Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion ed. by Ishmael Munene

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion ed. by Ishmael Munene Gretchen McAllister Munene, Ishmael, ed. Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion. London: Lexington Books, 2021. Ensuring All Children Learn: Lessons from the South on What Works in Equity and Inclusion brings together voices of practitioners, researchers, and policy makers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Ishmael Munene is ideal in his role as the editor as a representative of the Global South and a well-known author of comparative education leadership and higher education, as well as years of experience as an academic involved in supporting projects to increase learning access. The genesis of this book comes from the 2019 People's Action for Learning Network (PAL Network) conference in Kathmandu in Nepal. The focus of this conference was threefold and frames the purposes of this book: to explore underresearched equity and inclusion issues of marginalized populations, to use locally based data to assess educational interventions, and to connect key researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and civil society actors across the Global South. The book, through a regional focus (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and also a comparative lens, offers the reader a series of studies that examine the effectiveness of interventions, pedagogical and structurally, to address learning acquisition, usually in mathematics and literacy, among vulnerable populations, such as girls, low-income and out-of-school students, as well as others. What Munene does well with this volume is to frame the book through a critical lens as he provides a critique of "colonialist actions" of Western influenced organizations such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who have capitalized on the business of development and have played a role in shaping the requirements, inputs, and strategies to [End Page 218] address the Education for All (EFA) goals of basic education. He writes, "EFA activities have simply translated into creating additional space for these [excluded] groups while ensuring that the business [of education] goes on uninterrupted. There has been minimal change in the content taught, how it is taught, the resources in the teaching, the way it is assessed" (262). This frame is well supported by each chapter across the three regions as they illustrate the power of localized assessment of educational interventions that serve as a counter to the neoliberal development complex. Nico Vromant et al.'s chapter challenges the typical metric of attendance. They state that "attending school does not guarantee that children are learning" and further critique the inputs [offered by NGOs and other world governing bodies] such as "textbooks and teachers do not significantly increase learning" (101). This raises questions regarding the placement of resources from international communities and national funds to raise access. Reinterpretation of development goals and practices can be seen in Velasquez Duran et al.'s chapter that counters the notion of scaling up educational innovations, which usually is interpreted as standardizing some intervention and then applying it across multiple contexts. These authors state, "Scaling up does not consist of replicas, but rather of adaptations" (194). Saman Vergara Lope et al. in their chapter further point to the need to examine learning among students within the changing local context. Even when similar interventions are applied in different countries, context is key. In a particularly strong chapter, Vromant et al. measure the effectiveness of the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), originally derived in India, but known locally in Zambia as "Catch UP." They find that by adapting TaRL to the Zambian needs and context, they were able to see similar success with this model as their colleagues in India. This type of exploration of application and sharing of interventions, one of the goals of the PAL Network, points to the power of giving space to those in the Global South to collect and analyze their own data and then make decisions about policies and interventions. Though three regions are represented, the diversity of geographic voices was not always present. For example, the Latin American section relies on all Mexican contexts and authors. Adding in the voices of Colombia and Nicaragua, who were...