Globalization and Teacher Professionalization

From the Publisher.

OVERVIEW: As the first country in the world to enact a formal policy of multiculturalism, Canada has made impressive strides toward promoting civic inclusion for all; however, the education system remains less than forthcoming about the injustices that shape our democracy and create conditions that teach young people to see difference as deficiency. Ratna Ghosh and Mariusz Galczynski seek to persuade educators to incorporate the ideology of multiculturalism into their classroom pedagogy and professional practice. In this third edition, Redefining Multicultural Education mobilizes an expanded definition of multiculturalism that encompasses gender identity, sexual orientation, religious expression, and (dis)ability.

New features include material on environmental awareness, cyberbullying, multilingual learners, digital technologies, youth radicalization, and recent events in Quebec and First Nations communities. Integrating vignettes, discussion questions, and sample activities with techniques for applying a multicultural lens to any subject area or level of study, this lively and accessible guide is essential for those interested in preparing students for a global economy in which innovation relies, before all else, on diversity.

Como ha sucedido en otros trances de la historia contemporánea es hacia la educación donde primero se dirigen las intenciones de transformación socioeconómica de los países. Así, los cambios experimentados por nuestras sociedades —donde el conocimiento, la información y la comunicación se han vuelto centrales— plantean nuevos desafíos a la educación. Sin embargo, es la educación desde un núcleo teórico bien estructurado la que debe abordar sus propias problemáticas y no actuar de manera simplemente funcional a los cambios que se desarrollan a su alrededor. Y tal núcleo teórico se enfrenta hoy al imperativo de pensar la situación actual de una cultura, economía y sociedad diferentes. Por ello, uno de los aspectos centrales que cabe reflexionar es la nueva configuración ofrecida por la función cultural que cumple la educación, en tanto hoy rige sobre ella el imperativo de dirigir la educación hacia el conocimiento. Un conocimiento que es preciso diferenciar de una amplia variedad de c...

Como ha sucedido en otros trances de la historia contemporánea es hacia la educación donde primero se dirigen las intenciones de transformación socioeconómica de los países. Así, los cambios experimentados por nuestras sociedades —donde el conocimiento, la información y la comunicación se han vuelto centrales— plantean nuevos desafíos a la educación. Sin embargo, es la educación desde un núcleo teórico bien estructurado la que debe abordar sus propias problemáticas y no actuar de manera simplemente funcional a los cambios que se desarrollan a su alrededor. Y tal núcleo teórico se enfrenta hoy al imperativo de pensar la situación actual de una cultura, economía y sociedad diferentes. Por ello, uno de los aspectos centrales que cabe reflexionar es la nueva configuración ofrecida por la función cultural que cumple la educación, en tanto hoy rige sobre ella el imperativo de dirigir la educación hacia el conocimiento. Un conocimiento que es preciso diferenciar de una amplia variedad de competencias de acceso, procesamiento y recopilación de información de los que provee actualmente la psicología educativa, así como de las habilidades operativas específicas que interesan a la producción económica. Ambas aproximaciones tienden a separar al conocimiento y a la educación del rol que juegan en la cultura y sociedad actuales y a los que cabe el rol de una formación ciudadana capaz de integrar al cuerpo social.

Over the past two decades, perhaps no factors have been as inextricably linked to the externalization of educational policies and reforms as the league tables resulting from large-scale international studies by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Sensationalized by the media in nearly every nation across the globe, the results of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)—and to a lesser extent its Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS)—have been reported to the public and to policymakers in the form of rankings which depict how one’s home country measures up to the rest of the world. Whatever the response, these LSAs, which target student populations in vastly different nations, have contributed to externalization through the importation and exportation of educational policies between countries. However, it is crucial to understand that each international LSA only offers a snapshot of any country’s educational system: one that is panoramic in scope, but grainy in resolution and failing to capture the entire subject in its frame. A meta-interpretation of PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and ICCS helps us develop a clearer snapshot, so that we can see the “big picture” of what the studies, together, reveal about educational quality in particular countries. Moreover, studies focused on top-performing countries have confirmed that teacher quality makes a difference for educational effectiveness, as the best-performing nations augment the status of teaching as a profession by being restrictive and selective about who becomes a teacher and by offering compensation equitable to other professions requiring formal qualification. As such, international LSAs should be utilized not in the precarious externalization of educational policies and practices intended to enhance educational effectiveness, but in the championing of the contributions of teachers and the teaching profession to the globalized world.

Since the mid-1990s, perhaps no factor has been as inextricably linked to the externalization of educational policies and reforms (Schriewer, 1989) as the league tables resulting from international large-scale assessments (LSAs) sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Sensationalized by the media in nearly every nation across the globe (Steiner-Khamsi, 2003), the results of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)—and to a lesser extent its Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS)—have been delivered to the public and to policymakers in the form of rankings that expose the truth about how one’s home country measures up to the rest of the world. And while LSAs overtly intend to gauge student achievement, their results implicitly affect schoolteachers and the teaching profession, under the assumption that greater teacher efficacy should yield better student performance. As a result, LSAs function as an accountability measure, as parents, administrators, and policymakers interpret international rankings to be objective indicators of the quality of work performed by teachers and the quality of the teaching workforce itself.

In the context of the US and Canada, educational policy trends over the past two decades have increasingly sought to link student performance on standardized tests to accountability measures directed at teachers. Motivated by demands to prepare students for such tests, the standardization of curriculum and programs like No Child Left Behind actually represent the de-skilling of teachers, ensuring that classroom instruction is “foolproof.” In effect, such reforms have identified teachers as a major factor in increasing learning and quality, but they have acted towards diminishing the power and independence of teachers (Tatto, 2006). Moreover, the current state of teacher education in North America, entrenched in a philosophy that stresses the altruistic and pathetic aspects of teaching over professionalism and content knowledge, contributes both to the declining prestige of the teaching profession (Hunt, 1988) and declining social positioning of schoolteachers in the occupational hierarchy (Rytina, 2000).

Yet with over a third of the world’s countries relying on standardized tests as an indispensible tool for measuring educational effectiveness (Kamens & McNeely, 2010), the global rankings produced by international LSAs can actually serve to champion the professionalism of American and Canadian teachers. Despite their various limitations (White & Smith, 2005; Creemers, 2006; Cheung & Chan, 2008; Crossley, 2008; Perry, 2009), international LSAs can direct attention and autonomy back towards teachers. In fact, what PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and ICCS make clear is that the countries with the best performing students—i.e., Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chinese Taipei—elevate the status of the teaching profession by being restrictive and selective about who becomes a teacher, by making professional development available and accessible, and by granting teachers more autonomy in the classroom.  Furthermore, these high-performing countries offer teachers compensation that is equitable to other professions requiring formal qualification (Carnoy et al., 2009). Such insights, which run counter to current policy trends, reveal that intrinsic rewards cannot compensate for extrinsic ones—and that teacher quality cannot improve in the US and Canada until the profession is seen as an attractive and financially-rewarding career option for high-quality candidates (Gordon, 2000; Huat See, 2004); as long as the emotional and social aspects of teaching are emphasized, the rigor and professionalism of educational work will continue to be undermined (Giroux 1988; Zeichener, 2009; Shields, 2012).

In response to rising youth unemployment and pressures for democratization, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s explicitly transformational Education Reform for the Knowledge Economy (ERfKE) aims to overhaul the centralized public education system. ERfKE’s curricular goals include multilingualism, technological fluency, democratic participation, cooperation and teamwork, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship. The roll-out of this royal initiative relies on teaching educators and staff new ways of thinking about the present and potential future. Based off of twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with public school teachers and teacher trainers in Jordan, I argue that the operationalization of education policy reforms relies on state actors to transform teacher sympathies in a way that makes state goals and visions of the future more emotionally salient and persuasive reasons for action. This process often puts teachers in the position of justifying behavior according to state goals in contradiction to traditional role expectations of religion, gender, family, and culture. In this paper, I explore the ways institutional power constructs and reconstructs the culture of teaching by bringing to bear contributions of educational anthropology to theories of authority and the state. Specifically, I interpret interactions between teacher trainers and teachers to show how state social policy “works” in lived experience. More broadly, I question how individuals raised within a culture engage in cultural transformation and the ways in which this transformation can be authoritatively engineered.