As a prelude to the paper it should be stated that its genesis originates in conference presentations delivered on two separate occasions to two separate audiences. The first was to a mixed group of teacher educators, Roman Catholic priests and nuns, as well as others from diverse religious traditions, at a one-day conference on religion and pluralism held in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. The expressed focus for this conference was ‘inter-faith’ but with the addition of a secular dimension. The second presentation was to an international group largely comprised of comparative education scholars in Glasgow, Scotland. Although the two presentations were broadly similar in content the Dublin paper had a distinct orientation. Given that the publicly-funded Irish school system was characterised by a strong involvement of religion (Department of Education and Skills, 2017) – in particular, that of the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant tradition in that country – the Dublin presentation pursued an approach which sought to widen the educational agenda. Specifically, it focused upon the continuing discussion concerning the role of secularity in school systems where confessional approaches to religion were sanctioned by the central state. On the other hand, the Glasgow presentation was more ‘academic’ in tone, seeking to re-position secularity and religion in a non-oppositional relationship which was, in turn, argued to be functional for 21st education systems.
In an era of neo-liberal and authoritarian challenges to academia this is a timely book. Whitty and Furlong have constructed an edited volume in which the study of education, in the context of univ...
Education has been central to the maintenance of modern empires. Educational policies and practices under British imperialism reflected the complexities, tensions and conflicts in the different territories of the Empire. This is illustrated with specific reference to inter-war Palestine and Imperial India where education policy sometimes had unintended consequences in divided societies. Cultural imperialism was an inherent aspect of colonial education with curricular implications for schooling in the United Kingdom. As the British Empire underwent change and eventually declined, education also changed in response. However, the change was not linear, with the legacy of empire continuing both in the former colonial territories and in the UK itself up to present times, with implications both for the formal and informal dimensions of learning. Importantly, the English language is maintained, in different forms, as a continuing symbol of empire, together with diverse and sometimes complex responses at a time when interculturalism, post-colonialism, and globalisation have affected the discourse on the British Empire. At the same time, the discourse is sometimes complicated by an apparent resurgence of imperial sentiment while the arts continue to reflect critical attitudes towards past imperial power. The article concludes with the view that the development of a critical understanding of the relationship between education and empire is necessary to ensure changes in pedagogy with regard to greater inclusion of those with histories of marginalisation and subordination.
"Migrant, Roma and post-colonial youth in education across Europe." Comparative Education, 52(2), pp. 270–271
This paper connects the two fields of cooperative learning and intercultural education, focusing on the argument that cooperative learning strategies need to be equipped with intercultural understandings. There is a consideration of assumptions that effective cooperative pedagogical strategies require an engagement with challenging issues related to learners and to the structure of curricular content. The two key points raised here are that: (a) issues of competitiveness amongst learners and students must be dealt with directly rather than treating them from the sidelines or by ignoring them; and (b) for learning to take place in a truly cooperative manner, there must be an emphasis on an intercultural focus within the curriculum where the content of knowledge within the curriculum needs to be non-centric. This paper examines the view that cooperative learning strategies are effective when the curricular knowledge taught in the school is drawn from all groups, whether such groups have dominant, subordinate or minority status.
Intercultural education concerns the destruction of boundaries between people and their replacement by what Jurgen Habermas has called communicative action. It is a difficult task that raises various forms of existential fear: consciousness of individual mortality, communal insecurity, collective anxiety and distrust. In order to confront this globalisation of fear, to engage with ourselves as well as with others, the construction of what we might term the intercultural imagination is required. Intercultural education must embrace hope and the imagination, but in association with reason, understanding and knowledge. It is grounded in a capacity for critical pragmatism, an appreciation for an educational project based on a global concern for equity and justice and for the establishment of the basis of unfettered, rational communication between peoples. The construction of the intercultural imagination is a process which demands more than the attainment of the usual pedagogical competences; it requires an engagement both with hope and with fear.
Theory and practice in intercultural education remain problematic as they continue to reflect the tensions between universalistic and particularistic agendas. Particularism is manifested in a culturalist narrative which is mired in a failure to subject relativistic postmodernism to adequate critique. At the same time, universalism is frequently displayed in an attachment to utopian globalism which denies social complexities, divisions and inequalities. This has resulted in conceptualisations of intercultural education which are either wedded to an uncritical multiculturalism or to a futuristic universe of cultural unity. If intercultural education is to involve the mutual legitimation of collective existence it must focus on the concerns of young people as experienced in their immediate relationships. As such, it moves away from reified notions of cultural identity towards the realism of multiple identities, localised tensions, conflicts and affiliations. In addition, this alternative approach places critical engagement and the pursuit of justice at the centre of intercultural education. In this way, connections between the local and the global can be explored on the basis of an agenda based on the assumption of material and other inequalities which may be diverge from conventional cultural, ethnic and national contexts. Thus, intercultural education directs its attention to such issues as: resource allocation, the environment, collective decision-making, and social welfare. Above all, a central aspect of this approach is the application of reasoned enquiry in the process of communication and intercultural dynamics in the educational context.
Both intercultural education and comparative education have conventionally assumed the primacy of territoriality and sovereignty. This paper engages critically with these assumptions and, in turn, highlights the historical fluidity of nation states while seeking to normalise the process of geographical movement of populations. As such, a number of explicit or implicit modalities of collective survival have emerged on the part of many self-defined ethno-national groups reflected in narratives which sustain collective existence but which, over time, may be seen as flexible. These processes are illustrated with contemporary and historical references, demonstrating that such modalities pragmatically take into account the realities of survival and calling into question essentialist notions of ethnicity, cultural integrity and nationhood. It is argued that the provisional aspect of geopolitical boundaries, the mobility of populations and the autonomous existence of a number of communities have not conventionally figured prominently either in comparative education or intercultural education discourse. Accordingly, there is a strong case for moves towards de-territorialised theorisation in both disciplines with an increased emphasis on agency in collective identity formation and away from national and cultural reification.
This article attempts an initial exploration of the ramifications of geopolitical partition for identity in the context of children and their education. While not an exhaustive definition, partitions may be observed to follow armed conflict between human collectivities (nation-states, putative nations, ethnic groups, etc.) and are the outcome of treaties, armistices and unilateral action. Furthermore, a comparative and historical overview suggests that such macro-political action has clear micro-sociological impact, not least upon children and their families. While there may be some overlap with the creation of refugees this is by no means an automatic outcome of partition. On the other hand, an ‘imagined community’ with refugee status may be a consequence of conflict, the drafting of new geopolitical boundaries together with voluntary or forced migration. Here, in the context of children’s education, questions are posed regarding the disintegration of collective identity, the construction of otherness and the formation of new identities as manifested, inter alia, in the dynamics of nationality, language and religion. Inevitably, while the consequences of partitions set challenges for the possibility for intercultural dialogue they may also establish the possibility of new opportunities for the development of more inclusive identities.
Problematic aspects of intercultural communication are considered in the context of: an increasingly internationalized market for higher education; the globalization of knowledge; the compatibility of distinct national higher education cultures; and the capacity for successful cross‐cultural cooperation. This is exemplified by reference to a doctoral programme delivered by a UK‐based university, largely through distance learning, to students resident in a non‐anglophone country. Here, the challenges have concerned: cultural and linguistic barriers; the use of distance‐based supervision; and taken‐for‐granted knowledge related to learning and academic levels. Anecdotal evidence suggests diverse student experiences during the supervision process, in both face‐to‐face and distance learning contexts, reflecting the extent of familiarity with idiomatic and technical English, and the importance of non‐verbal communication. Given unequal power relations between students and university teachers, improved intercultural communicative competence may be achieved through a mutual construction of a discursive arena reflecting the dynamics of an increasingly globalized structure of academic intercourse. This may involve a critique of assumptions associated with ‘national’ academic cultures together with a pragmatic quest for a common lexicon. This in turn may contribute to the process of cross‐national collaboration and cooperation in higher education.
One of twenty-five papers exploring our contemporary reading of what is global, the way we comparatively understand this world of new mobilities and old beliefs and stabilities, in which we witness new movements of persons and peoples, scientific ideas and religions, information and information systems, government and management models, as well as the commodification of available identities.
In assuming ethnic/national identity as problematic, we examine its dynamic aspects in the context of refugee children and their educational experiences. While the starting point of our analysis is a deconstruction of ethnic/national identity in conventional terms of language, religion, education etc., the emerging focus is the notion of boundary. On the one hand, we look at the relevance of fluid boundaries for identity formation, while on the other hand, the experience of crossing boundaries will also be examined, particularly in the case of forced migration and displacement. Boundaries are conceptualised in the context of a continuum in which the experiences of refugee children range across school, home, locality and country. To illustrate the central arguments two case studies will be highlighted: a child refugee from Kosovo, the older of two brothers arriving in the UK about four years ago, who now attends a north London primary school; and several young minors, mainly from Kosovo, who attend a youth club in south London. Preliminary observations of the child, together with subsequent small group discussions and semi‐structured interviews, serve to identify how the child relates to the various spaces in the school. The analysis of his drawings forms the main part of the argument. In the case of the youth club users, observations and conversations show how these young people construct their individual and social identities by accessing global resources in response to local interests.
This paper examines the notion of a siege culture in which a self-defined minority community comes to perceive itself as being under threat from the dominant group within the society in which it is located and, as a response, has developed a conservative ideology based upon a mythologised collectivity. Siege cultures will tend to manifest themselves in ethnocentric terms and may frequently incorporate anachronistic perspectives on social divisions. Siege cultures may therefore be said to be in a state of continual production and reproduction-indeed, of re-invention-and require the support of educational institutions organised along separatist lines. Inevitably, this will have ramifications for national education systems, which may need to respond to the pressures resulting from resistance from such cultures to the hegemony of the dominant group. Except where the central state is strong and is able to subordinate the demands of minority communities through the process of de-legitimisation or through expulsion, there will be a tendency towards unresolved tensions, conflicts and contradictions. A possible explanatory framework for this phenomenon may be derived from the metaphor of social maturation in which societies fail to change sufficiently to meet the demands of legitimate constituencies and thus inhibit the development of a properly functioning social system. This may suggest a paradigm drawn from modernist, positivistic or even Marxist traditions, and that while current trends, as viewed cross-nationally, seem to point to the rise of 'ethnicism', we should be alerted to the dangers of separatist schooling which reinforces the ethnocentrism of some minority communities.
The traditional Western model of the university, characterised by collegiality and the autonomy, has been challenged by agencies of the U.K. central state in the quest to regulate knowledge, production and distribution, particularly in programmes of vocational preparation previously the province of the non-university sector. As part of the latter, teacher training has progressively been subjected to increased state regulation through policies which question higher education expertise and, as a corollary, increase the participation of schools. Social and cultural reproduction is reinforced as schools function to transmit state-sanctioned teacher training knowledge, perceived in utilitarian and atheoretical terms. The result is a conflict between a notional increase in accountability and democratisation, and the weakening of critical discourse and professional autonomy in the teacher training sector of higher education.
A commentary on changes in the initial and continuing education of teachers. The authors combine reviews of the available literature with research and offer suggestions as to how teacher education may be improved. Also included is a comparative research project on teacher education in the USA.
