Education Marketplace Research Articles

Evidence of Strategic Information Literacy Practices in Early Career Teachers' Navigation of TeachersPayTeachers

Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) has emerged as the most popular online educational marketplace of the moment, but exactly how curriculum marketplaces support professional learning and classroom curriculum design is still an emerging area of inquiry in educational research. This paper explores the perspectives of six novice teachers on the supplemental teaching materials available on TPT. Through semi-structured think-aloud interviews, we identified tensions related to teachers’ landscapes of practice, institutional mistrust, perceived authoritativeness of TPT sellers, curriculum marketplaces as altruistic platforms, and the affordances and constraints of TPT for managing finite resources. Findings suggest that professionals who work with preservice and in-service teachers must reframe their discussion of curriculum marketplaces toward developing early-career teachers’ critical curriculum cultivation practices. Such reframing has the potential to influence how educators make use of online curriculum marketplaces, what resources they download, and how those resources are employed.

Language and Education: Ideologies of Correctness

This review illustrates how language ideologies about correctness, in speaking and writing, have been discussed in research on the role of language in education. Research illustrates a give-and-take between the interests of multilingual speakers and advocates of language diversity on the one hand and, on the other, the correctness ideologies embedded in institutional demands for correctness and standardization (in schools and language policies) and commodification (in the global educational marketplace). More subtle than ideologies of correctness, language ideologies about “appropriate” language emerge as related to race, ethnicity, gender, and other embodied biases, and the nuanced mechanisms of language socialization illuminate the persistent dynamics of these appropriateness ideologies. Finally, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial epistemologies, the collaborative participatory research methods that are reframing what counts as correct and appropriate for the study of language and education, and the emerging role of generative artificial intelligence for language in education.

Technology-Based Education Marketplace Software for Adult Learning

The objectives of this research are: 1) to describe the empirical conditions of learning needs at the Community Learning Centre (CLC) in Indonesia; and 2) to explain how the marketplace model is used to address learning needs. Benefits from the education marketplace can assist learners in meeting their learning needs, connecting to various learning materials, and ensuring they can study and remain productive. From December 2022 to May 2023, the research methodologies used, i.e., mixed methods with qualitative and quantitative approaches, were carried out to 228 CLC students in 77 CLCs all over Indonesia. The findings of this study have resulted in prototypes of physical models and narrative models that can be used to address the community's learning needs in the CLC institutional context via the Education Marketplace software Smart Store. As an adult learner, the intelligent store marketplace has given adults the ability to select roles, i.e. as a learning resource. This study suggests that technology can enable and enhance lifelong learning, and that everyone can learn to meet their knowledge demands through technology.

Interpreting and enacting ‘empowerment’ in sport for development: the perspectives of UK stakeholders on a partnership-based programme in Malawi

This article examines the interpretation and enactment of ‘empowerment’ in a transnational Sport for Development programme that involved a partnership between a UK university and local stakeholders and practitioners in Malawi. In addressing whether the programme was underpinned by a neoliberal or more radical, progressive variant of empowerment, we employed semi-structured interviews with three categories of UK actors: university senior managers; university staff involved in project delivery; and student-volunteers. The findings reveal conflicting perspectives and tensions among these groups. The project staff team sought to promote a radical variant of empowerment through the programme. However, this was constrained by the use of the programme to burnish the University brand in the context of a competitive higher education marketplace and a tendency on the part of student-volunteers to uncritically position themselves as ‘superior’ to Malawian participants and view their involvement in instrumental terms. These perspectives had far reaching implications on relations of power within the programme, the extent to which it functioned on a partnership basis and whose interests were prioritised in its delivery.

Tensions undermining equitable school funding: insights from Australia

ABSTRACT School funding policy in Australia not only promotes educational equity in some ways but also creates substantial between-school resource inequalities due to its embrace of market ideologies. School funding policies are designed to promote school choice and competition, based on the assumption that they are both a right and an effective lever for improving educational outcomes. School funding is used to create an educational marketplace with varying ‘price points’, leading to the acceptance of a two-tiered system of basic provision via the public sector and enhanced provision for those willing to pay via the private sector. Political commitment to making school funding more equitable has been largely absent. Marketisation is the mechanism by which schooling maintains its capacity to reproduce social inequality without evoking class-based discourse or anxiety.

Satisfaction and Comfortability of the International Non-Arab Students at Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University in Their Accommodation Place: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract Background The growing international educational marketplace attracts students from all over the world. These students bring economic benefits to the host countries and their cultures and languages. However, international students face challenges and have needs and expectations when studying abroad. Comfortability in their accommodation whether it is in official dorms or private places among one of the most concerning challenges. Objectives To measure international non-Arab students’ satisfaction and comfortability level in their accommodation place, and to identify the effect of gender and place of accommodation on the satisfaction and comfortability level of students. Methods A cross sectional study with a total of 119 international non-Arab students were included in the study (42% males, and 58% females), Data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire including questions about age, gender, place of accommodation, satisfaction, and comfortability in the accommodation place. Results The mean age of the sample was (19.46 ± 2.02), and 58% of them were females. Most of the study participants lived in rented apartments (53.80%). The mean of the comfortability in the accommodation place was (32.08 ± 6.80). 46 % of the study participants had moderate comfortability in their accommodation. Satisfaction and comfortability in the accommodation place was associated with the gender of the students and the accommodation group (official dorms and private places), P values were 0.032, and 0.002, respectively. Conclusion and Recommendation The satisfaction and comfortability of the international students in the official dorms are lower than in the private places, and this needs more institutional support to improve the students’ experience.

“It’s a Chance, Not a Choice”: Black Families, School Choice, and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

Background: Public education reforms, such as expanded school choice, have become a critical lever for remaking urban landscapes. These reforms often aim to attract and retain affluent and White families in urban schools, so scholars have examined how these parents navigate the perceived risk of choosing these schools for their children. Purpose: This paper extends this scholarship to understand how other families experience these reforms in gentrifying landscapes. We ask: (1) How do Black parents navigate school selection in a gentrifying and expansive education marketplace? (2) How do Black parents’ perceptions of schooling shape their approach to school selection? (3) How do parents’ positionalities (e.g., gender, class, place attachments, and tenure in the city) influence their experiences? Research Design: We leverage a qualitative meta-analysis design that pools data from three separately conducted studies of gentrification in Washington, D.C. For this analysis, we center on 34 Black parents’ experiences as they navigate school selection. We reanalyzed data through the lens of critical spatial and racial theories. We paid particular attention to participants’ attachments to place, their perceptions of their choices, the school and neighborhood attributes participants valued, and how they navigated school selection. Findings: Parents considered a broad range of school and neighborhood characteristics as they constructed their choice sets. As they searched for schools, Black parents made a series of racialized compromises to find schools they perceived to be racially, physically, and socially safe for their children. Parents, for example, negotiated their desire for academic rigor with their perception of schools’ social climates and their perceptions that schools would be racially affirming and inclusive. Place and space were essential to parents’ choice set construction. Schools’ physical locations and perceptions of safety influenced whether parents viewed schools as viable options for their children. Conclusion: Our study underscores the multiple factors that bound choice set construction. Critically, Black parents’ experiences as they navigated school selection suggest that the expansive educational marketplace offered a “chance, not a choice” at high-quality educational opportunities.

The Cross and Our Calling

Redeemer University is a Canadian Christian university located in Ancaster, Ontario. Founded in 1983 in the Reformed Christian tradition, Redeemer’s mission is to prepare students to join Christ in his redemptive work through their careers and callings, while also fostering faculty research and scholarship in every discipline from a Christian perspective. Over the past forty years, Redeemer has evolved from a small college with limited degree granting authority to a full university offering a variety of programs including a B.A., B.Sc., B.Ed., B.B.A., B.Kin., and B. Comms. Redeemer currently faces challenges stemming from a post-Christian Canadian culture and the impact it has had on widespread individual belief in the psychological self as the ultimate source for personal identity and understanding. The changing higher education marketplace also contains a proliferation of degree granting institutions, and students are increasingly seeking clear and direct pathways to careers, making institutions like Redeemer with traditional degree nomenclature to appear less relevant and desirable. However, some of these challenges also present opportunities. Post-Christian culture also means that more Christians desire a unique, faith-based higher education institution, as it becomes more difficult to express faith in public spaces.

What's love got to do with it? Exploring the role of universities and third places in supporting human mate choice

PurposeThe growing cost and difficulty related to “finding someone” suggests that the role of service organisations in explicitly supporting and designing opportunities for love between customers merits further attention. This study employs a multidisciplinary approach of both services marketing and the economics of mate choice to understand how service organisations can exercise the third place effect and facilitate human mate choice (love) opportunities for consumers in extended service encounters.Design/methodology/approachThree qualitative co-design workshops were conducted with actors (students, casual and professional staff) from the Australian university ecosystem (n = 36) to identify consumer expectations related to mate selection in third place service contexts. A quantitative online survey of (n = 1207) current Australian university students was used to rank the importance of core and enhancing service elements.FindingsThe authors find that love holds a status in the minds of some consumers as an implicitly expected by-product of participation within the core service consumption experience in third places. For service providers to facilitate mate choice opportunities in third places, the results suggest that the design of the connective mechanism(s) should maximise opportunities for informal consumer-to-consumer interaction to allow prospective partners to ascertain compatibility. Further, consumers expect the organisational facilitation of engagement in order to clarify expected etiquette and support goal congruence. In the tertiary education marketplace for love, there is an increased preference for interpersonal engagement by those studying on campus (compared to externally), and a positive relationship between duration of enrolment and increased priority for mate choice service provision.Originality/valueThis research makes a novel theoretical and empirical contribution by being the first exploration of the economics of third place love in the tertiary education sector, also being a research primer for the field of services marketing to consider service design in third places to support mate choice.

Neoliberalism, Compulsory Education and Compulsion to Pay: Magnitude, Patterns and Determinants of Household Expenditure in Indian Punjab

Based on a recent primary survey, this study aims to examine the magnitude, patterns and determinants of household expenditure on compulsory schooling in Punjab. Our findings suggest that the increasing presence of private schools in the education marketplace, particularly in the contemporary era of neoliberalism, has commodified the education in the state, and these education providers offer compulsory schooling in diverse forms, with varying costs depending on the demand of their student clientele. Parents who enroll their children in elite private schools pay approximately seven times more than those choosing low-fee private schools. Private schools exert undue financial burden on their parent clientele (particularly those from low- and middle-income groups). This situation highlights the concept of ‘compulsion to pay’, especially in the absence of an acceptable quality of service provided by state-owned schools. Our regression analysis results on determinants of household expenditure reveal that households from socially and economically marginalised sections (for example, scheduled castes and the poor) spend significantly less than their more affluent counterparts. We recommend that the state take a more stringent approach to regulating these non-state education providers, particularly in terms of exorbitant fees, which would prevent further widening of the existing socio-economic inequality in the state.

Creating the “University experience”: promotional and multimodal video productions in Scandinavian higher education

ABSTRACT Promotional videos produced by higher education institutions (HEIs) are an important medium for introducing new generations of students to HEIs and communicating their roles and purposes to the outside world. Despite the widespread use of such videos, research on their contents and implications is relatively sparse. This study addresses this gap by analysing videos from 12 Scandinavian HEIs. The study found that the videos aligned with the concept of the ‘Promotional University 2.0’, emphasizing an intention to ‘aspire to more’ and ‘add to the real world’, and portraying the university as an arena for play and joy. Three main categories of videos emerged: student-centred, market-centred, and organization-centred. The study also highlights the ideological implications of the representations, as they reflect the tension between traditional and commercialized views of the university. The results contribute to an understanding of how promotional videos shape the expectations of students and other stakeholders. This research is important as it helps us understand how HEIs communicate and represent themselves in the highly competitive marketplace of higher education. It also illustrates the incommensurability between higher education policies aiming to promote democratization and serve the public interest on the one hand, and the images of HEIs created by promotional multimodal content on the other.

Building Practitioner Resilience

It is widely agreed that Indonesia is currently one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and with this growth has come the inevitable ‘internationalisation’ of the educational market, driven by investment, foreign aid, and trade agreements. Additionally, the Indonesian vocational and further education marketplace faces several challenges, risks, and vulnerabilities which make it necessary to integrate resilience development as a key component of future engagement practice. Technological change, economic instability, limited resources and emerging environmental and social challenges all weigh heavily on an emerging economy. Meaningful engagement therefore requires integrating resilience, so institutions can foster a culture of adaptability and flexibility. However, the content and conduct of imported models of engagement have been shown to lack the requisite local cultural sensitivity and therefore are having an unintended negative impact on educational practice (Allais, 2014). Whilst much of the substance of these imported models is delivered with good intention, there is a level of cultural inappropriateness, and this means that programs lack traction in the Indonesian milieu. In this article, the authors reflect on the deployment of the meaningful practice intervention model (Fairman, 2018) within a specified project, which is the creation of an industry-led vocational training system for the logistics and supply chain sector for Indonesia. In following this issue, the paper examines the approach, outcomes, initial design and relevant inclusion practices currently used in the education area in order to highlight a more culturally appropriate way forward for industry-led interventions, particularly in Occupational Standards and training systems design. The investigation also critically analyses the lessons learned and the changes required to assist any future foreign-designed capability development programs. The researchers critically examine their project using Driscoll’s (2007) Reflective Practice model, in order to better understanding what went well and what could be improved, paying particular relevance to donor-funded programs and the deployment of the meaningful practice intervention model.

Fragmented spaces in the urban landscape: A socio‐spatial analysis of educational supply in the city of Madrid

AbstractThe geography of school choice critically shapes families’ educational opportunities. Residential segregation, social inequalities and the educational marketplace interact in complex ways and produce spatialised educational opportunities for families. This paper analyses the link between these dimensions and how they structure families’ educational opportunities in the city of Madrid. Based on several administrative datasets that capture students’ residential location, their socio‐economic position, the schools they attend and the characteristics of school supply, our analysis reveals the uneven spatial distribution of the different school modalities in Madrid, where advantaged families and neighbourhoods have more diversified and socio‐economically homogenous nearby schooling options. The results also depict the way the city is spatially divided along a continuum of ‘privileged’ residential and educational assets. The paper reflects on how reforms expanding school choice and diversification of the educational market undertaken by the regional government may have increased the link between residential and school segregation.

The Sustainability of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUS) in the Post-COVID-19 World and Beyond

Abstract Higher education has long been the cornerstone of success in the United States. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have provided educational opportunities to African American students since the late 1800s. HBCUs have produced some of the most influential and successful graduates in all fields of study. HBCUs have produced some of the most influential and successful graduates in all fields of study. Writers like Toni Morrison, current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and entertainment icons like Oprah Winfrey are just a few of the most famous and influential graduates of HBCUs. These graduates have successfully succeeded in their respective fields and indelibly impacted society. HBCUs have also been instrumental in helping to close the achievement gap between African American and white students and have provided a safe and supportive environment for African American students to pursue their educational goals. This paper explores the organizational strategy and marketplace sustainability of HBCUs in the post-COVID-19 competitive higher education marketplace.

The quest for quality within an online educational marketplace: Indicators of expert-evaluated quality in U.S. history activities

Online educational marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT) have become popular among teachers, but the quality of materials offered is inconsistent. This descriptive study explored quality indicators for site materials. Examining a sample of TPT’s 100 best-selling 11th-grade U.S. history activities, we compared overall quality scores (as evaluated by three experts) with user review metrics and store characteristics. Expert ratings were not correlated with average user ratings, the number of user ratings, qualitative user feedback, the resource’s popularity rank, or marketing appeal. However, price and the seller’s number of followers were positively correlated with expert ratings, albeit weakly. These findings highlight how for-profit educational marketplaces constrain teachers’ ability to access and evaluate curricular materials. Ways forward for teachers, teacher educators, and the for-profit platforms are discussed.

Articulating Asia in Japanese Higher Education: Policy, Partnership and Mobility

The subject of this book, the ‘internationalisation’ of higher education in Japan, encompassed a number of policy goals, including securing research resources for Japan’s universities and making them more competitive in the education marketplace. A great deal of research has been conducted in this area. Unlike most of the prior research, however, this book is not devoted to the subject of internationalisation in higher education. The author, Jeremy Breaden, claims that previous studies do not provide sufficient understanding of the activities and changes accompanying the internationalisation of universities in Japan. It is necessary, he maintains, to address the matter within the political and cultural context in which Japanese universities are situated. This book, therefore, seizes on the ambiguous nature of Japan’s self-image constructed in juxtaposition to an ‘other’, namely Asia, and employs it as an analytic tool. This peculiarity is reflected in the term ‘articulate’, included in the title of this work. Foregoing an assessment based on a distinction between policy and implementation, the author sets out to illuminate, or ‘articulate’, the process whereby ‘Asia discourse’ within the policy domain is reinterpreted at the university level and ultimately implemented in the form of programs (7).

At the crossroad of performativity and the market: schools’ logics of action under a hybrid accountability regime

ABSTRACT School systems are shifting towards forms of post-bureaucratic governance (PBG), implying higher levels of school autonomy, choice, and performance-based management. Under this governance approach, which combines forms of administrative and market accountability, schools face greater levels of competition and external pressure to perform. Schools experience such pressures unevenly and address them through different responses. The paper develops a mixed-methods case study conducted in Madrid, a Spanish region where PBG reform has intensified in the last decades, and proposes a novel index to position schools within their reference local education markets. The results show that schools articulate a broad range of logics of action, largely interrelated with their position in the education marketplace. We also show that schools’ responses to external pressures are dynamic and marked by tensions of a different nature, which schools need to navigate, often without sufficient support from public authorities.

Giving It the Old College Try: Academic Departments and Undergraduate Curriculum Change in Political Science, 2009–2019

Thirty years after the last APSA-sponsored recommendations on the structure of the undergraduate political science major, new efforts at curriculum reform are under way. As a prelude to how the profession might respond, this article examines how political science departments made undergraduate curriculum changes during the 2010s. Based on a survey of department chairs in 2019–2020 (prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.), one-half of political science programs changed major requirements in the previous five years and 70% made revisions during the decade. Most changes involved adding courses or tracks and modifying course sequences within the prevailing model of subfield distribution. Assuming departments are rational actors seeking to improve student learning and respond effectively to the educational marketplace, various explanations of curriculum change were tested. Structural variables (institutional type and departmental factors) had no significant effects. Nevertheless, the survey revealed learning-based (acquiring disciplinary knowledge, developing intellectual skills) and market-based (concern about enrollments) motivations for change, as well as institutional constraints. Among curricular alternatives to the distribution model, evidence indicated greater support for promoting liberal learning outcomes. Moreover, the civic engagement movement influenced departmental decision-making. However, few programs made curriculum changes related to diversity, equity, or social justice, notable concerns among students and within the discipline.

Knowledge for sale: The construction of desired knowledge and identities in edu-marketing

The aim of this study is to examine how a particular object for consumption, professional development for teachers and principals, is marketed to schools, and what propositions and understandings are embedded in such offers. Adopting a conceptualization of marketing as a “perpetual questioning machine,” the study deploys and develops a theoretical approach from marketing studies to a new context: edu-marketing. The study is guided by the assumption that marketing functions as projection screen for the products and services offered to schools, but, also as a social and cultural space where dreams and desires are performed and governed. As such, marketing to school is not exclusively about selling things; but about what to be or who to become. Besides the theoretical contribution, the study contributes with empirical knowledge about (1) what concerns and desires this marketing “questioning machine” mobilizes and circulates and (2) how objects for consumption are de/stabilized in the education market. Thereby, it demonstrates some of the intricate relations between the growing education market and the values that those who work in schools are invited to strive for. It is argued that consumption at the education market-place is a question of identity, and therefore of branding and possible success.

The Boundaries of Competition: Examining Charter Schools’ Impact on Traditional Schools

For decades, charter schools have been promoted as a panacea for increasing competition in the educational marketplace. Supporters argue that increased choice forces neighboring schools to innovate, while opponents contend that charters “skim” students and funds away from traditional public schools (TPS). We test the two differing views by comparing academic achievement and school segregation in TPS in South Florida facing competition from charter schools compared to TPS with no competition. We find that when a charter school moves into the community, it fails to substantively change test scores or diversity of the nearby TPS, even 10 years after a charter is established.