Global Education Review (Mercy College, New York)
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From Assessment to Action: Lessons from the Development of Theories of Change with the People’s Action for Learning Network
Full text linkIn recent years, much attention has been given to extremely poor levels of learning outcomes in low-and lower-middle income countries. Citizen-led assessments have played a vital role in highlighting this “learning crisis.” Having developed these citizen-led assessments, members of the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network are now increasingly devising and implementing actions aimed at tackling the learning crisis in different country contexts. This article documents the process we undertook of developing theories of change with PAL Network members across 10 countries to inform their shift from assessment of children’s learning to action aimed at raising learning outcomes. The article highlights, in particular, the importance for theories of change to take account of context in identifying appropriate actions. Based on their country circumstances, the actions identified by PAL Network members vary, for example, from using assessment data to influence national government reform, to more localized activities associated with “teaching at the right level.” For appropriate actions to tackle the learning crisis to be identified and successfully implemented, an important lesson from the PAL Network experience is the need to enable South-to-South learning and adaptation. As such, the article highlights a pressing need for flexible and iterative theories of change that reflect contextual realities
Working with (Post)theories to Explore Embodied and Unrecognized Emotional Labor in English Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)
Full text linkTechnocratic accountability, which is impacting ECEC practices in England, is where the government favors evidence-based knowledge to work with children. As a result, the emotional aspect of ECEC work and emotional labor have become increasingly complex and are sometimes unrecognized. In this paper we highlight the importance of more relational, connected, and embodied ways to work with young children. Analyzing qualitative semi-structured interview data from two projects, we focus on emotional labor using poststructuralist and posthuman affect theory. We use data from the first project to analyze narratives from ECEC practitioners, highlighting the relationship between government policies and dominant discourses. The second project notes entanglements with human and other-than-human bodies enacted with affect theory, which reveals embodied other-than-human productions of emotional labor generating alternative ways to explore ECEC work. By engaging with these two theoretical and conceptual positions, we offer a different perspective to consider ECEC professional knowledge(s) and reveal the ways these can shed an alternative light on professional practice. The resultant analysis allows us to reconsider knowledge-making practices in ECEC and challenge existing Cartesian dualistic thinking which separates “care” and “education.
Troubling Authority and Material Bodies: Creating Sympoietic Pedagogies for Working with Children and Practitioners
Full text linkDiscourses and relations of child/adult and early education are super-permeated with ideas and practices of authority and boundary-making. In early years’ practices, deeply important beliefs and assumptions about who or what has authority and who or what should create the boundaries of everyday activity often go unquestioned. This produces different kinds of epistemic injustice in respect of children and those who work with them, as well as through the materialities of early childhood and training settings, including higher education. These systems of authority both express and produce wider patterns of living associated with the wider society, including democracies.
Posthumanism inspires questions about not only ways of knowing, but also about the privileging of dis/embodied knowing over feeling, intuiting, sensing, making, and moving. This paper thinks from the diffractive position that knowing is a direct material and moving engagement to explore possibilities for sympoietic pedagogies of enquiry-making-with (Haraway, 2016), and examines how these generate new ideas about early childhood practices and what professional knowledge might become. We illustrate this diffractive curriculum and pedagogy through an example from teacher education in South Africa to make important connections between authority, pedagogy, and an enlarged framework for democratic education; in this work, we explore sympoietic approaches to negotiation
Study Abroad for Preservice Teachers: A Critical Literature Review with Considerations for Research and Practice
Full text linkThis article applies a postcolonial analytical framework to critically review empirical literature on study abroad for preservice teachers (PSTs). Our systematic search of scholarly databases identified 47 empirical studies of study abroad programs for PSTs in the 2000-2019 time period. Our analysis of these 47 studies is driven by the objectives to (a) understand geographic patterns in study abroad of PSTs, (b) examine the topics, conceptual frames, and implementation of study abroad of PSTs, (c) explore how study abroad for PSTs is currently being conceptualized and studied, and (d) critically analyze how these geographic patterns and study abroad programmatic and research trends are situated within broader North-South relations (Major & Santoro, 2016). Using geovisualizations we illustrate patterns in the countries of origin of PSTs and the countries in which they study abroad. We find that the majority of PSTs are from the United States and are traveling to countries in the North. When examining the content and programming of study abroad, we find many programs focus on cultivating professional skills for PSTs such as language fluency for foreign language teachers and intercultural competence. After establishing these patterns, we pay particular attention to the 23 studies in our sample that examine PSTs traveling to regions in the Global South. We conclude by offering considerations for future research and highlighting practices for program design that encourage PSTs to reflect upon global power differentials and complexities
The role of male caretakers and pre-school teachers for father involvement in ECEC
Full text link‘Children need men!’ This rallying cry is a common argument for father involvement in the family as well as in the context of strategies for more men in ECEC. In what way are these two issues linked? Based on international research on the issue, this paper asks what role male EC workers can have for the involvement of fathers in the work of ECEC institutions / pre-schools. A critical gender perspective is crucial for the understanding of these links.
The relevance of fathers for children’s development in the early years is widely accepted nowadays. At the same time, institutional care for children remains a female-dominated field worldwide. However, in some countries, campaigns for more men in ECEC have showed some success, e.g. Norway and Germany. One of the arguments in such campaigns is that male practitioners can encourage father involvement in ECEC institutions.
The connection between father involvement and men in ECEC was already present in European debates on men and childcare more than two decades ago. But what do we really know about the role of male workers for cooperation with fathers? This paper gives an international overview on studies on the issue, and connects their results to the realms of practice. Finally, arguments for a specific role for male ECEC professionals in approaching and supporting fathers are presented and critically discussed
Fathers’ Role, Involvement and Cultural Expectations
Full text linkIntroduction to Volume 6 no 1 of Global Education Review: Fathers’ Role, Involvement and Cultural Expectations. The present themed issue aims at delineating the importance, roles, and diverse practices of fathers in different cultures. Special attention is given into how existing policies in various countries may affect fathers’ role and involvement. A collection of articles from around th world that discuss the differences in paternal roles as grounded culturally in that fathers may be expected to play roles different from that of mothers in different cultures, and what constitutes a good father may be highly dependent on cultural, historical and familial ideologies The present themed issue aims at delineating the importance, roles, and diverse practices of fathers in different cultures. Special attention is given into how existing policies in various countries may affect fathers’ role and involvement
Preparing Globally Competent Teachers to Address P-12 Students’ Needs: One University’s Story
Full text linkIn this article, two teacher educators share the evolution of an Overseas Student Teaching (OST) program embedded in the University of Kentucky’s Educator Preparation Program (EPP). The goal of this initiative is to help candidates who participate in this program develop skills associated with global competence so they can better address the needs of P-12 students from a wide range of diverse backgrounds when they enter the profession. We begin with a rationale explaining the importance of global competence for teachers as seen through a policy and theoretical lens. We also identify possible obstacles involved in initiatives such as ours and offer suggestions about how to overcome them. Then, we describe the curriculum OST participants follow including key assignments and tools used to guide and assess their progress. We conclude with expansion plans designed to help more teacher candidates in our EPP become globally competent teachers whether or not they participate in the overseas initiative
What Is It All For? : The Intentions and Priorities for Study Abroad in Canadian Teacher Education
Full text linkWithin the research literature and in public discourse on higher education, attention has focused on the need for new graduates to develop 21st century skills for success in an increasingly globalized world. Calls for institutions of higher education to support student mobility abound, with intentions that some have categorized as neoliberal and others ascribe to notions of global citizenship. In this paper, we bring together literature from the fields of internationalization, teacher education, and study abroad to provide a conceptual framing and response to an inquiry into the following research question: In what ways does a study abroad experience support the development of preservice teachers? Through a multi-phase, multiple-perspective case study approach, we draw on qualitative interview data to illuminate how faculties of education and their students conceptualize the role of study abroad in the development of preservice teachers. The intentions for these programs cluster under four themes: global citizenship, personal growth, professional development, and employability. The concept of structured encounters with difference emerges out of these themes as a conceptual frame for future study abroad initiatives
All for One and One for All: Recasting Alexandre Dumas as a Popular Educator in France during the New Imperialism
Full text linkBy separating Alexandre Dumas\u27s works from the more elite “world of letters” and reclassifying them as unsophisticated and suitable to the more rudimentary educational needs of the common working classes and adolescents for French nation-building purposes during the French Third Republic, intellectuals, policymakers, and of reformers of education found a way to simultaneously critique Dumas’s “Africanness” indirectly while praising his Frenchness openly