Search results for: Politics of education

This paper reports on how teacher educators from a university, acting as facilitators, supported teachers in conducting a school-based action research project as a practice of professional development in the context of reform in language assessment in Hong Kong. In particular, the article problematises how the facilitators and teachers negotiated and managed identities whilst being engaged in a collaborative action research project. A key finding was that identities were neither fixed nor finite in the context of collaboration, but were negotiated within and against a range of contextually salient discourses. A major contribution of the article lies in its examination of the complexities of negotiating identities when educators from two different institutional cultures collaborate.

This paper explores the micropolitical staffroom experiences of two beginning health and physical education teachers. The two narratives draw attention to how the context of the staffroom significantly shaped and reshaped the beginning teachers’ micropolitical learning and practices throughout their first year of teaching. The findings reveal that staffroom occupants shaped situations which beginning teachers encountered. The two beginning teachers became more micropolitically ‘literate’ overtime with a more in depth understanding of the particular context and prevailing micropolitical staffroom stories. The authors recommend that more attention needs to be paid to the staffroom as a micropolitical context in which beginning teachers transition, learn and develop professional and micropolitical identities.

The goal of this article is to show how social justice education (SJE) , can be coherently espoused in the Canadian education system without turning into “brainwashing.” Social justice education (SJE) is a ubiquitous component of contemporary education theory and practice. Recently, SJE has come under fire for being politically biased and even “brainwashing” children in the public education system. To defend SJE against its detractors, therefore, it is necessary to develop a philosophical argument situating SJE within a conception of democratic liberalism. This article provides such an argument by reviewing competing conceptions of liberalism, analyzing the political culture in Canada, and applying an interpretation of comprehensive liberalism to specific educational initiatives.

This study examines the political forces that have driven the development of performance funding in some states but not others. This study found that many of the actors and motives cited by the prevailing perspective operated in the six states, including state legislators, governors, and business people pursuing performance funding in the name of greater effectiveness and efficiency for higher education. However, the prevailing perspective misses the key advocacy role of state higher education coordinating boards and individual higher education institutions that pursued performance funding to secure new funds in an era of greater tax resistance and criticism of the effectiveness and efficiency of higher education.