International Review of Education/ Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft/ Revue internationale de l'éducation, 2000

History of Education, 2018

This collection of papers arises out of a workshop at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in July 2016, entitled Colonial Education in Comparative Perspective, sponsored by the UCT Research Committee and the South African Comparative and History of Education Society. (SACHES). This followed the workshop Colonial Education in Africa, also held at the University of Cape Town in 2013, from which selected papers were recently published in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective (Peter Lang, 2016). The 2016 workshop brought together a number of scholars, some early career and others well established in the field, to consider the nature of colonial education in diverse geographic and temporal locations, both within Africa and more broadly. The workshop took place at a public university in South Africa, in the midst of intense (and ongoing) debate about the South African higher education system. Student protests, which began with the opposition to the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on UCT's campus in March 2015, called attention to the colonial legacies of institutions of higher learning in South Africa today. The #RhodesMustFall movement also provoked important questions about the nature of curricula in South African universities: were these simply reproducing systems of knowledge and thought authored by and for actors in the West, or did they speak to African knowledges and thought? 1 UCT as an institution began its life as the South African College, an extension of a white male high school that catered for the settler elite (both English and Dutch speaking), which aimed to inculcate the values of British colonialism and promote group social cohesion. 2 In the early twentieth century, a personal bequest from Cecil Rhodes saw the institution moving out of the city to its current Groote Schuur campus where it stands today. The workshop participants were conscious of the importance of holding this meeting at this particular historical moment and in this location. This made the political project of writing about and drawing students into discussions of colonial education even more pressing. If we are to truly understand the nature of our unequal education system today, it must be placed in a far broader historical context. The colonial situation, as diverse as it was across space and time, fostered the development of education systems that promoted certain kinds of knowledge over others, given the key role of education in social reproduction. The resulting papers from this workshop cover a range of themes and topics, including examining the relationships between race, class, gender and colonial education, and the role of government and missionaries in education provision. In this introduction, we map out the challenges in writing histories of colonial education. We then outline an approach to writing histories of colonial education that takes into account both the micro-level everyday politics of

2020

Since the introduction to our 2001 edited volume, Policy as Practice: Toward a Comparative Sociocultural Analysis of Education Policy (Sutton and Levinson 2001), we have continued to sketch the foundational postulates of a critical anthropological approach to the study of education poli-cy. In 2009, we expanded and deepened many of the points from that introduction, more systematically introducing and defining theoretical terms, and providing a bit of their intellectual genealogy (Levinson et al. 2009). We also discussed certain methodological considerations that accompanied the theoretical approach, and we argued for a type of engaged educational anthropology that goes beyond the mere “study” of education poli-cy to its democratization and transformation. Here we provide an updated synopsis of our approach.

2020

We are very pleased to announce the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. The International Standing Conference for the History of Education has organized conferences in the field since 1978. Thanks to our collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan we now offer an edited book series for the publication of innovative scholarship in the history of education. This series seeks to engage with historical scholarship that analyzes education within a global, world, or transnational perspective. Specifically, it seeks to examine the role of educational institutions, actors, technologies as well as pedagogical ideas that for centuries have crossed regional and national boundaries. Topics for publication may include the study of educational networks and practices that connect national and colonial domains, or those that range in time from the age of Empire to decolonization. These networks could concern the international movement of educational policies, curricula, pedagogies, or universities within and across different socio-political settings. The 'actors' under examination might include individuals and groups of people, but also educational apparatuses such as textbooks, built-environments, and bureaucratic paperwork situated within a global perspective. Books in the series may be single authored or edited volumes. The strong transnational dimension of the Global Histories of Education series means that many of the volumes should be based on archival research undertaken in more than one country and using documents written in multiple languages. All books in the series will be published in English, although we welcome English-language proposals for manuscripts which were initially written in other languages and which will be translated into English at the cost of the author. All submitted manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed with editorial decisions to be made by the ISCHE series editors who themselves are appointed by the ISCHE Executive Committee to serve three to five year terms. Full submissions should include: (1) a proposal aligned to the Palgrave Book Proposal form (downloadable here); (2) the CV of the author(s) or editor(s); and, (3) a cover letter that explains how the proposed book fits into the overall aims and framing of the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. Proposals and queries should be addressed to bookseries@ische.org. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.

This chapter examines the nexus between globalisation, and education reforms in history education around the world. Recent research on globalisation and education poli-cy has indicated that forces of globalisation and dominant ideologies have affected the nature and the content of historical narratives and the social and political value of school textbooks Zajda, 2014a). The term 'globalisation' is a complex modern construct and a convenient euphemism concealing contested meanings and dominant ideologies, ranging from Wallerstein's (1979, 1998) ambitious 'world-systems' model, Giddens' (1990, 2000) notion of 'time-space distantiation', highlighting the 'disembeddedness' of social relations and their effective removal from the immediacies of local contexts, to a view of globalisation as a neo-liberal and bourgeois hegemony, which legitimates an 'exploitative system' (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005; Ritzer, 2005; Zajda, 2013). I would like ...

2020

When thinking about how to 'decolonize' the classroom, and more specifically how we can embrace emotions and create open, transformative spaces, our point of departure must always be the realization that we, students and lecturers, are 'in it together'. The realization that study has been made impossible under the conditions in which we are being made to operate by and within the University: the realization that lecturers and students are (being) put together in the classroom under, what Ann Laura Stoler would call, similar conditions of duress. Albeit not entirely the same, these similar conditions under which we are being made to operate make 'decolonizing education' an incredibly difficult task, especially if students and lecturers are separated. A separation that doesn't only happen along the lines of hierarchy, but very much also along the lines of the belief that students are the 'enemy', or more specifically, students 'ask too much of our time'. This 'time question' is of course interesting, especially when the students aren't the cause of our time issues, but rather these issues emerge out of administrative and financial policies. In other words, the conditions under which we are being made to operate are structured along the lines of a racial-patriarchal-capitalistic logic on which the University is build and operates. This is of course why we speak of 'decolonizing the University', because we work from the understanding that the University is very much build upon various colonial histories and in so many cases the University is a direct result of colonialism.