Global–local imbrications in education policy: Methodological reflections on researching the sociology of Teach for Bangladesh

Rino Wiseman Adhikary,Bob Lingard

doi:10.18546/lre.17.3.02

Abstract

This article documents the methodological thinking that underpined a sociological study of Teach for Bangladesh (TFB), a globally mobile yet locally embedded education policy situated in a developing world context. In order to reassess education policy vis-à-vis spatialities–power, relationships–resources, culture– change and imaginations–flows of globalization, this methodological thinking has to be both flexible and innovative. Analysis (topological) has demanded a combination of global ethnography and network ethnography, the former allowing global forces to be understood as spatially and culturally imbricated within intersecting policy worlds ([g]local cases), and the latter mapping and analysing spaces (networks and relations) and places (cultural negotiations) that characterize power within such imbrications. Data were collected both online and on site, resulting in both empirical advantages and practical challenges. As a sociological attempt to study policy mobilities in education in a Southeast Asian context, this study offers an innovative methodology and a befitting set of analytical vocabulary.

Highlights

This article provides an account of the methodological thinking that underpinned our research on the localization of a global reform in teacher education in a developing world context, in Bangladesh
The research examined in sociological terms how a global teacher education policy model, Teach for America/All (TFA/All), was locally institutionalized and embedded in Bangladesh as a non-governmental organization (NGO)-cum-social enterprise (SE), Teach for Bangladesh (TFB)
We asked simple questions: what is TFB? Was there a policy at all? If so, how was it constituted globally and locally? And under what policy conditions? during our fieldwork, we discovered that TFB was more than a local organizational career of globalized reform

Summary

Introduction

This article provides an account of the methodological thinking that underpinned our research on the localization of a global reform in teacher education in a developing world context, in Bangladesh (see Adhikary, 2019; Adhikary and Lingard, 2018; Adhikary et al, 2018). Such internet-based findings presented TFB as a local/izing carrier of a global reform policy in teacher education, highlighting the relationships, actors and organizations central to TFB’s enactment These observations signalled transformations in social entrepreneurial policy and governance within PESoB and NGO sectors in Bangladesh. If spatial organization is the ‘outcome’ of ‘attempts to use space efficiently’ (Adams, 1971: 54; Morrill, 1974), an attempt to efficiently organize sociospatial action is practically an act of governing social life by setting new scales, relations, fields and rules of the game Such spatial deformations and reformations are the results of powerful global imaginations that manifest into ‘imaginary worlds’ (Appadurai, 1996), in our case, of education policy (Peck and Theodore, 2015; Wright, 2011; Shore and Wright, 2011). The global and the local are imbricated through the work of networks

Discussion and conclusion

Notes on the contributors