Neoliberal Education System Research Articles

Becoming the falconer: productive feedback for the redrafting of creative writing

ABSTRACT Within a wider neoliberal education system, time and space for redrafting creative writing are marginalised, with focus on the written product rather than the writing process. This precludes the development of young writers. As academics and creative writers working in university Schools of Education, we use inductive autoethnography to explore our memories of feedback on creative writing throughout our writing lives. The affective dimension of feedback, with readers having power over their writers, is emphasised. We identify how feedback can be unproductive and unempathetic, harming the writer. We also identify how feedback can be productive, nurturing the writer through the process towards an internal dialogue with their inner ideal reader – their ‘superaddressee.’ It is the internal dialogue with the superaddressee, who perfectly understands what the writer is communicating, that develops the writer over time, giving them control over the writing process and facilitating redrafting. We recommend the professional development of teachers to become self-reflexive readers, who plan focused writing assessments, and provide productive feedback as well as mentorship programmes in publishing to develop new writers. Future research should explore the psychoanalytic nature of the writer–reader relationship and what the facilitation of redrafting looks like in educational settings.

Using data as poetry and text in case study research – poetic representations of adult learner experiences in neighbourhood houses

PurposeWe argue this method of inquiry better represents the participants' learning, lives and experiences in the formal neoliberal education system prioritising performativity, categorising and ranking students.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores using poetry as a research method to reveal the learning experiences of adult learners, who have often had disruptive experiences of the formal schooling system and return to study in community-based education spaces. Inspired by Laurel Richardson’s transgressive technique of presenting sociological data through poetry as method, we use poetic representations of these learners' lives alongside case study research methodology. The research was conducted in conjunction with Neighbourhood Houses in Victoria, Australia. Qualitative data were generated through conducting multiple case studies of learners across various adult community education (ACE) sites. In this research, some case studies were presented in the traditional method of writing biography, others were written in the form of found poetry, which we refer to as data as poetry and text. The paper uses found poetry through participant-voiced poems written from interview transcripts. We argue this method of inquiry better represents the participants' learning, lives and experiences in the formal neoliberal education system prioritising performativity, categorising and ranking students. Our findings highlight the benefits of using poetry to communicate data in case study research as it effectively represents the experiences of adult learners' lives in a creative and concise form, transgressing normative practices of writing education research. These poetic representations of data reveal learner experiences in an embodied and agentic way while providing readers with a deep and rich understanding of these crucial adult learning spaces.FindingsOur findings highlight the benefits of using poetry to communicate data in case study research as it effectively represents the experiences of adult learners' lives in a creative and concise form, transgressing normative practices of writing education research.Originality/valueThis research paper is empirical research and has not been submitted elsewhere for publication.

Listening to Hong Kong children's perspectives through pretend play

AbstractQuality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) has become an increasing concern in recent years. The issue has been regularly discussed by different stakeholders. However, the rising concern regarding quality in ECEC has not seriously taken into account children's perspectives. Hong Kong, with its academic‐driven education system, is no exception. Children's perspectives have been neglected under the impact of neoliberalism on education in Chinese society. Engaging with children's perspectives has thus become an important matter in Hong Kong society. In April 2019, a children's pretend‐play project was started in an open playground in Hong Kong. This project aimed to help children regain their subjectivities and share their thoughts through the process of pretend play. Children in this project were invited to create, pretend and imagine themselves in the role of superheroes so that they could express their perspectives. This alternative practice opened a space for children to liberate themselves through pretend‐play activities, while reworking the conventional pedagogies found in the neoliberal education system. The findings offer critical reflections on how to improve quality in ECEC by redeveloping trust and respect among adults and children through listening to children's perspectives.

Teaching critical hope with creative pedagogies of possibilities

ABSTRACT How can we teach critical hope, amidst contemporary challenges that seem intractable, within neoliberal educational institutions that work to foreclose transformative pedagogies and through academic critique that can result in cynicism and disillusionment among students? Here, I draw on the writings of Paolo Freire, J.K. Gibson-Graham and Sarah Amsler, as well as long-term research at the University of Sussex in the UK, to propose a critical-creative pedagogy that enables students to better understand global challenges and to imagine alternative responses to them. Consisting of whole-person learning, the use of arts and design methods and praxis, this pedagogy aims to nurture students’ critical hope. In this article I sketch an outline of its elements, advance philosophical arguments for their importance and share brief examples from my own teaching in International Development to show how it can be enacted in classrooms. Critical-creative pedagogy necessitates generative theorising that allows pedagogies of possibilities to emerge and grow, critical engagement with the neoliberal education system to find spaces for action, and a radical understanding of pedagogical creativity. It results in practices of pedagogical prefiguration that enable students, and educators, to collectively imagine heterodox responses to contemporary social, economic and ecological challenges.

The impact of the implementation of ‘double reduction’ policy on tutors in shadow education: legislation goals and early experiences

ABSTRACT Private supplementary tutoring, also known as shadow education, has had a profound influence on Chinese education during the past twenty years. The rapid expansion of shadow education has attracted the attention and increased regulation of the Chinese government. In July 2021, the Chinese government adopted one of the most restrictive legislative constraints on shadow education: the so-called ‘double reduction’ policy. This policy aims to reduce the dual burden for students of on-campus classes and off-campus tutoring. Through analysis of China’s central and provincial double reduction policies, this study examines the policy goals, accompanying instruments, and delineated implementation strategies. Interviews with tutors from shadow education institutions in five major cities in China uncover the strategies shadow education tutors have applied to mitigate the policy constraints and offer criticism of the Chinese political system and deficiencies in the neoliberal education system.

Prisons Do Not Disappear Problems, They Disappear Human Beings

Nicholas Mwangi explores how our generation has been forcefully torn apart from the true history of our land by hegemonies around knowledge and learning. He reminds us that though the neoliberal education system continues to depoliticise young people, we must dare to dream of a better society, educate ourselves politically, and organise towards a system that takes care of the majority and not a few in society, as Maina wa Kinyatti did.

'I no longer trust our son's school': Parents resisting the return to face-to-face teaching

Not all parents across England are happy about sending their children back to school, following the lifting of lockdown measures in March 2021. Our qualitative research, listening to accounts from eighty-five such families, finds that these concerns stem from Covid-related anxiety, most commonly linked to protecting members of the household at greater risk of severe illness. The experiences of these parents resisting the return to school sheds light on the fragmented nature of our education system – the uneven, haphazard practices across different schools – and how once again this differentially impacts certain students and their families. Particular difficulties for students with a special educational needs diagnosis (SEND), or those from multi-generational households, are underlined. Whilst some parents feel bullied into compliance, others are pressurised to deregister in a spate of what we term 'Covid off-rolling'. Several families have been able to fully embrace a permanent move to genuine home education, further raising criticisms of our competition-driven, performative, neoliberal education system with its narrow curriculum offer. A comprehensive education system with critical pedagogy at its heart is what is called for.

Towards a neoliberal education system in Queensland: Preliminary notes on senior secondary schooling reforms

Neoliberalism is often understood as being both an epoch of capitalism and a zealous ideological commitment to the primacy of private property and free markets. In practice, it has tended towards mobilising state power in the interests of capital, remaking societies and individuals in this process. Perhaps inevitably, education systems, the world over, have been reformed in light of neoliberalism’s overarching imperatives. It is in this light that we can best understand and make sense of recent reforms to Queensland’s senior secondary schooling system. While some details continue to be ironed out, the reformed system will revolve around three main planks: (a) an assessment model combining school-based and common external assessment, (b) a process that quantifies and standardises school-based assessment through external review processes and (c) a transition away from the Overall Position (OP) rank towards an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR). These changes to assessment and tertiary admission represent a pivot away from Queensland’s historical commitments to school-based assessment and teacher and curriculum flexibility towards a standardised national system of curriculum and external assessment. Ultimately, the reforms embody the ideological commitments of neoliberalism, perpetuating schools as producers of human capital. Hence, Queensland’s senior secondary schooling reforms ought to be understood through two different frames: firstly, as embodying the dominant ideological imperatives of neoliberalism and, secondly, that education is, within this context, being reconstituted to meet the perceived needs of capital.

The Chilean Winter: A Student Revolution

The 2011 Chilean Winter was a student movement that fought to end the rampant inequality found in the nation’s neoliberal education policies, which found their origins in the reforms enacted during the 1980s by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In response to the nation’s economic crisis, he attempted to cut government spending by decentralizing and privatizing the education system. The results were largely unfavorable; Chilean education came to be known for its socioeconomic stratification, unequal schools, and its exorbitantly expensive universities. Despite the undoubtedly negative outcome of Pinochet’s policies, they remained relatively untouched until student movements in 2006 and 2011 began to challenge them. Although almost all of the issues that the 2011 Chilean Winter addressed were the result of Pinochet’s policies, it would be incorrect to claim that the students were protesting his reforms. Instead, the movement was a reaction to the failure of the nation’s post-dictatorship governments, the Concertación coalition and right-centrist presidency of Sebastián Piñera, to restructure Chile’s neoliberal education system despite its numerous problems. This work aims to disprove the erroneous view of many newspapers and academic journals that the student movement was caused directly by Pinochet’s policies. In other words, I wish to separate protest against the legacy of the Pinochet reforms—that is the current system—from protest against the reforms themselves. The work will be divided into two main sections. The first section will focus on demonstrating the lasting impact of Pinochet’s education programs, with a particular emphasis on statistical studies performed by other researchers. The second section will be devoted to analyzing the roots of the 2011 student movement. This part of the investigation will focus on rhetoric from the students themselves, especially movement leader Camila Vallejo.

Una revolución neoliberal: la política educacional en Chile desde la dictadura militar

Resumen El artículo propone una lectura analítica del sistema educacional chileno a partir de la dictadura cívico-militar, encabezada por Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), en la que se transforma el modelo social, económico y político del país, imponiendo un Estado neoliberal incluso antes de que este modelo se vislumbrara como el horizonte en el resto de la región. Se recorre el proceso de transformación del sistema de educación chileno, los cambios en la morfología del sistema escolar y sus consecuencias, así como la consolidación de esta matriz durante los gobiernos democráticos de la coalición de centro izquierda, la Concertación (1990-2010). Si bien el desarrollo de este proyecto educacional se inicia con fuertes tensiones ideológicas entre el catolicismo y el liberalismo, estos logran converger en el principio de libertad de enseñanza. Bajo esta premisa, se articulan numerosas reformas que dan forma a un sistema educacional neoliberal. En consecuencia, se dará cuenta de la configuración de un nuevo orden educativo, hoy arraigado en la sociedad chilena, en el que la educación se establece como un bien individual bajo la égida de la competencia generalizada, el objetivo de la eficiencia y la cultura de la evaluación. Este artículo surge en el marco del desarrollo de mi tesis doctoral y se basa principalmente en el análisis de literatura académica y textos oficiales.

Portuguese

The history of the University in Portugal lives a moment of great relevance in the transition to democracy in the decade 1970-1980. Under the Marcello Caetano government (1968-1974) –the continuation of the New State of Salazar, the «fascism of the professorship»– there were some internal reforms, state reform experiences (with the creation of new universities and schools of higher education) and important struggles of students against the dictatorship; after the «Carnation Revolution» of April 25, there was also a poorly planned and not achieved attempt to draw a «political university» of Marxist influence, with the intention to accompany the extreme phase of the revolution. With the 1976 Constitution, based on a democratic nature of Occidental countries, and the first constitutional governments, higher education has been consolidated in our binary system, made by university and polytechnic. However, there is also evidence of the trend towards a neoliberal education system, announcing the foundation of many universities and particular institutes. In order to discuss this complex evolution, the article exceeds the decade of the 70s of the XX century, even to the current XXI century, characterized by the crisis of the universits, which leads us to ask: Which University? How to reference this article Torgal, L. R. (2015). A Universidade em Portugal em periodo de transicao para a democracia e para o neoliberalismo. Espacio, Tiempo y Educacion , 2(2), 155-171. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/ete.2015.002.002.008

The conservative response to the 2011 Chilean student movement: neoliberal education and media

This paper focuses on the relationship between the media and educational policies in the context of the ‘neoliberal newspeak’, which has characterized the current circulation of ideas in cultural production. Using framing theory, this article presents a critical discourse analysis on the editorials published about the 2011 student movement by El Mercurio, the most influential newspaper in Chile. El Mercurio is more than a newspaper. It is an institution; an institution that supports conservative ideas. El Mercurio framed the public discussion about educational policies and defended neoliberal education based on three discourses: the neoliberal system is absolute, public education is valued less than private and education is a technical issue, not political. By invoking this rhetoric strategy, these discourses attempted to maintain the neoliberal education system in Chile, which in turn rejected the social struggles of the student movement.

Singaporean Boys Constructing Global Literate Selves through Their Reading Practices In and Out of School

This article examines how threeSingaporean boys constructed their identities as global literate citizens through their reading practices in and out of school. An invisible network of resources contributed to their construction of a global literate identity relevant for local–global markets. The acquisition of a global literate identity as a form of intercultural capital is an unequal game in a neoliberal education system and social networks must be recognized as key nodes for literacy re‐vision. [reading, identity, globalization, class, cultural capital]

Teaching within and against the circle of privilege: reforming teachers, reforming schools

Three decades of neo-liberal education in western countries, particularly English-speaking countries, have not served most children well. The evidence is mounting that the neo-liberal experiment has been a failure on many grounds, not least because of its deprofessionalizing effect on teachers. The disciplinary effects of neo-liberal policy frameworks on education remain powerful, but there are numerous teachers and schools who have resisted the regime of managerialism and accountability. This paper celebrates such activists. It argues that the internal focus on the delivery of instruction and test-taking inside schools ignores the point that the major influences on the school performance of children exist outside rather than inside the school. The paper argues that young people who have been ‘othered’ and put at a disadvantage by the neo-liberal education system deserve to be treated in a more dignified, engaged and respectful manner than seems to be the case within the ideology of accountability and top-down managerialism.

Neoliberal Education and Student Movements in Chile: Inequalities and Malaise

This article examines the major consequences of the neoliberal education system implemented in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and how two important student movements contested this structure. In 2006 and 2011, thousands of students filled the streets to demand better public education, more social justice and equal opportunities. They rejected the free-market fundamentalism in education that has generated segregation, stratification and inequalities. Students have become important political actors who re-evaluated the discussion on education in Chile. By doing so, they are rejecting the competitive and privatized nature of the current system, which is lacking in quality and equity, and they are demonstrating that new ‘social imaginary’ in Chilean education is possible.