Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures, 2020
Educating the public is central to governmental and NGO responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Arisi... more Educating the public is central to governmental and NGO responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Arising from a sense of urgency, this education tends to focus on providing instructions and guidance on things such as handwashing, physical distancing, proper quarantining and recognising physical symptoms of the disease. Such imperatives are echoed by social and broadcast media and by local institutions, reflecting the immediate need to ‘get the message across’ to large publics in a short time. Increasingly, these messages are also backed-up with the threat of police, judicial and military power and continuous surveillance; noncompliance with prescribed behaviours can lead to sanctions, and in some countries to detention. It is our contention in this report that while the provision of clear, accurate and trustworthy information is essential during a pandemic, public education should not be limited to this approach alone. Instead, dialogic and situated community-based forms of public education are needed, premised on two-way communication with communities. We call this Transformative Public Education. Transformative Pubic Education is necessary under these conditions for two reasons: first, because such approaches are better at addressing the immediate risks of COVID-19 than the ‘inform and enforce’ model described above; and second, because such approaches are better able to successfully address the interrelated and underlying structural problems of massive wealth inequalities, gender inequality, infrastructure inequalities , ecological damage and climate change that feed into and interact with the pandemic. While instrumental forms of information sharing, education and training are useful in dealing with the immediate health risks of the pandemic, applied alone and with no sensitivity to the underlying issues faced by each community, their impact is likely to be limited. Instead, more interactive and emancipatory forms of education are required to build the understanding, knowledge and competences that citizens need to respond situationally, culturally and with solidarity to the pandemic. Such collective learning and solidarity, even in times of physical distancing, is possible.
Council and remains a research associate of the HSRC. He has published on a number of aspects of ... more Council and remains a research associate of the HSRC. He has published on a number of aspects of education -economy links, including vocational education and training systems in Africa, the skills development processes of micro and small enterprises, and the role of aid in shaping education. He advises a number of government departments (most notably in South Africa) and international agencies and in 2011-12 co-authored UNESCO's World TVET Report.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of developing into an internationa... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of developing into an international institution from the perspective of higher education leaders through the case study of one institution engaged in institutional transformation.
Design/methodology/approach This study employs the qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with key institutional managers.
Findings Findings suggest internationalization is a dynamic change process that goes beyond the rational and predictive elements of internationalization and cannot be confined to the rational planning and grand plans solely at institutional level. Reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis – institution, society and the nation – needs to be acknowledged and internationalization efforts need to go beyond the confines of the institution and extend into the society and the nation as a whole.
Originality/value Internationalization of higher education has been widely examined, but the reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis on the internationalization efforts of higher education institutions is thin to which this paper contributes.
Abstract Globally, vocational and lifelong education reform now places greater stress on employab... more Abstract Globally, vocational and lifelong education reform now places greater stress on employability skills rather than only simple technical skills. This study undertakes a thorough review of the vocational education curriculum offered at one institution in Hong Kong so as ...
Page 1. Great Ideas for Teaching About Africa EDITED BY MISTY L. BASTIAN &JANE L.... more Page 1. Great Ideas for Teaching About Africa EDITED BY MISTY L. BASTIAN &JANE L. PARPART *4 I.YNNF. RirNNF.ll rilltl.lSt IFR.S /99f К О II I. I) ER I О NOON -P elol~-\lf Í i il-' Ш 9 Contexts, Controversies, Dilemmas: Teaching ...
Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures, 2020
Educating the public is central to governmental and NGO responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Arisi... more Educating the public is central to governmental and NGO responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Arising from a sense of urgency, this education tends to focus on providing instructions and guidance on things such as handwashing, physical distancing, proper quarantining and recognising physical symptoms of the disease. Such imperatives are echoed by social and broadcast media and by local institutions, reflecting the immediate need to ‘get the message across’ to large publics in a short time. Increasingly, these messages are also backed-up with the threat of police, judicial and military power and continuous surveillance; noncompliance with prescribed behaviours can lead to sanctions, and in some countries to detention. It is our contention in this report that while the provision of clear, accurate and trustworthy information is essential during a pandemic, public education should not be limited to this approach alone. Instead, dialogic and situated community-based forms of public education are needed, premised on two-way communication with communities. We call this Transformative Public Education. Transformative Pubic Education is necessary under these conditions for two reasons: first, because such approaches are better at addressing the immediate risks of COVID-19 than the ‘inform and enforce’ model described above; and second, because such approaches are better able to successfully address the interrelated and underlying structural problems of massive wealth inequalities, gender inequality, infrastructure inequalities , ecological damage and climate change that feed into and interact with the pandemic. While instrumental forms of information sharing, education and training are useful in dealing with the immediate health risks of the pandemic, applied alone and with no sensitivity to the underlying issues faced by each community, their impact is likely to be limited. Instead, more interactive and emancipatory forms of education are required to build the understanding, knowledge and competences that citizens need to respond situationally, culturally and with solidarity to the pandemic. Such collective learning and solidarity, even in times of physical distancing, is possible.
Council and remains a research associate of the HSRC. He has published on a number of aspects of ... more Council and remains a research associate of the HSRC. He has published on a number of aspects of education -economy links, including vocational education and training systems in Africa, the skills development processes of micro and small enterprises, and the role of aid in shaping education. He advises a number of government departments (most notably in South Africa) and international agencies and in 2011-12 co-authored UNESCO's World TVET Report.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of developing into an internationa... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of developing into an international institution from the perspective of higher education leaders through the case study of one institution engaged in institutional transformation.
Design/methodology/approach This study employs the qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with key institutional managers.
Findings Findings suggest internationalization is a dynamic change process that goes beyond the rational and predictive elements of internationalization and cannot be confined to the rational planning and grand plans solely at institutional level. Reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis – institution, society and the nation – needs to be acknowledged and internationalization efforts need to go beyond the confines of the institution and extend into the society and the nation as a whole.
Originality/value Internationalization of higher education has been widely examined, but the reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis on the internationalization efforts of higher education institutions is thin to which this paper contributes.
Abstract Globally, vocational and lifelong education reform now places greater stress on employab... more Abstract Globally, vocational and lifelong education reform now places greater stress on employability skills rather than only simple technical skills. This study undertakes a thorough review of the vocational education curriculum offered at one institution in Hong Kong so as ...
Page 1. Great Ideas for Teaching About Africa EDITED BY MISTY L. BASTIAN &JANE L.... more Page 1. Great Ideas for Teaching About Africa EDITED BY MISTY L. BASTIAN &JANE L. PARPART *4 I.YNNF. RirNNF.ll rilltl.lSt IFR.S /99f К О II I. I) ER I О NOON -P elol~-\lf Í i il-' Ш 9 Contexts, Controversies, Dilemmas: Teaching ...
Internationally, vocational education and training (VET) has been castigated for its failings in ... more Internationally, vocational education and training (VET) has been castigated for its failings in quality terms. It has been seen as having poor standards, high costs and weak employment outcomes. However, the resultant combination of human capital, marketisation, new public management and employability has itself been critiqued as practically inefficacious, theoretical inadequate and environmentally illiterate. The moment is ripe to go beyond critique to develop a new approach. There are two major global policy moves that support this. First, the arrival of the SDGs forces us to ask how VET might fit into a global vision for sustainable development. Second, UNESCO’s new TVET Strategy, 2016-20 seeks to balance the traditional focus of VET on youth employment with a strong commitment to equity and reducing gender inequality, and to promoting sustainable development. Moreover, this is all underpinned by an emphasis on human development and the need to think more seriously about skills for life as well as for work. If we are going to talk about VET quality in the light of the SDGs, it becomes necessary to ask very different questions than have characterised the debate in recent decades. The logic of the SDGs and the vision of UNESCO fundamentally change understandings of the purpose of VET and require us to think about quality in ways that talk to how far this transformed vision is being achieved. Moreover, in thinking about quality not just as a summative evaluation but as a process of improvement, the new vision suggests the need to revisit existing processes of improving VET quality. Whilst we are critical of the existing focus on employability and human capital, this is not because we think that these are unimportant. Rather, it is because we insist on these being a partial rather than the exclusive answer so many of their proponents imply. To make it clear that we are not rejecting employability as a component of the quality VET debate, we will organise this paper around the search for an expanded notion of employability. This is informed by a range of work in the employability literature that rejects the narrow “initiative employability” account that has predominated in Anglophone accounts. Through exploring what “expanded employability” looks like, we can then start to ask what this implies for thinking, and action, about VET quality. Drawing on the human development and capabilities approach, here we offer a five-part characterisation of what an expanded employability notion might look like: 1. a broader awareness of who accesses public VET and why, focusing on data on motivations for accessing VET; 2. a broader conception of what is valued, with a particular emphasis on what learners value. This leads to an exploration of capability lists but also questions of aspirations; 3. a broader understanding of what is in the way of achieving successful outcomes from VET, with a particular emphasis on the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, of endowments and the challenges of conversion; 4. a broader sense of shared responsibility for employability, grounded in an insistence on a political economy of skills reading; and 5. a broader engagement with questions of sustainability, with particular attention to notions of sustainable work, production and consumption.
Uploads
Papers by Simon McGrath
The purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of developing into an international institution from the perspective of higher education leaders through the case study of one institution engaged in institutional transformation.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employs the qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with key institutional managers.
Findings
Findings suggest internationalization is a dynamic change process that goes beyond the rational and predictive elements of internationalization and cannot be confined to the rational planning and grand plans solely at institutional level. Reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis – institution, society and the nation – needs to be acknowledged and internationalization efforts need to go beyond the confines of the institution and extend into the society and the nation as a whole.
Originality/value
Internationalization of higher education has been widely examined, but the reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis on the internationalization efforts of higher education institutions is thin to which this paper contributes.
For the full-text: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/JOCM-10-2015-0185
The purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of developing into an international institution from the perspective of higher education leaders through the case study of one institution engaged in institutional transformation.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employs the qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with key institutional managers.
Findings
Findings suggest internationalization is a dynamic change process that goes beyond the rational and predictive elements of internationalization and cannot be confined to the rational planning and grand plans solely at institutional level. Reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis – institution, society and the nation – needs to be acknowledged and internationalization efforts need to go beyond the confines of the institution and extend into the society and the nation as a whole.
Originality/value
Internationalization of higher education has been widely examined, but the reciprocal influence of different levels of analysis on the internationalization efforts of higher education institutions is thin to which this paper contributes.
For the full-text: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/JOCM-10-2015-0185
The moment is ripe to go beyond critique to develop a new approach. There are two major global policy moves that support this. First, the arrival of the SDGs forces us to ask how VET might fit into a global vision for sustainable development. Second, UNESCO’s new TVET Strategy, 2016-20 seeks to balance the traditional focus of VET on youth employment with a strong commitment to equity and reducing gender inequality, and to promoting sustainable development. Moreover, this is all underpinned by an emphasis on human development and the need to think more seriously about skills for life as well as for work.
If we are going to talk about VET quality in the light of the SDGs, it becomes necessary to ask very different questions than have characterised the debate in recent decades. The logic of the SDGs and the vision of UNESCO fundamentally change understandings of the purpose of VET and require us to think about quality in ways that talk to how far this transformed vision is being achieved. Moreover, in thinking about quality not just as a summative evaluation but as a process of improvement, the new vision suggests the need to revisit existing processes of improving VET quality.
Whilst we are critical of the existing focus on employability and human capital, this is not because we think that these are unimportant. Rather, it is because we insist on these being a partial rather than the exclusive answer so many of their proponents imply. To make it clear that we are not rejecting employability as a component of the quality VET debate, we will organise this paper around the search for an expanded notion of employability. This is informed by a range of work in the employability literature that rejects the narrow “initiative employability” account that has predominated in Anglophone accounts.
Through exploring what “expanded employability” looks like, we can then start to ask what this implies for thinking, and action, about VET quality. Drawing on the human development and capabilities approach, here we offer a five-part characterisation of what an expanded employability notion might look like:
1. a broader awareness of who accesses public VET and why, focusing on data on motivations for accessing VET;
2. a broader conception of what is valued, with a particular emphasis on what learners value. This leads to an exploration of capability lists but also questions of aspirations;
3. a broader understanding of what is in the way of achieving successful outcomes from VET, with a particular emphasis on the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, of endowments and the challenges of conversion;
4. a broader sense of shared responsibility for employability, grounded in an insistence on a political economy of skills reading; and
5. a broader engagement with questions of sustainability, with particular attention to notions of sustainable work, production and consumption.