Abstract
As the end date for the Millennium Development Goals approaches so the focus on goals, visions and policies for development after 2015 becomes ever heightened. However, there has been relatively little engagement by educational research community in these debates. What then is being written about education in the key post-2015 documents? How is education's role in development conceptualised by those most central to shaping new accounts? I explore these issues through an analysis of a key text on post-2015, the High Level Panel Report of May 2013 (UN HLP, 2013), and an exploration of a year's worth of posts on 30 prominent blogs and websites discussing post-2015 matters. This leads me to two further, interlinked questions: what are the implications of potential marginalisation and irrelevance from these debates for the field of international education and development research? What are the potential dangers for the field of closer engagement in these debates and their growing use of social media? The academic international education and development community may be more comfortable in keeping these policy debates at a distance, but this may play against the strong educational research drive to engage in social science that makes a difference. If there is to be engagement with post-2015 then alternative ways of developing practices of research, action and dialogue need further strengthened. This may include interdisciplinary dialogues around such issues as early childhood development, the role of professions in development or environmental sustainability. Engagement with the post-2015 debate would also require a careful analysis of how best to engage with the instrumentalised accounts of education that are dominant in the policy-advocacy arena. This would entail more strategic positions on the uses and dangers of social media. At the same time, engagement with development studies as well as the development policy community requires a reappraisal of epistemological and methodological stances.
Highlights
The most prominent international education and development conferences, those of the United Kingdom Forum for International Education and Training (2013) and the (North American) Comparative and International Society (2014) have both identified the need for the international education and development research community to engage seriously with the post-2015 debates but the lateness of these events in the post-2015 policy cycle are indicative of a slowness of response
In discussing the interplay between debates about development policy and the international education and development field, the project assumes a close relationship between development goals and development theory that is far from simple
The focus of this paper, was the High Level Panel Report (UN HLP 2013) but this was closely followed by the reports of the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG-SDG 2013); the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN 2013); UN Global Compact (UN Global Compact 2013) and the UN Secretary General (UN 2013)
Summary
The most prominent international education and development conferences, those of the United Kingdom Forum for International Education and Training (2013) and the (North American) Comparative and International Society (2014) have both identified the need for the international education and development research community to engage seriously with the post-2015 debates but the lateness of these events in the post-2015 policy cycle are indicative of a slowness of response. Even at this late date, and remembering the importance of the period after any new goals are agreed, the international education and development research community needs to decide whether to engage more seriously with the post-2015 process.
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