Politics of Quality in Education


Book Description

The question of quality has become one of the most important framing factors in education and has been of growing interest to international organisations and national policymakers for decades. Politics of Quality in Education focuses on Brazil, China, and Russia, part of the so-called emerging nations’ BRICS block, and draws on a four-year project to develop a new theoretical and methodological approach. The book builds a comparative, sociohistorical, and transnational understanding of political relations in education, with a particular focus on the policies and practices of Quality Assurance and Evaluation (QAE). Tracking QAE processes from international organisations to individual schools, contributors analyse how QAE changes the dynamics in the roles of state, expertise, and governance. The book demonstrates how national and sub-national actors play a central role in the adaptation, modification or rejection of transnational policies. Politics of Quality in Education will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of comparative and international education, as well as educational policy and politics. It should also be essential reading for practitioners and policymakers. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351362528, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.








Book Description




Policy and the Political Life of Music Education


Book Description

Policy and the Political Life of Music Education is the first book of its kind in the field of Music Education. It offers a far-reaching and innovative outlook, bringing together expert voices who provide a multifaceted and global set of insights into a critical arena for action today: policy. On one hand, the book helps the novice to make sense of what policy is, how it functions, and how it is discussed in various parts of the world; while on the other, it offers the experienced educator a set of critically written analyses that outline the state of the play of music education policy thinking. As policy participation remains largely underexplored in music education, the book helps to clarify to teachers how policy thinking does shape educational action and directly influences the nature, extent, and impact of our programs. The goal is to help readers understand the complexities of policy and to become better skilled in how to think, speak, and act in policy terms. The book provides new ways to understand and therefore imagine policy, approximating it to the lives of educators and highlighting its importance and impact. This is an essential read for anyone interested in change and how to better understand decision-making within music and education. Finally, this book, while aimed at the growth of music educators' knowledge-base regarding policy, also fosters 'open thinking' regarding policy as subject, helping educators straddling arts and education to recognize that policy thinking can offer creative designs for educational change.







The Politics of Blackness


Book Description

This book examines Afro-Brazilian individual and group identity and political behavior, and develops a theory of racial spatiality of Afro-Brazilian underrepresentation.




Recruiting and Educating the Best Teachers: Policy, Professionalism and Pedagogy


Book Description

This book demonstrates that policy, professionalism, and pedagogy are integral to the development of the best teachers that our students deserve. The empirical quantitative and qualitative studies and narratives presented in this volume demonstrate that strong analyses are needed to drive decisions on policy and practice.




Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education


Book Description

In addition to many other issues that touch higher education around the world, diversity and equity in higher education is fast becoming a major opportunity and challenge to institutions, countries and regions. The increasing centrality of diversity is fueled in part by changing demographics, immigration, social movements, calls for remedies to historic grievances, and the relationship between identity and access to power. This book will provide an opportunity to look at efforts at institutional change with respect to diversity in several countries where issues of diversity are moving beyond simply access for diverse populations to efforts at institutional transformation. Its purpose is to provide a comparative perspective with the hope that we will be able to see patterns across these contexts from which we might learn. Amongst other subjects it will address: The historic and contemporary context for diversity Established and emerging salient identities How diversity is framed at a national and institutional level The prevailing strategies and policies for engaging diversity, again at the national and institutional level The role of special purpose institutions This critical book is essential for higher education scholars and practitioners with backgrounds in higher education.




Global Networks, Local Actions


Book Description

Global Networks, Local Actions: Rethinking adult education policy in the 21st century examines public policy developments in adult education, exploring the policy framing of adult education practice in a range of socio-cultural contexts, and contributing to the development of policy research from global and comparative perspectives. Drawing from multidisciplinary fields such as adult education, comparative and international education, and sociology, chapters analyse empirically grounded studies from the US, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. Each study helps to identify how political agents interact at international, regional, national and local scales, and what the implications are for publically-funded interventions in adult education. While this book recognises the complexity of adult education policy, it argues for the need to deconstruct the false belief that what is global in adult education may be intrinsically distinct from the characteristics of geographical or social territories in which adult education occurs. Instead, it points to localised norms and ideas on Adult Basic and Secondary Education as ultimately contained in, and constituting, what is at times perceived as global, or abstracted from definite geographical or social territories. This book calls for a global sociology of adult education in response to global challenges, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of developments in public adult education policy. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of adult education, comparative and international education, education policy and politics, sociology of education, and global studies.




Social Representations for the Anthropocene: Latin American Perspectives


Book Description

The Anthropocene has become a field of studies in which the influence of human activity on the Earth System and nature is both the main threat and the potential solution. Social Representations Theory has been evolving since the 1960s.It links knowledge and practice in everyday life and is an effective way to deal with systemic crises based on common sense. This book assembles key contributions by Latin American scholars working with social representations in the social sciences that are of conceptual relevance to the study of the Anthropocene and that investigate the societal consequences of complex interrelations between common sense and topics of global relevance, such asthe contradictions of sustainable development, the construction of risks beyond risk-perception, health, negotiation and governance in the field of education, gender equality, the usefulness of longitudinal and systemic ethnography and case studies, and agency and the link between inequality, crises and risk society in the context of COVID-19, presenting theoretical and methodological innovations fromSpanish, Portuguese and Frenchresearchthat have rarely been available in English. • This is the first book to address the relevance of Social Representations Theory for the Anthropocene as a societal era• It presents the multidisciplinary scope of Social Representations• This book covers emerging research contributions in Social Representations Theory from Latin America• This book presents innovative research and commentaries by established researchers in the field• This multidisciplinary book should be in the libraries of many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities