Search

When a representative democracy implicitly or explicitly undermines minority rights and prevents marginalized people from actively participating in a democratic process, it facilitates social exclusion. This paper focuses on how Ghana's democracy, coupled with traditions, aggravate social exclusion. The research discusses the democratization process of Ghana and its role in the marginalization of minorities. Particularly, this paper looks at the class-based marginalization of women on the one hand and the sex-based marginalization of the LGBTQI+ community on the other, in Ghana. Finally, this paper explores how Soka Education, as a way of life, can support these marginalized communities in Ghana.

Massive Open Online Courses have been a recent phenomenon in providing large-scale interactive participation and open access to courses online. Depending upon internet availability and familiarity with digital learning practices, this alternative could provide education for many people. This paper explores whether technology such as massive online open courses can democratize education by providing opportunities and access for those who desire formal learning. This paper reviews literature on massive online open courses as well as the benefits and challenges of these courses in adult education. Using computer-based content analysis, this paper also examines recent research (2010-2019) on massive online open courses and the implications of using them to provide widespread access to higher education in Asia. The findings show that offerings in many Asian countries help promote social and economic mobility for their people by providing continuing educational, professional, and personal development through courses online. Yet barriers involving digital literacy, technical capabilities, and language as well as culture, prevent the underserved from pursuing this digital education. This paper provides future research suggestions for collaboration of educational organizations to use massive online open courses in engaging life-long skills for people in Asia.

In a recent paper, Simpson and Dervin (2019a) offer a radical critique of the Council of Europe's "Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture" (RFCDC). However, Simpson and Dervin's paper contains numerous factual errors, interpretative errors and category errors in its description of the RFCDC. We identify 12 such errors which invalidate the conclusions drawn by them. We correct all of these errors, and suggest that, rather than using Simpson and Dervin's paper as a source of information about the RFCDC, readers should read the RFCDC itself, before drawing their own conclusions about the RFCDC and the adequacy of the arguments offered by Simpson and Dervin.

Educational research regularly claims, with lots of evidence, that humans learn from experience. However, experience is composed of outer and inner sensations. Thus, if humans learn from experience, we would expect that educational research would be replete with work on sensation. Yet sensation in the wild, outside laboratory studies, plays no real role in educational research on teaching and learning. This paper is based on current research, in several different disciplines, that sensation and feeling activate, guide, and assess cognition and that much of human thinking and problem-solving is based on associations formed from experience that are triggered quickly and unconsciously. We explore the nature of living things, learning and thinking without consciousness, the distinctive nature of the human brain and body, and the role of the physical and social body in cognition. The paper discusses some of the implications of a sensation-based view of human thinking and acting for how we study learning, language, and social identity.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate a social studies teacher education vision statement as it relates to Parker's (2003) "advanced" conception of citizenship education for democratic society. The vision statement, titled "Powerful Vision of Social Studies," was created by a group of practicing teachers and teacher educators as part of a seminar focusing on the effective mentoring of beginning teachers. It represents an attempt by the participants to answer the question of what sort of social studies practice is worth mentoring beginning teachers for. Using constructs of the "culturally acceptable self" derived from recent work in cultural psychology to guide our analysis, it is argued that the vision statement could unintentionally constrain understandings of democracy rooted in pluralism by inadvertently reflecting taken-for-granted cultural beliefs held as middle-class European-American. (Contains 1 table.)

Libraries throughout the world are increasingly involved in the production of scholarly publications. Much of this has been thanks to the growth of open access (OA) publishing in all its forms, from peer-reviewed "gold" journals to "green" self-archiving, and electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories. As a result, more and more of the world's scientific, medical, and scholarly research is freely available online. Libraries' quickly evolving capacity as OA publishers holds great promise for students, teachers, and researchers--not to mention farmers, entrepreneurs, and civil society groups--in developing regions of the world. The vast majority of research is still produced and used in a handful of economically powerful countries. This disparity of access to knowledge is slowly being corrected, at least in some disciplines, thanks in no small part to the work and advocacy of librarians. Although many of the challenges to OA library publishing apply in any context, there are some particular challenges faced by libraries in the Global South (areas also referred to as the Third World), not only in gaining full access to available resources but in participating more fully as "producers" of information and knowledge. Overcoming these challenges is an ethical imperative, enshrined in many a library mission statement, with profound consequences for freedom of thought and expression, democracy, and sustainable development. Libraries have already played a significant role in shaping the future of scholarly communication. Their capacity to lead the way into publishing's uncertain future is greater, and broader, than has generally been acknowledged so far. They have the history, the intellectual and practical skill sets, and the "big picture" perspectives needed to be instrumental in shaping the forms that publishing--scholarly and otherwise--takes in the years to come. As libraries continue to work on opening access to scientific and scholarly research, and as they assume more and more the roles, responsibilities, and capacities of publication, they are strategically placed to help significantly reduce the global digital information divide. There is much work to be done. By keeping the important ethical and social justice priorities of the OA movement at the heart of the evolving publication roles of libraries, librarians can bring the best instincts and practices of libraries to bear on this important issue. The author calls on librarians to be creative, determined, and wise in continuing to champion open publishing, for the Global South in particular, for the benefit and betterment of everyone.

The global Occupy! actions gave some pause for thought. At first, some thought that this was a global movement that could change the way politics was conducted and maybe see the end of capitalism as we knew it. The hopes for Occupy! were high, but the highest hopes for the movement were short lived. This paper examines Occupy!'s legacy; what potential remains and where educators might go with it. An argument is presented that Occupy! became an empty signifier: a 'bucket' of discontent into which thousands of disjointed, dissenting voices and discontents were poured, ranging from the original Wall Street encampment to the Umbrella revolution in Occupy Central. The paper looks at the power of the 'empty signifier' as a galvanising mechanism and explores what this could mean for education. The notion of occupying the curriculum in HE will be explored as a unifying mechanism for multidisciplinary teaching and learning.

This article presents one way of changing the participatory culture of training teachers – the Critical Integrative Teacher Education (CITE) programme now being implemented at Jyväskylä University. For the last ten years the Finnish school system has been the centre of considerable international attention because of its success in PISA. The Finnish school, however, has two faces. In the shadow of those good learning outcomes there lurks a democratic deficit in school and a lack of school wellbeing amongst children. This article examines the nature of the Finnish school and teacher education from the perspective of democracy. If participatory culture in Finnish schools is restricted, then the same also applies to teacher education. The long tradition of education as well as the radical school democracy experiment in the early 1970s resulted in the neutralization of teacher education and the removal of politics and politicality. This led to a teacher education with the emphasis on didactics and psychology but with a social viewpoint conspicuous by its absence. Even though the system offers opportunities to implement even radically different training methods, there is little that is done differently.

Citizenship as a compulsory subject was added to the National Curriculum in England in 2002 following the 1998 report, "Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools". It was little noticed at the time that the report stressed active citizenship much more strongly than democracy. The underlying presupposition was what historians call "civic republicanism", the tradition from the Greeks and the Romans of good government as political government, that is, citizens reaching acceptable compromises of group interests and values by public debate. This is contrasted to modern liberalism. To stress "democracy" unduly in citizenship education can lead to definitional dogmatics about multiple meanings of the term, even to disillusionment. Democracy is a necessary element in good government but not a sufficient one, unless subjective opinion is enshrined over knowledge through education. The practices of free politics are both historically and logically prior to democracy.

In this paper we present the analysis and interpretation of data collected during an intercultural virtual exchange undertaken in 2020 in which students from Argentina and the USA explored how trauma and suffering associated with COVID-19 can be channeled through collaborative artistic multimodal creations, and how approaching this in a productive way can lead to self-transformation in terms of intercultural and civic growth. To obtain unbiased data, we did not give the students information on the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC; 2018) which was fundamental to our conceptualization. Here, we apply an ex post facto research method to explore which of the 20 competences for democratic culture included in the RFCDC were mobilized and deployed by our students during this project. We do so by analyzing their multimodal artistic creations, social actions, and their civic statements from the perspective of the RFCDC definitions and descriptors. Findings indicate that the virtual exchange project contributed to the cultivation of 'democratically and interculturally competent citizens' as conceptualized in the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture.

The debate around standardized assessments became a global agenda imposed by multilateral organizations. These tests, in the neoliberal context, impose an impoverishment of the curriculum and also strong control over the teaching work. On the other hand, it also causes resistance from social movements. This paper addresses this process of disputes for hegemony in the context of early childhood education in Brazil within the last few years. This research analyses the protagonism of the Inter-Forum Movement of Early Childhood Education in Brazil (MIEIB) in the context of the Workers' Party administrations (Lula and Dilma). During this period, the movement had an amicable relationship with the federal administrations, which opened discussions about different ways to evaluate educational quality, based on the discourse of the right to education. Currently, this democratic dialogue no longer exists and the relations between the movement and the federal administration has become antagonistic, as the Bolsonaro administration wishes extend tests to early childhood education.

It remains to be seen how a task force from the American Political Science Association will contrive an equality of voice for the politically apathetic, but that goal, they say, is crucial to the continued workings of American democracy. Robert Weissberg wonders how muffling the appeals of those actively engaged in the political process will sit with the First Amendment and he suspects that the APSA's project signals the fabrication of "democratic inequality studies" as a new field of research and teaching for radical egalitarians. (Contains 1 note.)