Monday, July 20, 2009

Critical Education: New journal to officially launch in early 2010

Critical Education is a new international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education.

Critical Education is an open access journal and uses the Open Journal Systems management and publication platform, which was developed by the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University to expand and improve access to research.

Critical Education is hosted by the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia and edited by Sandra Mathison, E. Wayne Ross and Adam Renner.

Mathison, Ross, and Renner have extensive experience as educators, researchers, and academic journal editors in the United States and Canada.

Mathison is currently Editor-in-Chief of New Directions in Evaluation. She is also editor and author of several books including Encyclopedia of Evaluation, The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment, Battleground Schools and most recently Researching Children's Experiences.

Ross co-edits Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor and Cultural Logic and is former editor of Theory and Research in Social Education. His books include Neoliberalism and Education Reform (winner of the 2009 Critics' Choice Award from the the American Educational Studies Association), Education Under the Security State, The Social Studies Curriculum, and Image and Education, among others.

Renner is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. As well, he serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Core in the Bellarmine College of Arts and Sciences. Once a high school math teacher, Renner received his Ph.D from the University of Tennessee in Cultural Studies. He teaches courses on social difference, social justice, globalization, international service learning, and general pedagogy.

Renner's research interests are tightly connected to the courses he teaches. He has published in such venues as the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Educational Studies, the International Journal of Learning, and Intercultural Education, among others. He is the editor of The Rouge Forum News.

Additionally, among many invited lectures, he has delivered more than forty papers at professional conferences in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica. Since 1998, Adam has coordinated an international partnership which pairs students and faculty from the US with educational and health workers in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

In the coming weeks and months Critical Education will be announcing additional members of the Editorial Team as well as members of the Editorial Collective.

Our aim is to officially launch the journal in early 2010.

For more information visit the journal's website.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Higher education is a public good, not a service

150 governments agree that higher education is a public good, not a service. See the lead article of the last issue of the World University News!
- quotes:
"UNESCO held its second World Conference on Higher Education in Paris last week. The biggest event on the global higher education calendar since the first world conference in 1998, the four-day meeting attracted 1,200 delegates from 150 countries. They debated current and future issues in higher education in the areas of social responsibility, access, equity and quality, internationalisation, regionalisation and globalisation, and learning, research and innovation. There was also a special focus on Africa. As the official media representative at the conference, University World News covered all the key events." (...)
"The 'public good' debate followed numerous political squabbles over the "commodification" of higher education. At its heart is the wish by several developed countries to export educational provision without facing barriers to entry in foreign markets. They have pushed other countries to sign into effect education's inclusion in GATS, which would allow private providers to set up freely in those countries.
Developing countries fear their governments will be constrained from regulating higher education. For instance, there has been concern that governments would be required under GATS to subsidise foreign education providers on the same basis as they fund local public universities or violate GATS anti-discriminatory clauses." (...)
"Use of the words 'public good' appeared in the first draft communiqué published on 26 June. It was replaced with 'public service' in the second draft - which also shunted the section on social responsibility in higher education down the list of themes - and then popped back up again in the final communiqué as the very first point: "Higher education as a public good is the responsibility of all stakeholders, especially governments," the communiqué says.
Minister after minister supported this stance and, sources said, India was insistent on this in the drafting group. India does not currently allow foreign higher education providers but the current government will present a bill to parliament to allow them in under certain conditions, an Indian delegate told the conference." (...)
"Speaking on behalf of the Latin American and Caribbean group within UNESCO, Argentina's Minister for Education Juan Carlos Tedesco said: "We have to stress the idea that education and knowledge is part of the public good which each and every citizen has a right to.""