Belonging in Changing Educational Spaces
eBook - ePub

Belonging in Changing Educational Spaces

Negotiating Global, Transnational, and Neoliberal Dynamics

Karen Monkman, Ann Frkovich, Karen Monkman, Ann Frkovich

Share book
  1. 302 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Belonging in Changing Educational Spaces

Negotiating Global, Transnational, and Neoliberal Dynamics

Karen Monkman, Ann Frkovich, Karen Monkman, Ann Frkovich

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This book explores the impacts on personal and professional, local and global forms of belonging in educational spaces amidst rapid changes shaped by globalization.

Encouraging readers to consider the idea of belonging as an educational goal as much as a guiding educational strategy, this text forms a unique contribution to the field. Drawing on empirical and theoretical analyses, chapters illustrate how educational experience informs a sense of belonging, which is increasingly juxtaposed against a variety of global dynamics including neoliberalism, transnationalism, and global policy and practice discourses. Addressing phenomena such as refugee education, large-scale international assessments, and study abroad, the volume's focus on ten countries including Japan, Sierra Leone, and the US demonstrates the complexities of globalization and illuminates possibilities for supporting new constructions of belonging in rapidly globalizing educational spaces.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, multicultural education, and educational policy more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education and cultural studies within education will also benefit from this volume.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Belonging in Changing Educational Spaces an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Belonging in Changing Educational Spaces by Karen Monkman, Ann Frkovich, Karen Monkman, Ann Frkovich in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Éducation & Éducation comparative. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2022
ISBN
9781000541182

1 Introduction Belonging in Globalizing Spaces

Ann Frkovich and Karen Monkman
DOI: 10.4324/9781003219033-1

Introduction

The world is rapidly changing, whether we notice it or not. Silently and imperceptibly, or loudly and deliberately, we weave together a new world of understanding. How do we make sense of ourselves in a world known and unknown? There are inherent contradictions that inhabit our changing world: we look to find permanence and belonging in things always moving; we try to become part of something in perpetual motion. Our changing world is often difficult to recognize, or often jarring and hard to avoid. The authors featured in this book capture how we respond; how we create new ways of living, working, seeing, and experiencing; and how we engage in education, all as we develop emergent understandings of a changing world and co-construct that world in the process. We examine the, at times, contradictory nature of change, how we develop, emerge, and reform, revealing how we belong, how we make a place for ourselves in our rapidly changing world.
Much of the change in the world relates to globalization, which often obscures change and how we engage it. Until the late 20th century, the nation state and the economy, along with the third sector – civil society – were considered somewhat equal players in shaping societies. Globalization has altered the balance among them, however, prioritizing the power of the economy over the state and relegating civil society to an often-unrecognized entity that is expected to make up for government services and economic shortcomings (Anderson & Fernandez 2020; Ingram 2020). Globalization increases the scope and intensification of transnational and global flows of people, technologies, money, media, and ideas (Appadurai 1996), so that there is now an expanded range of policies, resources, and experiences that are not created within or limited by one’s physical location (Anderson-Levitt 2003). Globalization has reordered the relationships among the state, the market, and civil society; and has created transnational and global networks of influence through technology, media, and communications, and also as people become more mobile (Appadurai 1996; Stromquist & Monkman 2014). These changes shape how we think about the world and our place in it, and how we experience our local environments which change as they respond to global dynamics, and to our own efforts to reshape them.
Globalization has created a space for neoliberalism to become a pervasive agenda shaping not only education but many dimensions of life. It calls into question the role of the nation state in shaping societies, and positioning the market to drive agendas, which, in education, has created assessment-laden systems, narrowed curricula, and perpetuated a stratified system with growing inequalities (Lipman 2004; Hill & Kumar 2009). Globalization has also challenged education (in some regions) to shift its purposes from nation-building to creating global citizens. We see new ways of understanding cross-national phenomena and a proliferation of transnational connections among people, communities, organizations, corporations, governments, markets, and other realms. In addition, all of these changes influence educational policy and practice through prioritizing particular agendas, processes, and intended outcomes. Therefore, in order to educate broadly, deeply, and with meaning, a nuanced understanding of the relationships between global phenomena and lived experience in education and life is required for informed decision-making and action.
In addition to unpacking global phenomena as it relates to education and its implications for belonging, each chapter engages a particular theoretical or conceptual idea. These lenses help readers to more clearly see the dynamics at work and also enables theories to become real – to be understood as they are seen and felt in life, and how they shape lives or are shaped by global forces. This intention is to demonstrate complexities, contradictions, and the messiness of what key theoretical ideas look like, in both broader and more localized contexts, as they play out and are experienced by people in educational and community settings, as the world around them shifts and changes. The broad choice of theories and conceptual ideas are intended to enable readers to embrace the complexities, to realize that the solutions to educational challenges are not simple and require ongoing analytical consideration.
Chapters consider education broadly, whether formal schooling, nonformal education, or informal learning (Coombs & Ahmed 1974), whether it occurs in organized educational spaces or in communities (Spindler 1997), and whether learning is intended or not (Jackson 1990). Learning (also broadly defined), and interactions with social institutions (including schools and universities), is integral to the processes by which people find, create, or accept a sense of belonging in life.
When change occurs in global spaces, implications arise in how people live their lives, how they find meaning, and how they construct a sense of belonging. Belonging has individual and collective dimensions; it is also both personal and political (Yuval-Davis 2011). A sense of belonging relates to emotional attachments such as feeling at home, while a politics of belonging refers to the social and political forces that shape what belonging looks like. As the world becomes more globalized, contextual influences become more complex, as they shape the kinds of belonging that are prioritized, possible, challenged, or out of reach.
We (the editors) approached the notion of belonging by asking authors to situate their research in their own way of understanding the concept. We did not want them to limit their focus within already-existing scholarly frames. Instead, we wanted to utilize their more organic uses of the concept as a basis for analyzing how this idea is understood – how it is embedded in our thinking as educators – to see how we might move it forward and engage it in salient ways, which we do in the concluding chapter.

Understanding Our Globalizing World

We as a world are in flux, shaped by changing economic, political, and cultural dynamics and shifting priorities determined on a global scale (Giddens 1990; Harvey 2007; Stromquist & Monkman 2014). Education is integral to these processes. These forces play out in educational contexts and, in turn, impact an individual’s sense of professional and personal, along with local and global, belonging (Henry, Lingard, Rizvi & Taylor 1999). Touching on phenomena as diverse as forced migration and education, large-scale international assessments, the development of teacher identity, international education, and the experience of studying abroad, the volume highlights both positive and negative impacts of global transformations. Although there are many dimensions and dynamics related to globalization, we focus on two broad phenomena most directly impacting education – neoliberalism and transnationalism – before engaging how globalization is embedded in policy discourses, and also curriculum and pedagogy in our collective search for belonging in our globalizing world.

Neoliberalism: The Complications of Belonging

Neoliberalism, as one dimension of globalization, has become a hegemonic influence in changing the relationship between the state and the economy such that market-driven economic forces have increased in influence (Harvey 2007). This shift toward market liberalization and privatization along with deregulation restricts the role of government and limits its oversight, including in education. These new power dynamics diminish the role of the state to govern, as the power of the market grows and is expected but fails to attend to human needs no longer served by the state. In response, civil society is called upon to address human needs all but ignored by both the market and the state. This shifts much of the responsibility to individuals as civil society institutions are largely supported by donations (from individuals), and people are expected to take care of themselves. Prioritizing the market changes the purpose of education from shaping the next generation of citizens to creating the next generation of consumers; it turns education from a public good into a commodity to be competitively acquired. We examine the push and pull related to neoliberalism’s priorities of privatization, marketization, accountability, deregulation, and individualization.
Neoliberalism is maintained, Foucault (1982) argues, through governmentality, which refers to the hegemonic forces that create willing participation of the governed (i.e., people) to be governed, or in Foucault’s terms, “the conduct of conduct” (220), a concept suggesting that we are all complicit in maintaining the system of governance and that we govern the self in ways that enforce the governance of others. Darmon and Perez (2011) see this as dispositions that we take on that serve to enforce systems that govern our behavior, even when the behavior is contrary to our own best interest. While these ideas may seem amorphous, large, and undetectable, neoliberalism is indeed ubiquitous. While neoliberalism began as an economic theory, it has also become a political ideology, which informs social and educational policy (Hursh 2007).
Neoliberalism is rarely named, yet is evident not only in policy, but also in educational practice, in assumptions about responsibility for education, and in people’s belief systems about what is worth knowing and about teaching and learning (Lipman 2004; Apple 2012; Giroux 2012). The purpose of education has increasingly become one of job preparation at the expense of a broader understanding of civic engagement (of being part of a society). Curriculum has prioritized STEM fields over the humanities, as a reflection of beliefs about what kinds of jobs are more important, and testing regimes have further narrowed what is taught to what can be easily tested (e.g., reading and math, leaving social studies and the arts by the wayside). Belief systems have shifted toward understanding human value as reflected in the earnings that jobs generate and the goods that can be bought with it. In short, education, for many, has become an individual means to creating economic stability rather than something useful for the common good beyond the economic system. And, it has become a means to economic development of a country or region rather than also a route to a better quality of life for its citizens.
The chapters in Part I show a variety of ways in which neoliberalism creates particular ways of thinking for educators, policymakers, and the public. With the shift to prioritizing the market, we see that what is worth changing becomes defined primarily in economic terms. For example, Wright-Costello (Chapter 2), among other points, examines how neoliberalism alters the conceptualization of professional educational work, making teachers and teaching into a commodity rather than a profession dedicated to work that is done for the common good. Using the lens of governmentality, she shows how teachers can be complicit in the unwelcome changes in the profession. Angee Kraemer-Holland (Chapter 3) also focuses on how teachers’ work has changed. She engages new teachers’ understandings of what it means to be a teacher and how they respond to neoliberal ideologies – implicit and explicit – through their experience in an alternative teacher education program. They become “policy subjects” (Ball, Maguire & Braun 2012: 92). Many of her research participants have since moved out of education because of tensions between the ideologies embedded in their teacher preparation programs and their own sense of motivation in coming to the profession. Both chapters reveal the ways neoliberal forces impact what it means to teach, resulting in the deprofessionalization of teaching and shifts toward how the work of teaching is measured, sanctioned, and controlled.
Turning to how neoliberalism has affected his own life as a student and teacher, Jeremiah Howe (Chapter 4) examines the increased salience of social class. He adapts the concept of the neoliberal pariah (from Arendt’s [1974] notion of the pariah) to his life history as a teacher from a poor family background. He reveals how neoliberal societal messages influence one’s sense of self over time.
Mariano Narodowski and Delfina Campetella (Chapter 5) engage neoliberalism through the concept of creative destruction (Schumpeter 1942), which highlights how innovation in elite settings arises from a disruption in social structures and processes, in this case school closures caused by the global pandemic. Elite schools in Argentina were able to dismantle traditional structures of teaching and create other forms that work well during school shutdowns. While doing so, they grow the gap between schools in well-endowed communities and those in struggling communities, magnifying the effects of neoliberalism.
Public education was built on the notion that educating all of society benefits everyone, just as having a health care system that keeps everyone healthy benefits everyone. Yet, schooling and health care in neoliberal environments increasingly have become available to those with the means to pay for them. This logic ignores the realities for those who do not have access to the means to fulfill their basic needs – to adequate housing, to nourishing food, to strong schools, and to health care. Critiques of neoliberalism focus on the structures that create unequal access (Lipman 2004), which then predispose some people t...

Table of contents