This book uses a multi-dimensional conceptual framework to demonstrate how neoliberal forces have been manifested through changes to K–12 public education finance policy in British Columbia, Canada between 2001 and 2015. The text offers in-depth critical policy analysis to illustrate how the public education system has been impacted by the emergence of a hybrid model of public-private funding. By examining the impacts of this neoliberalized model, in which school districts must compete for public funding and engage in for-profit activities, the book highlights emerging financial inequalities; exacerbated inequities for students; increased entrepreneurialism; closer alignment of administrators' subjectivities with a managerial approach to educational leadership; and an illusion of local autonomy. Ultimately, the text makes powerful contributions by calling attention to detrimental processes of neoliberalization, marketization, and privatization within public education, as well as the managerialization of educational leadership. This text will benefit researchers, academics, educators, and educational leaders with an interest in the politics of education policy and finance, school district leadership, international and comparative education, and the sociology of education.

We conducted an exploratory study of the nature of women mine-rock waste collectors' (WWC) activities and analysed their working conditions managing mine waste rock in Ponce Enriquez, Ecuador. A WWC is locally known as janchera, and currently hundreds of women are involved in this activity within artisanal and smallscale gold mining. We combined qualitative and quantitative methods developing interviews, surveys, waste rock processing assessment, and carried on training activity to offer women an alternative livelihood. According to our study, women work individually collecting mine waste rock, but many are involved in associations under a new operational model recycling the collected rock in campsites. The WWC's associations do not have legal status in mining activity, depending only on the availability of waste rock dumped by small-scale gold mining companies and the will of their owners. The formalisation of WWC is currently difficult to accomplish, suggesting the need for alternative skills and entrepreneurial training, aimed at diversifying livelihood opportunities for women in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM).

K-12 public education finance policy in the province of British Columbia, Canada, responsibilises school district administrators to engage in competitive entrepreneurial practices, not only to increase public funding, but also to generate supplementary funding from private sources. We focus specifically on the generation of revenue from international student tuition. Our goal is to deepen our understanding of the spatial dimensions of inequities within the context of marketised education finance using the conceptual framework of spatiality and a mixed-methods approach to data collection. Quantitative data demonstrate how the amount of revenue generated from international student tuition differs between geographically diverse school districts. Qualitative data illuminate how the spatial contexts of local school districts shape administrators' reasoning, decision making, and marketing practices within a marketised education finance system. Both sets of data illustrate how spatiality exacerbates inequities within a market-oriented approach to education finance.

Introduction In the last two decades improving student achievement(s) became one of the key issues among global and national policymakers, along with an increased focus on quality school leadership when discussing changes and issues of excellence in schools and education systems (Vaillant, 2015). System and school leaders’ contributions towards the improvement of education systems, along with student learning outcomes, became a part of key educational policy that travelled globally among nations (Schleicher, 2012). In their enactment, these policy ideas and initiatives, once constituted globally (by supra-national institutions like UNESCO and OECD) and nationally, took on different forms when they entered the landscape of national policy, as the processes of reshaping such initiatives and ideas into national and local policy are complex and multifaceted. Consequently, an increasing number of scholars in the field of policy and educational leadership started to investigate some of this complexity in terms of the ways relations between educational leadership, system improvements, and student learning outcomes were framed and expressed by global, national, and local actors operating in culturally diverse educational systems (Bell & Stevenson, 2006; Dimmock & Walker, 2005; Honig, 2006). Leading futures: Global perspectives on educational leadership provides a collection of chapters featuring the work of a diversity of scholars around the theme of educational leadership and school and system changes from the standpoint of different systemic contexts and countries. The book is a welcome addition to the field as it offers multiple perspectives on educational leadership and policy from the viewpoint(s) of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. By introducing readers to a contemporary and comparative knowledge base about leadership, the book provides clues as to the global and local changes in the patterning of the work of educational leaders. It takes a multilevel and multicontextual view at ways contemporary educational leaders’ lived-experiences are changing, not only as localized daily events but also as disruptions to the broader patterns of current leadership practices that come to redefine the ways individuals lead in initiating and sustaining educational changes. This book takes the scholarly discussion about the practice of leadership further by contextualizing educational leaders’ work within not only school contexts and national education systems, but also within a global and globalizing political, economic, and cultural dynamics. For this reason, this book contributes to the study of educational leadership within in a fast-paced changing educational landscape by examining leadership as a phenomenon shaped by an interplay of global and local contexts and cultures.

The purpose of this presentation/paper is to provide to educators and curriculum writers a critical account of the diversity and contestability of the conceptions of sustainability embedded into the new British Columbia Education Plan. First, we discuss the different conceptions of sustainability that exist within the context of distinctive socio-cultural paradigms: the industrial, the existentialist, and the symbio-synergetic. Second, we identify and discuss the dominant conception of sustainability grounded in the new K-12 curriculum. Socio-cultural paradigms offer alternative ways of thinking about sustainability

This presentation/paper is based on a case study telling the story of an elementary teaching staff that decided to design and implement a process that transformed the decision making structure of their school into a sustainable collaborative and collegial environment in which teachers were able to exercise influence and use their collective knowledge in resolving schoolwide pedagogical and administrative issues. Situated within the conceptual framework of collaborative organizational structure and collegial practices, the paper provides insights about the key features of the process developed by research participants in redesigning the decision-making structure of their school, their understanding of its meaning and functions, and their level of engagement in sustainable collegial practices.

This research employs the conceptual framework of critical geographies of education to examine the implications of market-oriented education finance policy in British Columbia. Using data from interviews with 22 school district administrators, we investigate how these leaders interpreted and enacted (or did not enact) neoliberal education policy that emphasizes an entrepreneurial approach to financing, encouraging them to be innovative and to bring together private resources to fund educational programs. For purposes of this paper, our interest is in how geographic characteristics: (a) influence administrators

Seventeen years ago, the newly elected Liberal government in British Columbia implemented a series of policies promoting a shift toward entrepreneurial funding and provision of public education. As a result of this policy shift, school districts were pressured to become more responsive

The discourses of neoliberalism "have been at work on and in schools in capitalist societies since at least the 1980s" (Davies & Bansel, 2007, p. 247), leading governments and other key private and not-for-profit actors to create policy discourses and environments supportive of market incursions into public education, and enabling and encouraging the establishment of various forms of privatization. Neoliberalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes the application of market-oriented mechanisms to all aspects of social life, "the turning of all and any activity into a commodity that incorporates value" (Rikowski, 2002, p. 5). Sandel (2012, p. 7) also points out that "the reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by non-market norms and considered [to be] public goods is one of the most significant developments of our time." What traditionally were thought to be public goods like education now become commodities constituted and traded through market processes. For Olssen (1996), neoliberalism has also transformed the role of government in the provision and funding of public services from sole provider and funder to enabler of market-driven provision and funding of public services.In education, neoliberal reform promotes discourses of parental choice, competition, accountability measures, performance goals, and standardized assessment regimes. It creates consensually shared definitions of problems in public education for which inclusion of private actors operating within or in parallel to the public education system is presented as a legitimate policy solution (Ball & Youdell, 2007). Techniques and practices from the private sector are portrayed as the most effective and efficient means of addressing issues related to equity, labour market needs, and funding challenges (Spreen & Valey, 2014). Neoliberal discourse paves the way for privatization in education, which can take many forms.

In this chapter, we will discuss the notion of competing sociocultural paradigms, including the ones that bring together perspectives of the South, and their impact on interpreting the concept of creativity. We explore different notions of creativity within the context of our experiences and knowledge of realities of diverse rural communities in Colombia as they have been struggling with a dominant model of development based on the extraction of natural resources. We show how these communities resist and try to make possible the creation of new imaginings of well-being and development. Our discussion is guided by the following two questions: (1) In what sociocultural paradigm and epistemic framework (way of knowing) should we ground our view of the purpose of creative actions? (2) What other possibilities are available beyond the legacy of a colonialist modernity to consider what counts as valid knowledge about creativity? In our conclusions, based on an ongoing educational project developed in different Colombian rural contexts, we outline the necessity of considering cross-cultural dialogue about conceptions and practices of creativity as ways of creating imaginaries of well-being and development anchored into rural communities’ own expectations toward equity, justice, reciprocity, and complementarity.

Multiple forms of privatization are emerging in the Canadian public sector, including public – private partnerships. This article focuses on one approach to public – private partnerships called “ social finance, ” and a network of public, private, and not-for-profit organizations that promotes social finance as a means of funding public services, including education. The authors employ social network analysis to identify key members of this network, and critical discourse analysis to examine the discourse the network produces. Findings reveal a number of discursive and extra-discursive practices the network uses that legitimize social finance approaches to funding public services. These practices manufacture consent for increased privatization in the public sphere, and this has important implications for public education.

Developing literacy competencies has become a central component of educational policy in British Columbia (BC), with policies calling for province-wide assessment and school accountability. Based on the critical policy analysis (Blaikie & Soussan, 2000) of provincial and school district documents, complemented by semi-structured interviews of senior government officials, district-based administrators, and literacy coordinators, this article discusses how the synergistic effect of the policy discourses of accountability and assessment framed the ways of thinking, conceptually and practically, about literacy mainly in terms of its instrumental value in holding public schools accountable to performance indicators. The article concludes by discussing the necessity of redefining literacy to challenge the view of literacy as a mere set of technical and human skills for economic growth to shift the dialogue toward policy alternatives that view literacy as set of capabilities for sociocultural and political change.