Search

Historians have observed that the period 1860-1890 was educationally progressive. This paper identifies the renaissance with the creation of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland in the aftermath of Church Disestablishment. Disestablishment legislation facilitated the inclusion of the laity in Synod. The paper argues that the lay-clerical dynamic generated educational reform at all levels of provision. Post-Reformation denominational divisions qualify the discussion. The structure of Synod - General Synod, Diocesan Synods, Boards of Education and Education Committees - was the outcome of an intense debate as the post-Disestablishment Church of Ireland sought to reinvent itself. The 'art' of the title refers to Synod's adroit use of this structure in promoting educational reform that mitigated tensions surrounding the religious-secular conflict which characterised Irish post-Famine modernisation. Synod's role as agent of educational reform constitutes the theme. The paper aims to contribute to what, regretfully, remains an undeveloped historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically considers the notion of educational policy transfer by addressing the roles of significant actors, based on an analysis of educational reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation in the two Koreas. Using evidence from the Korean cases, the paper challenges the state-centric, linear, and static views of educational policy transfer, and proposes a new conceptualisation which involves multiple actors from different levels including international, domestic, and individual players. While the educational reforms in the two Koreas were developed by the Soviet and US military in order to maximise their long-term security interests in the Korean peninsula, the key actors who implemented the reforms were Korean policy-makers, who had been appointed to key positions of the educational administrations through the bureaucratic politics between the military authorities and the Korean polity. Thus, specific programmes and policies for implementation of the reforms depended on the Korean policy-makers’ understanding and interpretations of the different ideologies of the Soviet Union and the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although international definitions of early childhood repeatedly refer to a birth-8 age span, there are complex, institutional divides within this age range. This paper explores the divide between pre-compulsory and compulsory early childhood institutions. In countries such as Finland this divide is not such an issue because children do not begin formal schooling until age seven or eight. However, in Australia these 8 years include both pre-compulsory programs (often birth-5) and compulsory schooling. We argue that in situations where the early years of compulsory school are included in a country's definitions of early childhood, they often occupy a tenuous place in research, policy and practice. Drawing from the history of early childhood education in South Australia, we explore the place that the early years of school have occupied in early childhood discourse, policy and practice and then consider some contemporary state-based and national reforms. Our hope is that by considering the South Australian past, the paper may provide a space from which to advocate for policies and structures that uphold specialist expertise and leadership in the early years of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the shifts in discourses about teacher education and teacher voice within the South African research and policy environment over the last four decades. The alignment of the political and educational agenda in providing resistance to the apartheid system culminated in 1994, the start of the new democracy. The preceding 20 years (1974–1994) were characterised by defiance of the subjugation of teachers’ voices, and the need to find agency amongst teachers. The shifting agenda of the strong teacher union movement during these resistance years and within the post-apartheid 20 years (1994–2014) is the subject of this paper. The attempt to generate a focus on teacher professional quality agendas is presently becoming increasingly challenging. Has the teacher agency agenda produced a disregard for teacher professional development? Are teachers protective of their own inadequacies to enact the transformation for which they campaigned? Are the new educational authorities reverting to yet another form of earlier accountability and performativity regimes to regulate teachers? The paper traces a critical account of these shifting historical trends in activating teacher voice. It argues for ‘deliberative action’ to reassert teacher voice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This narrative paper investigates a number of enduring and emerging themes reflecting teacher education in Canada over the past 40 years, including changes in information and communication technology, bridging gaps in theory and practice, English as a second language, French immersion and multicultural teacher development. Canadian teacher education programmes have become famous for their long-standing commitment to public education and social welfare. This paper examines the way in which over the past four decades such a commitment has led to effective leadership, multiculturalism, racial tolerance and global citizenship education, as well as comprehensive curriculum, teaching and learning, all figure prominently in Canadian teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the long attempt to transform teacher education in Thailand. Although a brief summary of educational systems and models of teacher preparation from 1892 to 1973 has been provided, the prime focus of the paper is on presenting changes in teacher education from 1974 to the present day, against the backdrop of key political and social forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers an account of the historic and ongoing international interchange between Britain and Japan in the field of progressive education. Concentrating on the last half-century, it takes two reference points from Roy Lowe’s writings in 1977 and 2006. Eveline Lowe Primary was a newly built model progressive school when documented by him in a seminal work on school architecture, later becoming a key point of interest for Japanese educationists. The British educational policy context against which this exchange of ideas and practices occurred was later documented by Lowe in a major book. Contemporaneous debates and events within Japanese society and government meanwhile provided the impetus for networks of research and transmission of progressive practices. The most recent turn in the narrative presented here demonstrates Japanese support for independent progressive practice continuing in the UK. Responding to an extensive historical research literature on transnational migration of educational ideals and practices this paper constitutes a micro-study that draws on personal memory, oral testimony, records of classroom observation on site and by means of video-conferencing, in addition to more formal documentation of conference proceedings and policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper compares the American and Soviet transformations at Kabul University, Afghanistan, during the 1960s to the 1980s explained in terms of Americanisation and Sovietisation. Using new declassified documents from both American and former Soviet archives, the author reveals that both powers attempted to impose their rival models of university education in Afghanistan. However, resistance on the part of the Afghan university undermined both of their cultural influences, thus causing their policies of reform to eventually fail. The case of Kabul University demonstrates the inability of the superpowers to encourage the formation of pliable students and professors. Despite crucial transformations in the structure, administration apparatus, and content of disciplines, both superpowers were not able to change the traditions and values of professors and students. The university community has been proven to be the main cause for the success or failure of any reforms brought to a university by external powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so ‘drenched in the past,’ the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt and dysfunctional. This is an incomplete story. While national narratives and news media tend to downplay these features, there is no local consensus on the reforms. There is mistrust on both sides of the debate, and a growing opposition movement, which arises from decades of racial and political struggles, corrupt public officials, and previous experiences with the state exerting power over locally elected school boards, which disenfranchised African-Americans in New Orleans in particular. Although the new, post-Katrina educational system significantly altered political dynamics, it has not eradicated politics altogether. In this paper, I conduct a policy history of education reforms in New Orleans, connecting the historical and political context to current reform efforts. As researchers evaluate the effectiveness of the new reforms in terms of student achievement, it is important also to examine their impacts on communities and the democratic control of schools, as well as how they reproduce or break from historical patterns of political struggle and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes the case for the need to study assessment reform processes from a broader and more complex perspective that takes the historical, ideological and systemic aspects of assessment policies into account. It draws on a larger study to demonstrate how the understanding of Assessment for Learning (AfL) reforms is enriched by such a perspective, taking the Chilean case as an illustrative example. The study draws on polysystems theory as an overarching theoretical tool and on critical discourse analysis and intertextuality as a means to reconstruct the polysystem of assessment reforms. These tools are used to analyse two types of sources: documents from different periods of Chilean history of education where reforms relevant to assessment were carried out, and interviews with policy authorities involved in the AfL reform as well as with teachers from different backgrounds and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 40 years, teacher education in England has been the focus of a stream of ‘reforms’ with the ultimate aim of placing provision into schools, the justification for such a radical policy being that higher education is alleged to be failing to provide good quality teachers thereby compromising the social and economic development of the country. The process whereby these reforms have been introduced is described and then used as a way of comparing and contrasting the way in which similar reforms can be identified in the international teacher education communities represented in this special issue of theJournal of Education for Teaching(JET). The paper closes by identifying lessons that can be learned from international comparators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the creation of the schools called ikastolas throughout the Basque Country from the 1960s onwards. The name ikastola refers to a unique school model whose major characteristic is to teach the majority of subjects in the Basque language, or euskera. It outlines the reasons why some of these schools took a co-operative organisational form and describes their major characteristics. The first part analyses the opportunities created under the Francoist regime for this kind of school, despite the repressive character of the dictatorship in other fields. The second part of the paper examines the important influence of the Mondragón co-operative movement, especially through its financial institution, in the creation of these educational co-operatives. The third and last part emphasises the role played by social mobilisation in defence of the Basque language in the creation of these schools and how this factor tied in with a co-operative governance system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The old project of modernizing madrasas has acquired a new zeal in South Asia after September 2011, whereby madrasa reform programmes became an acknowledged soft tactic of the war on terror. With 9000 Aliya (reformed) madrasas, the Bangladesh madrasa modernization programme has been identified as a potentially useful model for the neighbouring states of Pakistan and India who have made slower progress in implementing similar programmes. In this paper I argue that, although the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh has succeeded in integrating secular subjects in the madrasa curriculum, in reality this modernization project has failed in its underlying ambition to generate a ‘modern discourse’ on Islam—a discourse that is compatible with the demands of western modernity. The right to speak for Islam is still primarily exercised by the ‘ulama and graduates of the Qoumi (unreformed) madrasas. Aliya madrasas today compete with the secular schools not with Qoumi madrasas. The growth of the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh, instead of bearing testimony to the popular appeal of the modernization agenda, demonstrates the preference of Muslim parents for increased Islamic content in the school curriculum [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The research context that this article seeks to show the different models of college, from the evolution and development of universities and their management in Latin America, particularly in Chile, and how they affect the development of societies, both past and contemporary, highlighting some similar and different characteristics that they have. It should be noted that the Chilean model of education has been considered to have a great impact on some countries in Latin America, especially in Colombia. Moreover, the general objective of this research was the reflection on the reforms of higher education in Latin America and the impact these reforms have had in recent years in Chile, which seem to have created a high dissatisfaction in the social context, due to the excessive commercialization of educational services. For the development of this paper an extensive review of the literature, which accounts for the phenomenon to be investigated is made and semi-structured interviews were carried out to experts in the field, which helped to understand what authors explain in the literature concerning models and educational reforms in Latin America and the current situation of education in Chile, thereby achieving a clear vision of the reality of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the human capital theory and the pretext and aspiration theory, this paper aims at disentangling and making explicit or visible the pretension wrapped up in the aspiration of the Nigerian state to build universities for national development. It was found that there was and continues to be an aspiration to build universities for creating a knowledge-based economy (KBE). But, simultaneously, there also was, and continues to be, a pretension in it as indicated in the unwillingness of the state to fund universities. To survive, universities have resorted to commercialize their services. To cope with the increasing demand for access to universities, the state too embarked on the privatization of universities. To realize its aspiration to build the KBE, the state was urged to banish its pretension, partner with the Academic Staff Union of Universities in reforming the university system, and widen its university funding sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between the years 1950 and 1974 there was a conservative view regarding physical education (PE) and the perception of the body in Greek PE curricula. PE was seen as an ideological means of legitimising political dominance. Before the Athens Olympic games of 2004, educational authorities were assigned the duty of promoting the Olympic spirit in education, and a new PE and sports curriculum was developed. The main question of this paper is why PE was not perceived as an autonomous subject, but had to be related to the State’s major political and ideological agendas, in the context of both dictatorship and democracy. A Foucauldian perspective is adopted concerning perceptions of the body as an agent of power, and Bernstein’s framework will be used to analyse PE curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of place in the reform efforts of two teachers who established Miss White's Home School in Concord, Massachusetts (USA). Flora and Mary White rebelled against the prevailing industrial model of instruction in tax-supported schools where they taught. As a solution, they moved to Concord a nonconformist town with a literary and historical heritage where they founded a private day and boarding school within the child-centred ideals of progressive education. Their experience, and the link between school and town, highlight the significance of the writing of Edward Casey, Doreen Massey, and bell hooks on the role of place in the search for identity and the relationship between place and home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that English education policy has come full-circle – from the first constitution of a state system of education in 1870 to the beginning of the end of state education in 2010 – and that this circularity can be understood in relation to the reluctant state. That is, in the nineteenth century, the English state hesitantly and slowly moved from a patchwork education system of many providers to a national system locally provided. In the twenty-first century, the English state is moving back towards a patchwork of many providers with enhanced institutional autonomies and marginalising the role of local delivery and coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the early 1980s, China underwent perhaps the world¿s largest and most comprehensive experiment of decentralization in education. There has been a shift from decentralization to some degree of recentralization, however, since the mid-1990s, particularly since the early 2000s. The purpose of this shift was to establish a stable and regularized financing mechanism for rural education. Using provincial-level data from between 1997 and 2005, this paper analyzes whether the shift worked as expected. It finds that by the end of 2005, there had been a substantial decrease in the rural¿urban gap, the regional disparity, and the overall inequality in per student budgetary expenditure and total spending. Much of the decline occurred in the 2000s. Moreover, the rural¿urban gap declined more rapidly than the regional disparity, and inequalities in spending on primary education declined much more rapidly than junior secondary education. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]