Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education


Book Description

This book grew out of the experience of a European Union Thematic Network of the same title, and focuses on aspects of the complex and varying relationships between globalisation, Europeanisation and Education. The volume is divided into two parts: PART 1: Governance and the Knowledge Economy, focuses on how the discourses of a Knowledge Economy and Lifelong Learning, and an emerging functional and scalar division of the labour of educational governance became central to the development of a European Education Space. Contributors emphasise the role of the European Commission, and especially the Lisbon agenda, in this process, and considers the role of the Open Method of Coordination and the Bologna Process in the construction of the EES. A key theme linking Europeanisation to globalisation is the prominence of the discourse of competitiveness, and the role allocated to education in enhancing Europe’s ability to compete with the United States and Japan. PART TWO: Citizenship, Identity and Language, looks at the emergence of a new social model for Europe, this time from the point of view of how it relates the development of individual capacities and citizenship, and the role of intellectuals in this process. A second major theme is the place, role and choice of languages and at the impact of pressures from globalisation and Europeanisation, and national and sub-national levels, on language choice and teaching, taking into account both ‘World Englishes’ and Language Europe. Finally, globalisation becomes the central issue in an analysis of its different relationships with ‘northern’ (of which European education policy is taken as the example) and ‘southern’ paradigms of educational development.




Global Regionalisms and Higher Education


Book Description

This original book provides a unique analysis of the different regional and inter-regional projects, their processes and the politics of Europeanisation, globalisation and education. Collectively, the contirbutors engage with international relations and integrations theory to explore new ways of thinking about regionalisms and inter-regionalisms, and bring to the fore the role that higher education plays in this.




Austerity and the Remaking of European Education


Book Description

Austerity and the Remaking of European Education offers historically and empirically grounded accounts of national educational formations in Europe, at a specific time in their reshaping through encounters with global policy frameworks, and social and economic developments. The authors explore these issues in the context of different pressures that impact on European education systems - from the constraints established by the European Central Bank and the European Commission across Southern Europe, to the 2008 financial crisis and the increased migration. The book provides a rigorous theoretical approach to European and national policies, combined with detailed analyses of national educational contexts in England, France, Greece, Hungary and Sweden. These in-depth studies identify major issues of national education policymaking, and explore the complexities of global/national relationships. The economic crisis, the rise of the Left in Greece and of the populist Right in many countries in Europe, questions of cultural and religious diversity, tensions between marketization and inclusion are all brought into focus, offering findings that are of great interest to researchers of education policy, politics and sociology of education alike. In the final section of the book, the authors explore policy alternatives, as embodied in the activities of both governments and non-state actors, such as trade unions and social movements.




Europeanisation in Teacher Education


Book Description

This book explores the phenomenon and process of Europeanisation in the field of teacher education. Drawing on comparative case studies in Austria, Greece and Hungary, it examines empirical data and analyses key themes around the continuum of teacher education, the development of teacher competence frameworks, and the support to teacher educators. The book is the first of its kind to systematically research the landscape of European teacher education, exploring the interactions between national and European influences in the trajectory of teacher education policy and practice. Chapters offer an original and in-depth understanding of European influences that draw on evidence from policy documents and interviews with relevant stakeholders. It argues that teacher education systems are being Europeanised, although at different speeds and directions for each country. Factors such as the socio-political and economic contexts, historical traits and policy actors’ preferences at both national and institutional levels determine the translation process. This book will be of great interest for academics, educational researchers, practitioners and policymakers in Europe and beyond, informing wider discussions about the emerging European context in teacher education, education policy and what it means to be a European teacher.




Lifelong Learning in Europe


Book Description

The ongoing economic crisis raises fundamental questions about the political and social goals of the European Union, particularly the feasibility of harmonising social and education policy across member states. The forward momentum of the European project is clearly faltering, raising the possibility that the high water mark of European integration has been achieved, with implications for many aspects of education and social policy, including lifelong learning. This timely book makes a major and original contribution to the development of knowledge and understanding of lifelong learning in an expanded Europe. Its wide range of contributors look at the contribution of lifelong learning to economic growth and social cohesion across Europe, focusing its challenge to social exclusion. It draws on comparative data from the EU Sixth Framework Project Lifelong Learning Policy and Practice in Europe (LLL2010), which ran from 2005 - 2011 and involved twelve European countries and Russia. Very little research has been conducted to date on the nature of lifelong learning in post-Soviet countries, and this book provides important insights into their evolving education and lifelong learning systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and academics in the UK and Europe, especially those from social policy, adult and comparative education, equality studies and practice of lifelong learning.




Handbook of European Policies


Book Description

This definitive Handbook addresses the current lack of research into European policymaking and development using an interpretive perspective. Questioning areas that mainstream approaches tend to neglect, contributors target the ways in which ideas, arguments and discourses shape policies in the institutional context of the EU.




Lifelong Learning in Europe


Book Description

Based on a 5-year research project conducted by experts in 13 countries, this comprehensive book analyses the ways in which national characteristics frame the Lifelong Learning agenda.




Transnational Policy Flows in European Education


Book Description

International comparisons of educational achievements have come to play a crucial role in understanding the educational field today. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the development of international large-scale assessments. The lives and achievements of transnational educational experts who paved the way for these assessments are discussed as well as the rise of institutions specialising in the making and managing of educational statistics such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievements (IEA) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) supported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Emerging transnational policy spaces and their effect on national education policy are also problematised using the concept of ‘Europeanisation’ as a theoretical reference. By bringing together historical and contemporary comparisons using different methodological approaches the goal of this book is to contribute to a widened understanding of educational policy-making as an open-ended and complex process that cannot be reduced to a rational process of linear implementation, or a deduction of world models of education. Instead the result of this book shows that transnational policy flows in many directions in European education today and is being negotiated, translated, interpreted or even contested when recontextualised in different national and/or local arenas. This book addresses crucial questions on how the landscape and its borders of educational knowledge and policy-making have changed over time and place and how the map is currently redrawn in the contemporary globalised educational context. It provides important navigational knowledge for students, teachers and researchers as well as policy-makers at different levels.




Academic Identities—Academic Challenges? American and European Experience of the Transformation of Higher Education and Research


Book Description

The university in Europe – as a central institution of society – is presently met with many new expectations challenging established practices and self-understandings of academics across Europe. In the European Union, the higher education and research system has become a foremost tool of change. Current reforms across national higher education systems are seen as a potential for creating a European Higher Education Area, as well as an opportunity to introduce EU policies and ideas addressing how reforms can contribute to promote this as an EU dimension. An argument that only reforms of the higher education institution – in particular the research university, as a European institution – can make Europe regain its competitive force and economic growth-potential has gained currency in the last decade with reference to the US. The university system of the US, particularly its highly regarded elite universities, is also held forth as a model for the developments in the EU, and thus for the reforms of the different countries of EU. In this book, however, it is demonstrated that much of the political rhetoric about the construction of the future knowledge economy of Europe and the promotion of a European Higher Education Area may contradict basic values that give Europe its identity as a cultural region. Promoting the US university as an ideal model does not do justice to the kind of problems the US is facing in their own reform efforts, nor does it reflect properly the social costs of copying such an elite system. The book raises a number of issues relating to elitism and democracy, internationalisation and regionalisation, and new forms of governance in higher education and research which current EU policies seem to neglect.




A European Politics of Education


Book Description

A European Politics of Education proposes a sociology of education establishing connections between empirical data coming from European-scale comparative surveys, normative assumptions structuring actors’ representations and interpretative judgements, and a specific focus on Lifelong Learning policy areas. It invites readers to think about the place of standards, expertise and calculations in the European space from a common perspective, supported by a tradition of critical sociology and European political studies. The book: Addresses an important agenda: how the policies and politics of supranational Europe are making a European educational space Contains a response to the emergence of new epistemic governance and instruments at European level Contains contributions from the EU and the UK which give a comprehensive selection of perspectives and analysis of the field as it concerns Europe The complexity of the contemporary European education policy space is addressed here with new lines of inquiry as well as a reflexive outlook, on standardization, policy-making and actor engagement. Students and researchers of European policy studies, education policy analysts and theorists will all be particularly interested readers.