Literacy, defined as the ability to read and write, has had a long history in India; while the oral tradition existed for centuries, writing was introduced in the later Vedic period. The colonial period brought about mass education, English as the medium of instruction, and textbook-oriented literacy that led to the disintegration of the Indigenous education system. Postindependence concerted efforts have been undertaken to improve literacy for all age groups. Currently, various schemes and programs are reflective of the nation’s aim to be fully literate. Nevertheless, the objective has been deterred by caste, class, and poverty. Universalization of education, the Total Literacy Campaign, and the Right to Education have been significant aspects of five year plans since their inception in 1951 until the last five year plan that ended in 2017; these have ensured that literacy rates progressed from 12% to 75% in the past 70 years of independence. Despite these worthwhile steps and progress, universal literacy in India is a long-awaited aim.
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Literacies in India
Radha Iyer
Article
Translanguaging and EFL Teaching
Zhongfeng Tian and Wei Li
Translanguaging is the capacity multilingual language users have to draw on different linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, and modal resources to make meaning and make sense, transcending the boundaries between named languages and between language and other meaning- and sense-making resources. The 21st century is a postmultilingualism era that is no longer about the harmonious parallel existence of multiple languages but about the infiltration, transgression, and subversion of boundaries that are artificially and ideologically set between languages, races, and nations. No single nation or community can claim sole ownership, authority, and responsibility for any particular language, including English, and boundaries between named languages, between languages and other communicative means, and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken, or adjusted. Translanguaging captures such changing dynamics and highlights the language user’s agency in exploiting their communicative repertoire holistically and in an integrated and coordinated way. When applied to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning, translanguaging demands that not just the first language but the learner’s repertoire be visible and audible in the classroom, aiming to foster a more inclusive, equitable learning environment, especially for minoritized language speakers. Translanguaging as a pedagogical approach has been shown to deepen students’ understanding of certain content and topics, facilitate the learners’ participation and knowledge coconstruction with one another, develop their English language and literacy skills, and enhance their multilingual and multicultural awareness.
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Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature Series
Troy Potter
Children’s literature operates as discursive social structures that establish young readers’ understanding of gender, including masculinities. Oftentimes, however, children’s literature perpetuates limited or normative constructions of gender. This is particularly the case for two genres that are popular with male readers: fantasy and comedy. Both genres for young readers contribute to the maintenance of a hegemony of masculinity that values independence, action, resourcefulness, and bravery.While some fantasy and comedy series for young readers begin to expand the repertoire of acceptable masculine traits by incorporating empathy and consideration of others, validating more sensitive models of masculinity, they do not necessarily undermine the hierarchy seemingly inherent to masculine dynamics. By understanding the complex and sometimes contradictory messages about masculinity that are presented in books for young people, educators can develop critical ways of reading fiction to engage children in meaningful conversations about gendered identities in order to promote acceptance and understanding of all genders and differences, not just those relating to masculinities.
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Social Justice and Equitable Systems in Education
Romina Madrid Miranda and Christopher Chapman
Social Justice is a term that encapsulates many of the problematic issues concerning modern societies. As a reflection of society, the concept has evolved to emphasize different aspects of fairness such as distribution or recognition. One often tacit but central element in this discussion is the articulation of social justice with the development of equitable education systems. In other words, what it means to pursue social justice in educational change and improvement.
To address this question, contemporary ideas of social justice can be brought into the field of educational change and improvement in a more intentional and explicit way to respond to the societal imperatives for justice in education. By tracing the evolution of the key conceptualizations of social justice rooted in political philosophy, it is possible to examine its implications for educational and systemic transformation. Furthermore, from a systems perspective, understanding the ecology of equity can offer important insights into the interplay between schools, education systems, and wider society. The exploration of experiences and approaches in education that aim to disrupt inequities can be used to propose a number of key principles to guide educational change efforts from a social justice perspective, aiming to foster more equitable educational systems.
These principles serve to unpack issues of social justice and move to a more complex and action-oriented perspective that places distribution, recognition, and representation as key to developing more equitable education systems. The six principles are: a focus on learning and teaching; a commitment to collaboration and networking; the use of inquiry, research, and evidence; understanding the contextual nature of justice; investing in support and agency; and
building leadership capacity. The notion of a networked learning system and how this perspective can advance the discourse toward a more explicit agenda for developing socially just approaches in educational research, policymaking, and practice is also helpful. The overarching goal is to stimulate dialogue and action aimed at creating more equitable educational systems that prioritize social justice principles in all facets of education.
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Challenging the Nature—Culture Binary Through Urban Environmental Education
Marijke Hecht
Environmental conditions facing our local and global communities in the early 21st-century demand an urgent shift in education toward fostering healthy multispecies communities through stronger relationships between human and more-than-human beings. Environmental education, which has long pushed for interdisciplinary pedagogies that connect people and place, is well positioned to serve this aim. However, for the field to continue to develop and meet the challenges of the 21st century, it needs to address its roots as an outgrowth of science education where entrenched Eurocentric perspectives, such as human exceptionalism and the persistence of a nature–culture binary, are pervasive. These perspectives contribute significantly to the ongoing extraction of natural resources and degradation of habitats, which are tied to pressing environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. For environmental education to effectively impact learning in ways that lead toward a lasting protection of people and the planet, the field must be more critical of its roots and practices. Urban environmental education, which takes place where the majority of people live globally and in landscapes where humans and more-than-human beings are in close proximity, has the potential to challenge existing practices and continue to grow the field. Rethinking the nature–culture binary and the insistence on human exceptionalism are necessary for transformational improvements to the local landscape and planetary health. Two existing approaches that can support field-level change are critical place-based and Indigenous L/land-based pedagogies, which are drawn from different traditions but both support the transformation of relations between human and more-than-human beings. However, this requires an interrogation of if and/or how non-Indigenous scholars might take up Indigenous philosophies and pedagogies respectfully and ethically.
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Curriculum Development
Dominic Wyse and Yana Manyukhina
The word curriculum refers to the planned activities and experiences that education systems organize for students to help them achieve learning goals that are usually specified at national, school, and classroom levels. Within the realm of the discipline of education, curriculum represents a distinctive field of study in which a key debate has been about the best approaches to curriculum design and delivery. Various kinds of research, such as experimental trials, qualitative research, and comparative analyses, have been employed to analyze and attempt to optimize curricula and associated pedagogies. Philosophical thinking about the purposes of education has also been central to these debates.
An important topic in curriculum study is the extent to which learner-centered approaches, which emphasize the needs and interests of individual learners while addressing broader societal aspirations for education, are appropriate. Learner-centered curricula necessitate pedagogies that allow for differentiated, personalized, and meaningful learning experiences that can accommodate learners’ prior experiences and their interests.
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Interpreting and Using Basil Bernstein’s Sociology of Education
Henry Kwok and Parlo Singh
For four decades, Basil Bernstein developed a distinct and original contribution to the sociology of education. Despite his death in 2000, Bernstein’s theories still attract attention, not just in the United Kingdom, but all over the world, beyond Anglophone academic circuits. Yet, his work is sometimes regarded as too theoretical with minor significance to current educational issues and problems. Is Bernstein’s sociological theory relevant to the challenges of the 21st century? How should his work and research approach be understood and better utilized? While not claiming an orthodox interpretation, we do suggest that three crucial principles should underpin any engagement with t Bernstein’s theory for educational research. First, the researcher’s encounter with a specific problem in empirical reality is pivotal. Concepts which carry sociological sensibilities should be assembled around the problem. Second, while Bernstein has developed a bewildering array of concepts, it is better to use them lightly, for the sake of a more accurate description of complex, open, dynamic social systems such as education and schooling. Third, the gaze of Bernstein’s sociological theory is relational not only towards the object of inquiry but also to other theoretical frameworks. This relational gaze means that the theory can be used to dialogue with other theories as well as open dynamic social systems. Such relational capacities enable the theory to grow through the refinement and extension of existing concepts and the introduction of additional concepts. Three examples of research drawing upon these principles are provided as an illustration.
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Religious Liberty in American Public Higher Education
William E. Thro
A state college or university, through its administrators and, in some contexts, its faculty and students, is a constitutional actor. This statement surprises many who work in public higher education. Because students, staff, faculty members, and visitors retain their constitutional rights, those who act on behalf of public colleges and universities are constitutional actors, the paramount duty is to obey the Constitution. The constitutional obligations trump other duties under statutes, regulations, guidance documents, union agreements, internal policies, and faculty rules.
Because they are flawed human beings, university administrators are no more or no less virtuous than other governmental actors are. Like other government officials, higher education administrators may pursue their own interests at the expense of the public interests, may reward their friends and punish their enemies, and may subordinate the constitutional rights of others to their own well-intentioned policy objectives. Constitutional conflict and constitutional litigation are inevitable. Like government officials outside of academe, a public college or university’s constitutional actors must ensure their own behavior conforms to the Constitution while striving to ensure their colleagues also comply.
Although constitutional conflicts for public universities arise in many contexts, disputes involving the “first freedom” of religious liberty are quite common. Americans are a religious people and, while they differ on fundamental theological questions, there is a broad consensus around the existence of a higher power. Consequently, their government’s foundational documents explicitly acknowledge the unalienable right of religious liberty. This acknowledgment takes the form of the Establishment Clause, which prevents the government from favoring a particular faith, and the Free Exercise Clause, which prohibits government interference with religious practice.
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Current Trends and Directions in Socioscientific Issues Education Research
Aswathy Raveendran
References to socioscientific issues (SSIs) in science education research literature can be traced back to the 1980s. With a focus on introducing students to SSIs or issues with conceptual or technological links to science, the SSI movement aims to foster skills for democratic citizenship in students. This entails understanding the ethical and political complexities involved in these technoscientific controversies, the nature of the evidence involved and arriving at one’s own position on these issues. Two major approaches characterize research in the field of SSI education—the sociocultural and sociopolitical approaches, which differ in their assumptions and methodological approaches. While both approaches are concerned about issues of democratic citizenship and teaching skills to engage SSIs, they differ in their overarching emphasis on sociopolitical actions. The literature on SSIs raises questions on citizenship and how it is theorized in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research as well as whether schools are meaningful spaces where students can engage with SSIs. It is also important to carefully deliberate on what meaningful sociopolitical actions entail. Future SSI research needs to focus on the issue of navigating SSIs in the affective space of the classroom where complex power-ridden relationalities play out between teacher and students. There is also a necessity for the SSI movement to engage with questions of contextualization and politicization of the STEM curriculum as a whole.
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Sweden and Education as a Market
Lisbeth Lundahl
Since the late 1970s, the relationship between the state, the public sector, and the economy has undergone a profound transformation globally toward privatization, commercialization, and market organization. Pronounced marketization of education has occurred even in the Nordic countries, traditionally characterized as having social democratic/universalistic and egalitarian welfare systems, but with considerable national variations. Sweden has caught international attention by introducing unusually far-reaching, state-supported privatization of educational provision and strong incentives for school choice and competition. Central issues addressed include the factors associated with the exceptionally swift and far-reaching market reforms in Sweden, as well as the persistence of the resulting system and its consequences according to current research.
A hasty reform decision, paucity of envisioned alternatives, and the appeal of school choice for an expanding middle-class contributed to the neoliberal turn in Swedish education politics. Generous rules of establishment and possibilities of profit-making attracted big businesses, particularly after the decision in the mid-1990s to fully tax-fund independent “free” schools. Within a 10-year period, substantial proportions of the schools were owned and run by large, profit-making companies and chains. Research has shown that the school choice and privatization reforms, besides providing parents and young people in the urban areas with a vast smorgasbord of schools, have fueled growing educational inequity and segregation since the 1990s. Despite increasing criticism of the design of school choice and profit-making in education from many sides, recently even from conservative–liberal media and politicians, the Swedish “market school system” persists and flourishes.
