Besley - Böcker

Conceptions of Islamic Education: Pedagogical Framings argues that madāris (Muslim schools) cannot exclusively be held responsible for the cultivation of extremism. Islamic education can most appropriately be framed according to three interrelated concepts: tarbiyyah (rearing or nurturing), ta‘līm (learning/ instruction), and ta’dīb (good action). These three phenomena are explored along the lines of a minimalist-maximalist continuum that guides practices and institutions differently. A minimalist understanding of Islamic education does not necessarily produce uncritical citizens, but a maximalist understanding engenders an ethical democratic community and cosmopolitan beings concerned about their responsibility towards others. By looking specifically at South African Muslim schools, Conceptions of Islamic Education undermines the misconception that such schools perpetuate Islamic radicalism.

Conceptions of Islamic Education: Pedagogical Framings argues that madāris (Muslim schools) cannot exclusively be held responsible for the cultivation of extremism. Islamic education can most appropriately be framed according to three interrelated concepts: tarbiyyah (rearing or nurturing), ta‘līm (learning/ instruction), and ta’dīb (good action). These three phenomena are explored along the lines of a minimalist-maximalist continuum that guides practices and institutions differently. A minimalist understanding of Islamic education does not necessarily produce uncritical citizens, but a maximalist understanding engenders an ethical democratic community and cosmopolitan beings concerned about their responsibility towards others. By looking specifically at South African Muslim schools, Conceptions of Islamic Education undermines the misconception that such schools perpetuate Islamic radicalism.

The era that began with the election of the Thatcher and Reagan governments has been dominated by contemporary forms of neoliberalism-based market fundamentalism, globalization as world economic integration and the ideology of «free trade,» and an attack on «big» government and social welfare. This book is a historical and theoretical investigation of contemporary neoliberalism in relation to education policy and its rollback of the Keynesian welfare state. It argues that education is the basis of an open society and is a social welfare right in the merging knowledge economy. Drawing on the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality understood as a form of radical political economy, the book explores and critiques neoliberalism as the ruling ideological consensus. It also questions whether and to what extent its influence will continue, in the face of the destabilization of markets that followed the financial crisis and the global recession that began in 2007, in the advanced liberal economies of the United States and the European Union.

This book illuminates the changing landscape and expediency of international education in global times. Within this larger picture, the book focuses on the educational effects of international encounters, experiences and lessons – the complex processes of learning and subject formation in play during and after one's international/intercultural experience. These complex processes, hinged on past and present self-other relations, are illustrated by employing the parable of «The Elephant and the Blind Men.» In contrast to more narrow, developmentalist conceptions of intercultural learning, Paul Tarc attends to each of the linguistic, existential, structural, and psychical dimensions of difficulty constituting learning across difference. Becoming aware of, and reflexive to, these dimensions of difficulty and their implications for one’s own learning and resistance to learning, represents the domain of cosmopolitan literacy. The key intervention of this book is to re-conceive pedagogical processes and aims of international education as fostering such cosmopolitan literacy. Graduate courses on international education, study abroad, global citizenship education, and preservice education courses focusing on international education and teaching internationally could be primary candidates for this text.

This book illuminates the changing landscape and expediency of international education in global times. Within this larger picture, the book focuses on the educational effects of international encounters, experiences and lessons – the complex processes of learning and subject formation in play during and after one's international/intercultural experience. These complex processes, hinged on past and present self-other relations, are illustrated by employing the parable of «The Elephant and the Blind Men.» In contrast to more narrow, developmentalist conceptions of intercultural learning, Paul Tarc attends to each of the linguistic, existential, structural, and psychical dimensions of difficulty constituting learning across difference. Becoming aware of, and reflexive to, these dimensions of difficulty and their implications for one’s own learning and resistance to learning, represents the domain of cosmopolitan literacy. The key intervention of this book is to re-conceive pedagogical processes and aims of international education as fostering such cosmopolitan literacy. Graduate courses on international education, study abroad, global citizenship education, and preservice education courses focusing on international education and teaching internationally could be primary candidates for this text.

Occupy Education is motivated by the sustainability crisis and energized by the drive for social justice that inspired the Occupy movement. Situated within the struggle for sustainability taking place amid looming resource shortages, climate change, economic instability, and ecological breakdown, the book is a timely contribution to community education and action. It opens a whole realm of integrated theory to educators and sustainability activists – and demonstrates how that theory can be moved into practice. Occupy Education is an excellent text for courses in sustainability studies, social philosophy, globalization, social justice, food system praxis, sustainability education, political economy, and environmental studies.

Occupy Education is motivated by the sustainability crisis and energized by the drive for social justice that inspired the Occupy movement. Situated within the struggle for sustainability taking place amid looming resource shortages, climate change, economic instability, and ecological breakdown, the book is a timely contribution to community education and action. It opens a whole realm of integrated theory to educators and sustainability activists – and demonstrates how that theory can be moved into practice. Occupy Education is an excellent text for courses in sustainability studies, social philosophy, globalization, social justice, food system praxis, sustainability education, political economy, and environmental studies.

What can be learned from a story woven out of fragmented moments of joy, pain, horror, and blissful awareness? Flesh Mapping is an attempt to create a pedagogy of shared narrative, place, and politics; to narratively map the injuries of the material, emotional, and spiritual impact of poverty, displacement, hunger and war on an individual life. The book is an invitation to instructors in education, anthropology, women’s studies, and labor studies to re-imagine education as the praxis for liberation, renewal, and hope. It serves as a process of naming the injuries inflicted on real bodies by privilege and power, like sites on a map. The goal is not simply to name and make visible privilege but to simultaneously create emergent spaces of dissonance in education that can challenge and transform power at the site where the personal is political.

This book focuses on the development of Taiwan’s long-standing National Scholarship Program for Overseas Study between 1955 and 2000. The National Scholarship Program can be seen as Taiwan’s governmental pursuit of strategic modernization for national and social development. Strategic modernization does not necessarily imply a linear, progressive, and technological modernity; but should be viewed as an adjustable, flexible, and sustainable effort that transforms and assists a nation, like Taiwan, to adapt itself within its constrained and changing post-colonial condition. This view of strategic modernization is based upon an interrogation of the discourses surrounding the scholarship program, using post-colonial theories as a referential framework. The research includes an ethnographic analysis of discourse, investigating the program from two perspectives: the researcher’s critical discourse analysis of historical texts, and the narratives provided by program stakeholders. The juxtaposition of these two discursive perspectives not only reveals different facets of the program, but more importantly, tracks the dynamic and constantly unfolding interwoven complex of political, economic and cultural threads that have rarely been considered together.

We live in the age of global science – but not, primarily, in the sense of ‘universal knowledge’ that has characterized the liberal metanarrative of ‘free’ science and the ‘free society’ since its early development in the Enlightenment. Today, an economic logic links science to national economic policy, while globalized multinational science dominates an environment where quality assurance replaces truth as the new regulative ideal. This book examines the nature of educational and science-based capitalism in its cybernetic, knowledge, algorithmic and bioinformational forms before turning to the emergence of the global science system and the promise of openness in the growth of international research collaboration, the development of the global knowledge commons and the rise of the open science economy. Education, Science and Knowledge Capitalism explores the nature of cognitive capitalism, the emerging mode of social production for public education and science and its promise for the democratization of knowledge.

The World’s Highest-Scoring Students focuses on how various countries transformed their school systems into the world’s leading systems of education. Hani Morgan covers eight countries: Finland, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China, Canada, Estonia, and the United States. His book offers ideas on how the United States can improve its school system so that it can regain its status as the world’s undisputed leader in education.In addition to offering a brief historical context for each country, Morgan describes important practices that helped these nations achieve stellar results in international testing. Some of the subjects covered include teacher preparation programs, cultural attitudes toward education, and teacher recruitment practices. His book differs from other texts on this topic because he describes in detail the most recent practices that various educational systems have used to maintain top academic performance and the strategies others have implemented to climb to the top.The World’s Highest-Scoring Students offers a new perspective on this topic in several ways. This book provides a balanced view of the highest-ranking nations in education, offering the outstanding practices they use to achieve stellar results but also pointing out the problems they endure. In addition, Morgan discusses various controversies about international tests, including the limitations of using these tests to evaluate students.

The World’s Highest-Scoring Students focuses on how various countries transformed their school systems into the world’s leading systems of education. Hani Morgan covers eight countries: Finland, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China, Canada, Estonia, and the United States. His book offers ideas on how the United States can improve its school system so that it can regain its status as the world’s undisputed leader in education.In addition to offering a brief historical context for each country, Morgan describes important practices that helped these nations achieve stellar results in international testing. Some of the subjects covered include teacher preparation programs, cultural attitudes toward education, and teacher recruitment practices. His book differs from other texts on this topic because he describes in detail the most recent practices that various educational systems have used to maintain top academic performance and the strategies others have implemented to climb to the top.The World’s Highest-Scoring Students offers a new perspective on this topic in several ways. This book provides a balanced view of the highest-ranking nations in education, offering the outstanding practices they use to achieve stellar results but also pointing out the problems they endure. In addition, Morgan discusses various controversies about international tests, including the limitations of using these tests to evaluate students.

Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education examines pressing issues of inequality in education. The notion of gap—and the need to close it—is used widely in public and policy debates to name the nature and scope of disadvantage. In the competitive world of education, gaps have become associated with students who are seen to be "falling behind," "failing" or "dropping out." A global deficit discourse is, therefore, mobilised and normalised. But this discourse has a history and is deeply political. Unsettling the Gap examines this history and how it is politically activated through an analysis of the "Australian Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage" policy. In this policy discourse the notion of gap serves as a complex and multiple signifier, attached to individuals, communities and to national history.In unravelling these diverse modalities of gap, the text illuminates the types of ruling binaries that tend to direct dynamics of power and knowledge in a settler colonial context. This reveals not only the features of the crisis of "Indigenous educational disadvantage" that the policy seeks to address, but the undercurrents of a different type of crisis, namely the authority of the settler colonial state. By unsettling the normalised functions of gap discourse the book urges critical reflections on the problem of settler colonial authority and how it constrains the possibilities of Indigenous educational justice.