnamese for translation and communication, replacing Mandarin as the medium of instruction in schools and the language of the previous feudal civil service. One of the first acts as part of the revolutionary educational settlement initiated in 1945 was to proclaim Vietnamese as the official language of the nation, which was expanded to North Vietnam in 1954 and later consolidated in the nation’s reunification in 1975.
From its inception, Vietnam’s revolutionary educational settlement faced a legitimacy problem that undermined its nation-building agenda. It was mistakenly believed that economic advancement would follow revolutionary educational schooling. Voluntary mass education gave way to bureaucracy and careerism, and a traditional curriculum took hold; the Vietnamese state struggled to build and support schooling. A burgeoning young population meant it was difficult for state expenditures to meet the need for classrooms, qualified teachers, and quality instruction.
Faced with challenges that were exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, in 1986 the Sixth National Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party broke with its previous policy frameworks. Termed “Doi Moi,” this “renovation” realigned its command to a market economy. Subsequent related educational reforms overhauled preschool, general vocational, and higher and postgraduate education. In a radical departure from its past, these reforms established a dual system of state-built, -operated, and -managed public and private schools.
Educational settlements are partial and tenuous. Just as there were tensions within its revolutionary educational policy settlement, so too the hegemonic nature of Vietnam’s current neoliberal consensus has its own stresses. Two are ongoing concerns about the quality of teaching and learning and the weight of a strong culture of centralism in decision making as an aspect of Vietnam’s revolutionary legacy.
