'International education : emergences and future possibilities'. Report on a University of Fribourg workshop, 4-7 May, 2015.

An exploratory workshop with the theme: ‘International Education: Emergences and Future Possibilities’, was held at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland from 4-7 May 2015. The workshop, organised by the university’s Department of Educational Sciences, was made possible when the head of department Professor Edgar Forster and lecturer/PhD candidate Ms. Rose Eder applied for and won a grant of 24,810 CHF (Swiss Francs) from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Participants in the workshop included a number of invited global scholars of international education from universities in Canada, the USA, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Vietnam, as well as graduate students in Education and their supervisors from the University of Fribourg, some from the transdisciplinary postdoctoral program ‘Migration and Postcoloniality meet Switzerland’.peer-reviewe

Gender equality and girls education: Investigating frameworks, disjunctures and meanings of quality education

The article draws on qualitative educational research across a diversity of low-income countries to examine the gendered inequalities in education as complex, multi-faceted and situated rather than a series of barriers to be overcome through linear input–output processes focused on isolated dimensions of quality. It argues that frameworks for thinking about educational quality often result in analyses of gender inequalities that are fragmented and incomplete. However, by considering education quality more broadly as a terrain of quality it investigates questions of educational transitions, teacher supply and community participation, and develops understandings of how education is experienced by learners and teachers in their gendered lives and their teaching practices. By taking an approach based on theories of human development the article identifies dynamics of power underpinning gender inequalities in the literature and played out in diverse contexts and influenced by social, cultural and historical contexts. The review and discussion indicate that attaining gender equitable quality education requires recognition and understanding of the ways in which inequalities intersect and interrelate in order to seek out multi-faceted strategies that address not only different dimensions of girls’ and women’s lives, but understand gendered relationships and structurally entrenched inequalities between women and men, girls and boys

The potential of a mobile group blog to support cultural learning among overseas students

We explored the use of mobile social software, in the form of a mobile group blog, to assist cultural learning. The potential of using this technology for cultural adaptation among overseas students was examined as those students adapted to the everyday life of studying abroad. Two pilot studies and a successful field study of a mobile group blog as used by UK overseas students are reported. A further study with prospective overseas students witnessing this ‘moblogging’ in China revealed the advantages of communicating through this technology as a form of peer-supported preparation for cultural adaptation. Potential advantages for learning a second language via this system, were highlighted as communication was interweaved with cultural adaptation and exercised in the blog entries. Given mobile internet, the language experience together with cultural observation impressively supported these students' growing confidence with time, space and imagination

Missing non-Western voices on social justice for education : a postcolonial perspective on traditions of marginalized communities

This chapter reviews the theories and development of a number of non-Western philosophical and legal social justice traditions that have been marginalized in the literature, adopting primarily a postcolonial perspective on how they can contribute to education, transcending colonizer distortions of knowledge to present and draw implications from bodies of knowledge that have been removed from the dominating international literature. This approach is accompanied by a critique of globalization that has, according to many authors, created a hegemonic position for primarily Anglo-American systems in this respect including the view of “epistemicide,” imperialism, “symbolic violence,” and neocolonization, particularly in relation to the right to culture as a social justice principle. Various forms of colonization, including that under the current globalization period, produce cultural hierarchies of values and knowledge, or even expunge cultural and knowledge traditions. This chapter examines selected humanistic traditions of social justice that have existed for centuries, long pre-dating the modern period, focusing on those that have suffered an injustice in their suppression and distortion through a Bourdieuian “symbolic” violence applying not only to the knowledge that is suppressed, expunged, or lost through colonization and globalization and the cultural and intellectual capital they carry but also the identities, values, and traditional social institutions from which they are derived. The first section examines the conceptions and practices of social justice established in ancient Mesopotamia that provides the historical foundation to many later systems. The second presents the Confucian system of social justice as a foundation to the just society that has informed administration, education, and the principles of justice of a number of countries consisting of equitable distribution, equal opportunities, the rights of individuals and the principle of equity. The next section examines the Islamic social justice tradition consisting of distributive, retributive, and fairness and equity and the aim of piety to correct injustices, individually and collectively and establish equal rights for women and men in many spheres and the role of education in emphasizing the role of mind in its critical and reasoning capacities and reason in the formation of character, morality, and the human community with a strong emphasis on education and becoming learned. Finally, a representative selection of indigenous systems of social justice are examined where principles of individual rights and obligations to others and nature carried with them obligations in how others are treated and cared for due to stronger collective rather than individualistic values

Re-Visioning from the Inside : Getting Under the Skin of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy

This paper uses the device of imagining Education personnel at the World Bank engaging in study and discussion that causes them to rethink their 1999 Education Sector Strategy document. The Bank’s educators discuss issues that lead them to see that the World Bank’s assumptions of human capital theory are deficient. Having studied the severe limitations in the effectiveness of the education reforms of several countries, they admit not only that the education model being promoted by the Bank is flawed, but also that its preferred paradigm of modernist development is unsustainable. Thanks to the program of study and reflection, Bank educators decide to meet the challenge of reinventing themselves as educators collaborating with their national clients in developing new paradigms in which both creative education and sustainable development can flourish

Striving for a better world: Lessons from Freire in Grenada, Jamaica and Australia

The author of this paper considers the influence of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical philosophy on educational practice in three different geographical/political settings. She begins with reflections on her experience as a facilitator at Freire’s seminar, held in Grenada in 1980 for teachers and community educators, on the integration of work and study. This case demonstrates how Freire’s method of dialogic education achieved outcomes for the group of thoughtful collaboration leading to conscientisation in terms of deep reflection on their lives as teachers in Grenada and strategies for decolonising education and society. The second case under consideration is the arts-based pedagogy shaping the work of the Area Youth Foundation (AYF) in Kingston, Jamaica. Young participants, many of them from tough socio-economic backgrounds, are empowered by learning how to articulate their own experiences and relate these to social change. They express this conscientisation by creating stage performances, murals, photo-novella booklets and other artistic products. The third case study describes and evaluates the Honey Ant Reader project in Alice Springs, Australia. Aboriginal children, as well as the adults in their community, learn to read in their local language as well as Australian Standard English, using booklets created from indigenous stories told by community Elders, featuring local customs and traditions. The author analyses how the “Freirean” pedagogy in all three cases exemplifies the process of encouraging the creation of knowledge for progressive social change, rather than teaching preconceived knowledge. This supports her discussion of the extent to which this is authentic to the spirit of the scholar/teacher Paulo Freire, who maintained that in our search for a better society, the world has to be made and remade. Her second, related aim is to raise questions about how education aligned with Freirean pedagogy can contribute to moving social change from the culture circle to the public sphere