The parent as 'subject' : beyond liberal discourse in parental involvement in early childhood education

There is a growing trend towards parental involvement programmes in early childhood education. In most of the programmes, the major objective is to enhance the parents' ability to facilitate their children's development, particularly where the conditions for 'normal' development are found wanting, This reformist trend is reviewed in the first part of this article. In the second part, the review will serve as a backdrop to a critique of liberal discourse in parental involvement, leading to a reconceptualization of the issue. The argument carried through this article is that the notion of parental involvement is central to the process of democratic control, and therefore needs to be grounded in a political project that engenders personal and social empowerment of parents. Such a project demands a pedagogy that recognizes the different voices, know ledges and identities that constitute the parental body; a pedagogy that is fully cognizant of the fact that parents differ in terms of location, cultural capital, habitus, and personal experience within the education system. In other words, there are parents who have benefited from the social relations that characterize mainstream schooling and others, perhaps the majority, that have experienced a sense of powerlessness. It is the latter category of parents that the project for parental involvement in question will mostly address. By adopting a language of critique, traditionally disenfranchised parents will dig into the past to reclaim their personal, class and gender history in order to subjectively under- stand why conservative and liberal discourse in education has failed them, with a view that they will eventually embark on a project of possibility that will not only promote equal partnership but also substantial transformation in the educational process itself.peer-reviewe

Diluted wine in new bottles : the key messages of the EU memorandum (on lifelong learning)

This paper provides a critical exposition of the six key messages of the EU Memorandum on Lifelong Learning introduced in 2001. It concludes that the memorandum is to be seen against against an economic backdrop characterised by a market-oriented definition of social viability. As educational change is becoming increasingly linked to the discourse of efficiency, competitiveness, cost effectiveness and accountability, socio-economic inequalities and corresponding asymmetrical relations of power continue to intensify. In general, the Memorandum is found wanting in its analysis of the effects of neo-liberal, socio-economic policies on educational change.peer-reviewe

Active citizenship and late-life learning in the community

In an age where the official, adult-education component of lifelong learning is dominated by the discourse of employability and performativity, reclaiming the radical agenda of critical, adult, active citizenship is not only urgent but indispensable for morally sound and democratically viable societies. The crisis in capitalism is showing us, adult educators, that unless adult education is employed to interrogate, challenge and resist the accesses of a system that privileges profit at all cost, rampant individualism and privatisation of social goods, it will reproduce asymmetrical and predatory, social economic relations. This paper problematises dominant notions of active citizenship in later life and provides a framework for an alternative view of active citizenship. It also illustrates how adult educators can facilitate learning processes where late-life learners, reflect on the impact of the neoliberal value system and on the consequences of its hegemonic practices on personal and community life, before engaging in transformative action.peer-reviewe

Critical pedagogy and citizenship : Lorenzo Milani and the school of Barbiana

This article can also be found in: Learning and Social Difference, Challenges for Public Education and Critical pedagogy. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm, 2006. Chapter 8,This paper discusses the pedagogical challenge of providing an education that stresses the connection between learning and power and the potential, for social solidarity, of a collective approach to learning based on a process of what Freire and other critical pedagogues would call ‘critical literacy.’ The stimulus for such a pedagogical approach to citizenship derives from the legacy of a radical and very controversial Tuscan priest, Don Lorenzo Milani (1923-1967), and the students from an isolated and impoverished farming community in the Mugello region of Tuscany who constituted the School of Barbiana. The pedagogical ideas emanating from Lorenzo Milani and his school of Barbiana remain a source of reference in debates about schooling and social activism in Italy and elsewhere. The key text to emerge from this school, Lettera a Una Professoressa (Letter to a Teacher), was an important source of reference during the turbulent ‘sessantotto’ (1968) period in Italy. The paper provides an analysis of this and other works with whihc Lorenzo Milani was connected.peer-reviewe

From "Adjuncts" to "Subjects" parental involvement in a working-class community

This paper focuses on a project of parental involvement in a state primary school located in a predominantly working-class area in Malta. The authors are two of the project's coordinators. The paper reviews the international literature on parental participation in schools, gives an account of the socio-economic context of the school, and foregrounds, through empirical data culled from transcribed semi-structured interviews, the voices of parents, administrators, school-council members and teachers. The paper argues that, if this project is to develop into a genuine exercise in democratic participation, parents must begin to be conceived of not as 'adjuncts', but 'subjects'. The parents interviewed in this empirical work see themselves as such, and derive confidence from the fact that their claims and recommendations are translating into concrete developments.peer-reviewe

The Maltese community in Toronto : a proposed adult education strategy

In this article, we focus on the Maltese community in Toronto, Canada which, we argue, is suffering from a particular kind of oppression that is given little or no consideration in the existing literature. We name this oppression as that of small nation identity. The trivialization of small countries in the minds of ethnocentric individuals, and institutions/ organizations, has a strong bearing on the subjectivity of immigrants from these places of origin. By highlighting aspects of everyday life experienced by members of the Maltese community, the voice of a subordinate group is reclaimed, providing visibility to a community which has hitherto been invisible, its voice having been immersed in the "culture of silence". We also aim to explore the contradictory discourses that characterize the community. In the second half of the paper we propose an adult education strategy intended to affirm the roots of this community and provide the basis for better democratic living within the larger Toronto community.peer-reviewe

Challenges for critical pedagogy : a southern European perspective

Lecture available on OAR - https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar//handle/123456789/12159Like all regions of the world, Southern Europe and the largerMediterranean area are under the sway of the phenomenon commonly referred to as globalization, a process that, strictly speaking, has always been a feature of the capitalist mode of production characterized by periodical economic reorganization and an ongoing quest for the exploration of new markets. In fact, it is more appropriate, in the present historical conjuncture, to use the phrase, “the intensification of globalization.” This intensification is brought about through developments in the field of information technology. It is a period in which mobility occurs at different levels. There is the constant threat of the “flight of capital” in a scenario where the process of production is characterized by dispersal and cybernetic control.We also witness the mobility of workers within and beyond the region. People from the south move up north in search of newopportunities.peer-reviewe

Learning and social difference : challenges for public education and critical pedagogy

One of the main features of the present historical conjuncture, the intensification of globalization, has brought in its wake not only the mobility of capital but also mass mobility of potential labor power across the globe - two types of mobility which, of course, do not occur on a level playing field. In a mode of production which, as indicated in the previous chapter, has always been characterized by uneven levels of industrial development (once again, see Marx and Engels, 1998), people in the subaltern part of the North-South axis move up north in search of a new life. The „specter‟ of the violent colonial process the „old continent‟ initiated has come back with a vengeance to „haunt‟ it. This process is itself exacerbated by the fact that highly industrialized countries require certain types of labor and that this requirement cannot be met via the internal labor market, despite the high levels of unemployment to be found within these countries (Apitzsch, 1995, p. 68).peer-reviewe

Museums : adult education as cultural politics

The sites of adult education practice are multiple and museums feature regularly among these sites (Chadwick and Stannett, 1995, 2000). In this paper,i we will regard the museum as a site of cultural politics and public pedagogy. As a site of „public pedagogy‟ (Giroux, 2001) the museum plays its role in the politics of knowledge and representation. It represents a selection from the cultures of society. This situation is similar to that concerning the curriculum. Both the contents and form of the museum, and the curriculum, are repositories of what counts as „official knowledge‟ (Apple, 1993) and what does not. They select, legitimize, marginalize and are open to contestation and resistance. Critical educators who are ethically committed to excavating sites of educational practice and to interrogating official knowledges and practices are likely to ask the following questions regarding the politics of the curriculum and the museum: Whose culture shall be the official one and whose shall be subordinated? What culture shall be regarded as worthy of display and which shall be hidden? Whose history shall be remembered and whose forgotten? What images of social life shall be projected and which shall be marginalized? What voices shall be heard and which will be silenced? Who is representing whom and on what basis? (Jordan and Weedon, 1995, p.4).peer-reviewe

Globalisation, Southern Europe and European adult education policy

In this article, the authors define some of the most evident features of globalisation from below, which they distinguish from hegemonic globalisation, and draw out its implications for adult education. They draw out the implications for European adult education that emerge from the different features of these two types of globalisations. They then refer to the history of and contemporary provision in adult education in southern Europe and argue that there are elements there that can serve the purpose of a revitalised counter-hegemonic adult education approach. They then explore whether this thinking makes its presence felt in two major European documents, the EU Memorandum on Lifelong Learning and a recent report on adult education, carried out for the European Commission, provided by the European Association for the Education of Adults. They do this given that the international literature on adult education is dominated by ideas and experiences emerging from the central European states and Nordic countries. They highlight the recurrence in the Memorandum of the tendency to vocationalise adult education at different stages of a person’s life. They consider the EAEA report to be more expansive and representative than the Memorandum but they also argue that there is a tendency to uncritically accept the vocationalisation of older adulthood. The issue of migration from south-of-the-equator populations to Europe, and especially southern Europe, is also considered, given that it is a prominent feature of the intensification of globalisation. Its implications for adult education practice are also considered, also and mainly in light of the situation obtaining in the frontier countries of southern Europe.peer-reviewe