‘Scaling up’ educational change: some musings on misrecognition and doxic challenges

Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of ‘scaling up’. This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement ‘what works’ across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu’s notions of misrecognition to consider the current orthodoxies of scaling up. I argue that the focus on ‘process’ and ‘implementation problems’: (1) both obscures and legitimates the ways in which the field logics of practice actually work and, (2) produces/reproduces the inequitable distribution of educational benefits (capitals and life opportunities). I suggest that the notion of misrecognition might provide a useful lens through which to examine reform initiatives and explanations of their success/failure

Marketing, art and voices of dissent: promotional methods of protest art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Limited research exists around the interrelationships between protest camps and marketing practices. In this paper, we focus on the 2014 Hong Kong protest camps as a context where artistic work was innovatively developed and imaginatively promoted to draw global attention. Collecting and analyzing empirical data from the Umbrella Movement, our findings explore the interrelationships between arts marketing technologies and the creativity and artistic expression of the protest camps so as to inform, update and rethink arts marketing theory itself. We discuss how protesters used public space to employ inventive methods of audience engagement, participation and co-creation of artwork, together with media art projects which aimed not only to promote their collective aims but also to educate and inform citizens. While some studies have already examined the function of arts marketing beyond traditional and established artistic institutions, our findings offer novel insights into the promotional techniques of protest art within the occupied space of a social movement. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research around the artwork of social movements that could highlight creative and political aspects of (arts) marketing theory

Letramento em Matemática: um estudo a partir dos dados do PISA2003

Neste trabalho partimos do pressuposto de que os resultados das avaliações em larga escala são instrumentos adequados para compreender o currículo aprendido. Entendemos, ainda, que os resultados obtidos por distintos países em avaliações internacionais constituem-se uma boa estratégia para captar ênfases diferenciadas no currículo ensinado. A partir dos resultados do Programa Internacional de Avaliação dos Estudantes - PISA 2003, buscou-se comparar diferenças nas ênfases curriculares em Matemática entre Brasil e Portugal. Para isto, a pesquisa utilizou como metodologia a análise do Funcionamento Diferencial do Item (DIF). Esta metodologia possibilita identificar itens que violam um dos principais pressupostos da Teoria de Resposta ao Item (TRI), segundo o qual, alunos de grupos distintos, mas de mesma habilidade cognitiva, têm a mesma probabilidade de acertar um item. A análise em 84 itens da prova de Matemática do PISA 2003 mostrou que alguns itens apresentam DIF entre alunos brasileiros e portugueses. De modo sintético, podemos dizer que alguns itens mostram-se mais fáceis aos alunos brasileiros, em especial os que se referem à subárea Quantidade. Já os itens da subárea Mudança e Relações são, aparentemente, mais fáceis aos alunos portugueses. Ao mesmo tempo, itens envolvendo contextos científicos mostram-se mais fáceis aos alunos portugueses, enquanto os que envolvem contextos da vida pessoal são mais fáceis aos brasileiros. Os resultados desta pesquisa evidenciam a relevância e necessidade da ampliação do debate curricular no campo da educação matemática. A compreensão dos resultados dos testes de avaliação em larga escala pode fornecer novas questões sobre o como e o quê os alunos aprendem Matemática

Non-affirmative Theory of Education as a Foundation for Curriculum Studies, Didaktik and Educational Leadership

This chapter presents non-affirmative theory of education as the foundation for a new research program in education, allowing us to bridge educational leadership, curriculum studies and Didaktik. We demonstrate the strengths of this framework by analyzing literature from educational leadership and curriculum theory/didaktik. In contrast to both socialization-oriented explanations locating curriculum and leadership within existing society, and transformation-oriented models viewing education as revolutionary or super-ordinate to society, non-affirmative theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy and culture, respectively, as non-hierarchical. Here critical deliberation and discursive practices mediate between politics, culture, economy and education, driven by individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions. While transformative and socialization models typically result in instrumental notions of leadership and teaching, non-affirmative education theory, previously developed within German and Nordic education, instead views leadership and teaching as relational and hermeneutic, drawing on ontological core concepts of modern education: recognition; summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. Understanding educational leadership, school development and teaching then requires a comparative multi-level approach informed by discursive institutionalism and organization theory, in addition to theorizing leadership and teaching as cultural-historical and critical-hermeneutic activity. Globalisation and contemporary challenges to deliberative democracy also call for rethinking modern nation-state based theorizing of education in a cosmopolitan light. Non-affirmative education theory allows us to understand and promote recognition based democratic citizenship (political, economical and cultural) that respects cultural, ethical and epistemological variations in a globopolitan era. We hope an American-European-Asian comparative dialogue is enhanced by theorizing education with a non-affirmative approach