The paper is an attempt to localize ritual studies within the theory and methodolog y of educational sciences. A fundamental paradigmatic (but also biographically-based) “alliance” can be found with the concepts of the so-called hidden curriculum, the latter providing a ground for selecting features constitutive of this “alliance” (overt and covert aspects of formative phenomena, importance of automating the process of splitting the overt from the covert etc.). A methodological “alliance” is found with the ethnographic approach, one associated with concepts of the hidden curriculum, too. As for the systemic point of view, ritual studies may be seen as akin to the so-called reflexive paradigms, integrated within the so-called reflexive education science in educational theory.
The study reports on social relations among peers in the contexts of various educational institutions. The aim of the study is to emphasize the importance of bodily expressions and their involvement in the constitution of peer-to-peer interactions, with focus on the ethnography of the body, reflecting rather the participants’ behaviour than their speech. The author comments on various forms of corporeal contacts as key factors in the creation of peer groups and the intentional peer learning.
The study reports on relations between the field of so-called ritual studies and the educational sphere. The author points out the relations between rituals and the process of human shaping and learning, the state of ritual-discussion in pedagogical sphere, the criteria for analysis and identification of rituals in educational contexts, the possibilities of differentiation of various forms of ritual activities in educational contexts.
The study presents the results of ethnographic interviews with selected mothers of Slovak kindergarten children and compares these results with the relevant English-American studies aimed at engagement of mothers in early education in relation to their educational and professional status. The research is focused on mothers’ preschool and primary school choice, engagement of mothers in preparation for the first grade of primary school, education values of mothers in relation to their school participation and perception. The study confirms the strong social differentiation in perception of education and in engagement of mothers in child’s schooling, although in comparison with English-American context there does not exists an extensive systemic social segregation in preschool education provision in Slovakia.
The article examines the application of ‘governmentality studies’ to the field of education and particularly to the formation of social representations of the goals and needs of contemporary education and current curriculum design. The field of governmentality studies is based on Michel Foucault’s analyses of social power and the technologies of power, which in later writings he applied to liberal government and liberal notions of social control. This perspective provides better insight into contemporary neoliberal technologies of social control and the related technology of social control in general, examples of which in various social sectors are then provided by the authors in the article. The education sector must also be understood in the context of neoliberal governmentality, which casts in a new light many educational strategies that are generally accepted without question. The strategy of lifelong education must then be released from its representation as a natural right and instead included among the strategies of social coercion and domination directed at the inter-institutionalisation of education. Equally, it is also possible to expose debunk the skills-based concept of ‘enterprise curriculum’ that blurs the difference between general and professional education as a neoliberal power strategy. The results of the failure to apply this perspective to the education sector are the unchallenged ideologisation of contemporary education discourse and the formation of educational strategies that generate many undesirable consequences.
The summarizing study presents the research field of the so called school ethnography of the body (SEB) that started to develop during the last decade. This interdisciplinary field produces results that could be used in the social and cultural anthropology, sociology, social philosophy as well as in pedagogy. The introductory part of the study is dedicated to the concept of the body that is being productively handled within the frame of the SEB. Subsequently, selected concepts of the body are applied to the socio-cultural space of the school, and in the final part of the study the results of partial researches within the frame of the SEB, realized so far, are presented, as well as the basic theoretical and methodological approaches.
This paper understands the basic elements of neoliberalism in education and governmentality to be the technologies for the neoliberal government of education. It outlines Foucault’s methodology for analysing governmentality and shows how neoliberalism is a discursive formation which homogenises apparently unrelated language games and discourses. It places particular emphasis on the rhizomatic dispersion of neoliberal discursive and non-discursive practices, which in the end create a mosaic of thinking and acting with its own existing internal logic. This paper provides a cross-sectional perspective on how neoliberalism has implanted itself as a universal phenomenon along the horizontal and vertical lines of the education sphere and shows how, particularly through the policy of lifelong learning for a knowledge society, it is transforming first of all the education of adults and how subsequently it has become a fundamental blueprint for the complex revision of the higher education and regional schooling, including pre-school education. This paper prefaces this single-issue edition of the Journal of Pedagogy and therefore presents and summarises the articles published in this issue, and suggests how they are thematic examples of a single and more general theoretical framework.
This paper understands the basic elements of neoliberalism in education and governmentality to be the technologies for the neoliberal government of education. It outlines Foucault's methodology for analysing governmentality and shows how neoliberalism is a discursive formation which homogenises apparently unrelated language games and discourses. It places particular emphasis on the rhizomatic dispersion of neoliberal discursive and non-discursive practices, which in the end create a mosaic of thinking and acting with its own existing internal logic. This paper provides a cross-sectional perspective on how neoliberalism has implanted itself as a universal phenomenon along the horizontal and vertical lines of the education sphere and shows how, particularly through the policy of lifelong learning for a knowledge society, it is transforming first of all the education of adults and how subsequently it has become a fundamental blueprint for the complex revision of higher education and regional schooling, including pre-school education. This paper prefaces this single-issue edition of the Journal of Pedagogy and therefore presents and summarises the articles published in this issue, and suggests how they are thematic examples of a single and more general theoretical framework.
This study refers to the discursive transformation in perceptions of preschool age children generated by central European Union policy on early childhood education and care. This policy is representative of the pervasion of contemporary entrepreneurial culture and curricula within preschool education. At the same time, the field is also starting to become subordinated to the neoliberal trend of economising the social. This study highlights the fact that, within discourses on the child, these trends are encouraging a particular conception of childhood and of developmental theories. This conception is also enabling entrepreneurial logic to be applied to the preschool education sector via the use of theoretical tools. Consequently, children are being shaped into so-called knowledge-workers, or gold-collar workers, as they are referred to in current employment discourse. Even authorised preschool education documents (e.g. NAEYS’s Developmentally Appropriate Practice etc.) are responding to this transformation by introducing a new type of normality into this sphere, as can be seen in the Slovak state education programme for preschool education.
Slovak education policy is an example of the kind of transformations occurring in the education spheres of postcommunist countries. While at the end of the 1990s, it seemed that education policy was still attempting to ensure that Slovakia caught up with education levels in western countries, the period that followed brought with it a shift towards neoliberalization of the education sector and towards the economization of education. Slovakia’s entry into the EU was accompanied by the total assimilation of the neoliberal agenda within education and since then it can be said that Slovak education policy has followed a path towards so-called perpetual neoliberalism. The aim of this article is to show how education policy has developed within Slovak politics, in terms of how it is gradually adapting to neoliberal ideas. The article analyzes government documents from 1998 onwards, particularly Slovak government programs, which document the process of neoliberalization in education.
The survey study brings information about the way that educational research copes with neoliberalism as a generalized form of social government in the current western culture. It shows that neoliberalism is considered as a universal scope of other changes in the basic segments of education and those theoretical and critical analyses of this phenomenon represent an important part of production in the area of educational research. It emphasizes the contribution of formation and development of the so-called governmental studies for comprehension of mechanisms and consequences of neoliberal government of the society and shows how way the methodology of these studies helps to identify neoliberal strategies used in the regulation of social subjects by education. There are five selected segments of critical analyses elaborated (from the concept of a lifelong learning, through preschool and university education to the education of teachers and PISA project) that obviously show ideological and theoretical cohesiveness of the education analysis through the scope of neoliberal governmentality.
This paper summarizes the problematic aspects of a globalized neoliberal culture in education. Linking to the particular studies of this monothematic volume it discusses the consequences of the globalization of a testing culture in schools, the issues of developing civic literacy in the context of current education practice and the issues of forming a historic consciousness in present schools relating to the existing social discourse. Language teaching, currently dominated by the concept of language literacy or the concept of language education resulting from English language teaching seems to be significant. This paper reveals various ways in which the educational section is being contaminated by neoliberal transformations to point out their culturally devastating consequences in a critical way. The goal of this paper is to articulate the mechanism by which neoliberalism is infiltrating education in the form of discursive and physical “colonizing”.
This paper, based on ethnographically obtained data, discusses German language acquisition at an early age: the discovery of the interconnection between language and corporeality is the key component of the analysis based on videostudies. The body-conceived as an intermediary and content element of education, becomes an essential base for foreign language acquisition. This will be documented by tangible data and subsequent theoretical analysis with respect to relevant terminology of cultural anthropology (Körper and Leib). The principle of corporeality is further used as a means of perceiving German language education in the sense of the so called language propaedeutic concept and as a means of the legitimisation of particular qualification and the role of foreign language teachers in preschool institutions.
The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of school culture both as a concept and as a subject of investigation. It deals with the historical roots of this concept and the fact that it is shrinking-a consequence of the managerial imperatives of effectiveness and accountability in education. School culture, in relation to the quality of schools and the quality of education, has become the subject of audits, arrived at through a developed network of standardisation in education, testing and evaluation. The methodology of evaluation currently lending particular substance to school culture, however, generates different methodological perspectives on investigating school culture and thus research is becoming an instrument of political power. In the research it is then necessary to either abandon the concept of school culture or to free it from spinning round the cycle of evaluation/self-evaluation-a change in school culture-improving the “quality of the school”-a new evaluation/self-evaluation. One way to do this is to employ ethnographic approaches in research into schools and to understand school culture as a system of texts.
The paper newly raises the traditional question of educational science – the question of the relationship between theoretical knowledge and practice, between science and practice. This target problem is discussed using a complex theoretical overview and integrating this problem of educational science into broader context of development of social sciences and humanities. Using this umbrella, transformations of relationship between theory and practice, discussed from the period of Classical Antiquity, through Modern period until present times, are interpreted. Consequently, transformations of relationship between theory and practice in this timeline provide a background for explaining the oscillation of self-representation of educational science as either theoretical or practical science. Finally, the well-known concept of teacher as reflective practitioner announced in the field of teacher training as a promising example of how to definitely bridge the gap between academic knowledge and knowledge necessary for practical execution of education is elaborated on.
Childhoods in contemporary Kenya are entangled with discourses of care in a post-colonial landscape. Such imaginaries of childhoods through discourses of ‘care’ and ‘charity’ are well established through Western lenses. Another lens that is often enacted is the lens of de-commercialised, un-spoilt, pure and innocent childhoods in the Kenyan landscape. In this study, the authors utilize Nel Nodding’s concept of an ethics of care, and a feminist lens, to explore this binary of Western views through real experiences of childhoods. This paper provides an analysis of childhoods as lived experiences in Kenya, and challenges constructions of children/childhoods as vulnerable, based upon observations and interviews conducted in Kenya in the remote area of Kwale County.
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