Praxis,educational development and the university sector in Australia     

Ian Hardy  Peter Grootenboer  Laurette Bristol 《International journal of qualitative studies in education》2016,29(7):925-945

In this article, we utilise recent theorising on praxis and educational development to explore how academics in universities can foster public, institutional and more personal development, even as they are challenged by what are sometimes described as more ‘managerial’ and ‘neoliberal’ conditions. The research draws upon a variety of sources of data, including publicly available correspondence on the university sector in Australia, interviews with colleagues, and personal reflective journals. These data reflect three instances of educational praxis development in the Australian university context, and at three scales/levels: nationally; unit-wide (university/faculty/institute); and sub-unit/individually. The findings reveal such development in the form of: academics using mainstream media to inform the general public about the nature of university industrial relations and funding at a national level; junior and senior academics collaborating and engaging in mentoring practices to build institutional research capacity at a university/institutional level; and, individual academics meeting to develop individual teaching practice. Through explicating the characteristics and value of educational development for and as praxis, we provide resources for hope for better understanding how the work of universities, including their broader mission to inform the public, might be enacted more educationally.  相似文献   

Who's counting? Legitimating measurement in the audit culture     

Jude Ocean  Andrew Skourdoumbis 《Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education》2016,37(3):442-456

What gives legitimacy to the numbers that constitute the measurement techniques of the audit culture? We argue that the audit culture's blind application of numbers to people as if there was no moral or ethical dimension to the calculation rests on a military discourse resident in mathematics. This argument is based on the genealogy presented in this paper, which uncovers a regime of measurement-by-number, sedimented as legitimate through an association with military power. We claim that this military measurement-by-number is a dubious technique of government on which the audit culture relies for its highly questionable authority.  相似文献   

The university,democracy and the public sphere     

John Holmwood 《British Journal of Sociology of Education》2017,38(7):927-942

This article takes a historical approach to the rise and fall of the public university, relating its fate to specific developments in public policy. Particular attention will be paid to the United Kingdom since it has developed an explicit drive towards the marketization of higher education in the context of an earlier commitment to public higher education, although the latter was initially first developed in the United States. Both countries are typically characterized as liberal policy regimes and therefore the article considers how wider social structures are implicated in recent changes to higher education. In particular, the article addresses how the functions of the university and its corporate form are being transformed and relates this to wider developments in the nature of the corporation and the relation between business and citizenship (or market and democracy).  相似文献   

Performance power: the impact of neoliberalism on social justice educators’ ways of speaking about their educational practice     

Angela MacDonald-Vemic  John Portelli 《Critical Studies in Education》2020,61(3):296-312

ABSTRACT

Few studies have attended to the specific influence of neoliberalism on education for social justice, despite the complex ways in which the competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice work side by side in local educational settings. This article reports data derived from interviews with 28 educators committed to social justice education from across Ontario, Canada. Participants were asked how they perceived the impact of neoliberalism on education and on their teaching practice. Findings were interpreted through critical democratic theory and discourse analysis. An unanticipated finding is the influence of neoliberal discourse on the ways that educators spoke about their teaching practice for social justice. The study found that discourse of performance is one arena where competing discourses of neoliberalism and social justice not only coexist but also intersect. This finding has important implications for the transformative potential of social justice education through more concentrated attention to the power embedded in everyday speech acts. Attending more to the performative potential of neoliberal discourse toward social justice ends can be a mechanism for resistance and teacher agency.  相似文献   

Shifting discourses from boy preference to boy crisis: educating boys and nation building in neoliberal China     

Xiaodong Lin  Mairtin Mac an Ghaill 《Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education》2019,40(3):281-293

ABSTRACT

It is well established that China has emerged as a major economic power, resulting from the nation’s neoliberal modernization. What is less understood is the socio-cultural and educational impact of this change on public institutions. This article focuses on the education system, which is currently seen as central to delivering the nation’s modernization project, particularly through suzhi jiaoyu (education for quality). More specifically, we engage with a pervasive public discourse of a boy crisis. We suggest the need critically to explore the local (national) meanings within a contemporary Chinese context of this assumed projected crisis that appears to be established as a western phenomenon. We argue that the discourse of a boy crisis can be read as a strategic move to re-inscribe an earlier discourse, that of the boy preference, that in turn is discursively linked to nation building at a time of globally inflected socio-economic transformations.  相似文献   

Dreaming of ‘nowhere’: A co-autoethnographic exploration of Utopia-dystopia in the academy     

Tricia M. Kress  Robert Lake 《Educational Philosophy and Theory》2020,52(9):937-946

Abstract

In this postformal co-autoethnographic research, the authors explore the changing landscape of American research universities from their respective locations as mid-career, post-tenure critical pedagogy scholars. By using autobiographical narratives in parallel with a running discussion of rodent habits and habitats, they explore the influence of Enlightenment humanism and Western epistemology in a) forming ‘the academy’ as an institution, and b) regulating how research and knowledge production are taken up within a rapidly neoliberalizing context. They recalibrate their ‘theories of change’ to recast critical researchers and critical pedagogy in relation to a volatile and hostile institutional context. By moving away from progress narratives of education for social change, the authors posit that critical pedagogy and critical research can be thought of as akin to ‘wayfinding,’ providing guidance, direction and reprieve while within the disorienting and violent flux of neoliberalization.  相似文献   

The logic of the marketplace and the ethic of co-operation: a case study of a co-operative school     

Joanna Dennis 《International Journal of Inclusive Education》2019,23(11):1196-1207

ABSTRACT

Over the previous decade, co-operative schools have emerged as a feature of, and resistance to, processes of marketisation in the English schools sector. The co-operative schools project, an education initiative of the UK co-operative movement, has been positioned as a ‘values-based alternative’ to the controversial academies programme. This paper examines the claim of the co-operative alternative and questions whether the co-operative schools project risks reproducing neoliberal values through a reliance on the ideal of the ‘self-improving school’. The discussion focuses on the evolution of one inner-city co-operative school. Through a close examination of its sociohistorical context, and with attention to the experiences of those involved, this case study explores the realities of a co-operative school striving to operate within a competitive system.  相似文献   

Living in a world different from the one in which we think     

Dennis Murray 《Journal of Higher Education Policy & Management》2018,40(6):520-532

ABSTRACT

The rise of populist nationalism in many parts of the world poses urgent challenges for higher education institutions. Normally zones of liberal values and reasoned argument as well as sources of expert information, constructive criticism and useful advice for societies, universities face increasing uncertainty as a result of political and popular attack in a wide range of countries. Doing nothing is probably not an option. The challenge facing higher education broadly is to understand and to respond effectively to a geopolitical and social reality that is qualitatively new and threatening. Effective response will require a degree of self-examination, a re-articulation of purpose and a reconfiguration of action across multiple domains of university life.  相似文献   

Privatization and ‘destatization’: school autonomy as the ‘Anglo neoliberalization’ of Irish education policy     

Craig Skerritt 《Irish Educational Studies》2019,38(2):263-279

Symbolic of the rise of neoliberal principles in Irish education policy, there is now a move towards advancing school autonomy and decentralizing decision-making to individual schools, possibly emulating the academy model that has become widespread in England. Increasing the freedom and independence of schools may involve using private actors to provide what has traditionally been the service of the state, but it will most definitely involve schools behaving more like private sector organizations. While some of the new powers that would be devolved to schools might seem attractive, especially in how they are presented at an official level, this paper highlights how features of autonomous schools that may initially seem appealing are, in practice, likely to be unsuited to the Irish context. In this regard, this paper advises that school autonomy should not be advanced in Ireland.  相似文献   

The neoliberal toxic university: Beyond no is not enough and daring to dream a socially just alternative into existence     

John Smyth 《Educational Philosophy and Theory》2020,52(7):716-725

Abstract

This article deploys critical sociology to examine institutions of higher learning, worldwide, within a context of a more utopian set of possibilities. The article contests the idea of universities as marketplaces – competition, commercialisation and vocationalisation; the synthetic values of docility, conformity, and image/impression management; the calibration and metrification of all facets of university activity; and the containment of universities as places of dissent and social critique, shackling them instead to the whims of capitalism. As an alternative, the author explores Klein's elements of a social imaginary that involves extirpating the alien interloper neoliberal ideology that has been allowed to invade and colonise universities, and instead allowing indigenous ideologies to emerge from the discourses of those who do academic work. The austerity logic that has so poisoned universities, is replaced by the humanising and democratising practices and voices of those who have been wilfully excluded. Above all, what the author pitches towards is not ‘fixing’ our broken universities, for that would be in Klein's terms ‘fitting into the box’ that has been constructed for universities over the past half-century, but rather an ‘exploding of the box’. Examples from the author's prior community-based research are used to illustrate humanising, transformative possibilities.  相似文献