Education and Social Change

Connecting Local and Global Perspectives

Geoffrey Elliott, Chahid Fourali, Sally Issler, Geoffrey Elliott, Chahid Fourali, Sally Issler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441136985
• eBook ISBN: 9781441157966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Education policy and practice has historically been developed within the national/regional context. However, globalization has prompted educationalists to review their practice in the light of international influences. World issues such as global warming, conflict and the depletion of earth resources have also contributed to an increased awareness of the role that education can play in resolving these problems. The contributors focus on how education can bring about social change while connecting with theory at the level of cultural impact and policy implications. They investigate the potential for creating a transnational value system in education, focusing on some key human rights issues both at home and overseas. Truly international in scope, this text lays the groundwork for future research by exposing the commonalities and differences in approaches to knowledge production and its dissemination, drawing together contributions from a variety of cross cultural contexts.

PART I

The Global Policy Context

Overview

This opening global context-forming section of the book focuses on policies adopted by national governments and multi-nation groupings on how to address economic and social challenges they face through mutually agreed policies. This section gives a perspective from several continents on educational access, inclusion and impact.

David Bainton and Michael Crossley’s chapter, which opens our first section, is set against the backdrop of an arid and mountainous landscape in which two young children of Tibetan nomads living in Ladakh receive their schooling. The authors’ focus is the lines of power that both bring these children’s lived reality into being and reveal the hegemonic influence of global assumptions about education and schooling, the sedentary and nomadic, the central and the marginal, the traditional and progressive. In their discussion of what we might call ‘the politics of consensus’, the authors rightly warn against the uncritical transfer of educational models and ideas across cultures and contexts and call for a reconceptualization of education – not necessarily to resolve tensions between the local and the global, but to reconceptualize what the global might be, and in particular to seek an ethic of respect for different local experiences in ways that afford alternative ways of knowing and thinking.

James Stanfield helps to shed light on the recent growth of private schools for the poor in developing countries, a grassroots movement which has the potential to transform the way we think about increasing access to education in developing countries. He demonstrates that a growing number of people and organizations are now prepared to take seriously the idea that private schools can cater for low-income families, a concept which was still being dismissed a decade ago. In response to the increasing awareness of the growth of private schools serving low-income families, a number of different organizations have responded to help stimulate growth in the sector. The impact of these developments on the concept of the right to education and the rights-based approach are critically examined and an alternative freedom-based approach is recommended.

The international agreements such as Education for All (EFA) and World Millennium Goals (MDGs) and the United Nation (UN) policies promoting human rights have influenced the formation of the Ghanaian constitution and education policymaking, particularly in relation to access to quality education for women. Quantitative research for international monitoring purposes by the UN and World Bank has revealed that in Ghana progress with entry rates for both boys and girls at primary school level are higher than in other sub-Saharan countries, but more boys complete than girls. This difference has consequences for further education and occupational opportunities for girls. Máiréad Dunne’s contribution recommends the use of complementary qualitative research, which focuses on gender as a social construct and concentrates on the school as a location for constructing identities and a place that reinforces discriminatory practices such as favouring of boys and where the sexual harassment and bullying of girls is more likely.

Gary Jones, Edward Sallis and Peter Hubert offer a critique of policymaking models imported from large states and applied to small states, such as to the Island of Jersey where their case study of college self-assessment is located. Such policy models rely on the notion of separation of the spheres of influence of national stakeholders, the policy text itself, and implementation, whereas the authors argue that, in the context of small states, the same individuals who are involved in trying to shape and influence policy will invariably also be involved in both production of policy documents and their subsequent implementation. This therefore raises the question as to what extent it is possible to separate the three contexts in a small state. This question is explored through a specific example, presented as a case study of how policy and approaches to college improvement have been imported from a large state and then subsequently amended to meet the local needs of the importing small state. As well as providing guidance for small states on policy importation, the authors point out that small states provide opportunities for large stage policymakers to examine what policies and innovations might look like if implemented within a different setting.

Against the Lisbon Strategy and European policies of lifelong learning, VET teachers and trainers have become a key target group. Good-quality services provided by teachers and trainers is regarded as an immediate contribution to fostering the quality, attractiveness and accessibility of opportunities for lifelong learning, and also to enhancing social integration and economic competitiveness of the European member states. Consequently, VET practitioners as a target group have received considerable attention in European policy papers over the past ten years. However, little is known about the work, qualification and professional development of VET practitioners, particularly at the European level. As a response, the European Commission and other European bodies have launched and supported different research and development initiatives targeted at VET teachers and trainers in past years. Interestingly, those ‘top-down’ approaches were concurrently complemented by several ‘bottom-up’ approaches in form of project proposals and initiatives developed by researchers or other stakeholders. Simone Kirpal explores how those different initiatives interlink and what implications they have for modernization and social change.

Chapter 1

Lessons from comparative and international education

David Bainton and Michael Crossley

Introduction

Context lies at the heart of research in the multidisciplinary field of comparative and international education. In this chapter we draw upon many of the qualitative principles and perspectives that have done much to advance context sensitivity in recent comparative studies relating to education and social change (Crossley, 2009). In doing so, we argue that in times of intensified globalization – when international policy prescriptions are becoming increasingly powerful – concerted efforts must be made to ensure that the voices of local actors – community members, parents, school children – are included in genuine dialogue by development partners, ‘who not only talk but also listen and hear’ (Samoff, 1998, p. 24). The chapter, therefore, presents a critical, locally grounded and forward-looking analysis of the impact of globally inspired educational development agendas with particular reference to the context of Tibetan nomads of Ladakh, in northern India. Building bridges between the social sciences and the arts and humanities, the analysis is informed by postcolonial theoretical positionings, detailed fieldwork and revealing personal narratives.

Photo 1.1 Ladakh: narrative research in context

Spaces of experience 1

At the age of five, Stanzin was one of the oldest children in the boarding school. She was just starting her third year here, and she was well used to the routines of the school. Soon it would be time to go down to the river to take a quick wash and clean her teeth before the sun went down. It was midsummer, yet the wind sweeping down off the higher mountain plateau was still cold. She faced into the wind, trying to imagine where, amid the mountains, her family might be now.

Last week she had been playing with her elder brother and baby sister at the summer huts. Not far away – a day’s walk past the hot springs, where the grazing was good for their Pashmina goats that her family lived off; but the memories of the two-week summer holiday had faded together with her father’s retreating figure back into the landscape.

Stanzin looked down at Tashi next to her, playing with stones like the other little ones. He looked up and then turned his face away as she distractedly wiped his runny nose on her sleeve. She looked more closely at him. ‘And don’t forget to wash your eyes, you’re starting to get redeye’, she said. Stanzin tried to look out for him – she remembered her own first year here. It was tough for some of them, not understanding why their parents had left them here in this windy place, having to wash and look after themselves. They soon learnt, soon made friends, as she had, had begun to understand why their families thought that education was so important, had begun to learn to read and write. She knew the Tibetan letters now, and could sing plenty of the Tibetan songs that made her family laugh so much.

She smiled to herself, took Tashi’s hand in hers, and headed down to the river.

Education and social change

Next year, most likely, Stanzin will no longer be here, at the point of this camera. For this boarding school, with its forty or so children and three teachers, with its single dormitory, with its nearby river, testament as it is to the human capacity to bring into being schools in the most unlikely places, teaches only preschool-age children, Montessori years 1–3, typically children aged three to six. If Stanzin is to continue her education, she must travel, not up the valley to her family, but away, down the valley into those warmer lands where the soil is rich enough, even in this arid landscape, to enable you, if you are skilled enough, to grow crops. Down even further for high school, where the valley floor is wide enough for a town to have grown up over the years, with its taxis and shops and airport.

Stanzin speaks the first words, and locates us, for now, here in this windy place, in the lived reality of her young life, that Gramsci reminds us is necessary for any meaningful consideration of the dynamic between education and social change (Gramsci, 1985; see Crehan, 2002, for a cultural reading of his work). For Gramsci, these lived realities are less an expression of culture, reified as some form of idealized pre-industrial state, but rather understood as an expression of culture that has been formed out of inequality and power. How do Stanzin and Tashi, young children of Tibetan nomads, end up just here? What are the lines of power that bring their particular lived reality into being?

Comparative and international education has a long history of analysis of educational practices that are particularly sensitive to the uncritical transfer of educational models and ideas across cultures and contexts (Crossley, 2004, 2008; Crossley and Watson, 2003) and, as such, seeks to trace the lines of influence that materialize a global hegemony through the enaction of particular local educational practices. And yet, standing here at 5,000m, even with the help of postcolonial critiques that seek to de-centre an understanding of this particular reality as remote or marginal (Ashcroft et al., 1995; Loomba, 2005), it is difficult to shake off the feeling that this place – a place that must stand, if any place ever could, as the epitome of the ‘local’ – is somehow far away from inscription by the ‘global’.

And yet her story is offered here as a testament to the ever-complex relations between these spheres of influence and the mechanisms of hegemony through which global educational discourses operate. A hegemony that starts by understanding schooling as the only legitimate form of education – the dominance, even here, of the sedentary over the nomadic. A hegemony, too, of the uncritical transfer of progressive Montessori methods – an approach that, in the urban centres of the Tibetan diaspora, stands against didactic methods and for the possibility of the development of a particularly Tibetan education, while here in the mountains it makes boarding school the lived reality for three-year-old children. A hegemony that is materialized through the financing of Tibetan education by NGOs and individual supporters.

Stanzin’s lived reality, inscribed by discourses of progress, of possibility, of action – discourses, one might say of modernity, of development. The winds of change are flowing off the mountain, winds that bring with them schools and knowledge from other places, bring perhaps a better life, bring with them hope. Crapanzano, in an anthropological essay on hope, quotes Minkowski as noting that ‘We are charmed by hope, because it opens the future broadly before us’ (Minkowski, in Crapanzano, 2004, p. 103). The nomad hopes for a better life for her children; the Westerner hopes for a better outcome for the Tibetan community;the Tibetan authorities hope for educational success; and Stanzin hopes for her family’s laughter.

Hope, the softer side of hegemony. Hope inevitably implicates the global, implicates that which is beyond the individual for, as Crapanzano goes on to say, ‘while desire presumes a psychology, hope presupposes a metaphysics. Both require an ethics – of expectation, constraint, and resignation’ (Crapanzano, 2004, p. 100). Social change, development, globalization – the world is made anew, and we respond to it (for how else might we do so) with hope. But this is not a blind hope. We are ambivalent, aware of our powerlessness in the face of global change. We do what we can; and Stanzin stares into the wind.

The hegemony of the global

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Education For All agenda (EFA) are testament to the possibilities of coherent global action. At the same time, while these initiatives have clearly made progress in mobilizing support for educational development and have made steps towards achieving their goals (Packer, 2008), they have been criticized for failing to address issues of educational inequality (EFA Global Monitoring Report Team, 2009), and for failing to offer quality education for marginalized groups (Bainton, 2007).

It is perhaps unsurprising that there has been a turn to such concerted global action as the MDGs and EFA agenda as a means of addressing issues of global concern, based as they are on the universality of education as a human right (Bainton, 2009). Nevertheless, the dominance of a discourse that privileges not only the global, but an understanding of it as a space of ‘global consensus’ and ‘concerted global action’, must be understood in the context both of Václav Havel’s struggle, noted above, and in the context of the danger of hegemony that such a global consensus necessarily creates. Stanzin reminds us that the apparent demand for global coherence that an era of globalization fetishizes must be cautioned by listening to the entropic voices of the particular. She reminds us that we must trouble the assumption that what the world – what Stanzin – needs is a new global consensus as the principal solution.

Context matters

‘Context matters’ (Crossley, 2008), and the discussion of Stanzin’s story serves to offer such a context within which we can engage in discussions on the interrelationship between education, globalization and social and environmental change. For Stanzin’s family, social change is a reality and it is important to understand the dynamics of the relationships between educational and social changes for families such as hers – to understand not only how schools might offer the possibility of sensitively responding to global concerns, but the critical ways that schools already act as agents of social change, often unwittingly and with unintended consequences. This is not to say that the social changes that are taking place within this nomadic community are only a consequence of educational provision, but that, for Stanzin’s family and indeed for herself, the act of going to school has repercussions – in dislocating her from her family, from the knowledge of how to live in this landscape. A dislocation that will, most likely, lead her to an urban, modern livelihood.

In the context of the main theme of this book – the possibility of a transnational educational response to global concerns – such repercussions are not simply social in their nature. Here, in the arid, high-altitude Himalayan desert, where life is only maintained by the replenishment of glaciers through winter snowfall, concerns of global warming are less global than immediate. Stanzin’s story highlights the critical role of schooling in the articulation of a broader development discourse that, in its hegemonic industrialized, modernized, globalized forms, is often complicit with a shift to the unsustainable forms of livelihood that we might wish, through it, to challenge. There is an irony to the realization that, just as we might wish education to contribute toward the development of sustainable values, through its complicity with a Western modernity its structural effects can lead to social fracture and modern livelihoods.

As such, what we are arguing for in the possible development of transnational educational values is that such debates take a broad and radical canvas to understand how diverse, non-modern livelihoods, knowledge and attitudes might contribute to the reconceptualization of educational provision and practices. For this to take place we must find ways to open up dialogic spaces where conversations about educational and social change across cultures and contexts take place that do not privilege the global, and this is where we now turn.

Transnational dialogues within the pluri-verse

Comparative and international education foregrounds the importance of contextualized understandings of educational practices and possibilities. From this perspective, any discussion of the likelihood of transnational educational values to respond to global concerns inevitably raises the question of how diverse local contexts might be considered, during attempts to formulate a set of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Global Policy Context
• Part II Community Integration and Inclusion
• Part III Curriculum Reform
• Part IV Learning and Pedagogy
• Conclusions and implications
• Selected Bibliography
• Selected Resources
• Index