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Climate change threatens human well-being and planetary health but is hardly addressed in education. Comparative education research has advised governments about education reforms since the nineteenth century, so what must change to sustain a liveable earth? I use the concept of 'educational space' to understand how comparative knowledge building has steered education. Then I re-read three volumes of the World Yearbook of Education (WYB) to show how comparative education has embedded knowledges that have steered governing, neglected experiences that complicate powerlessness, and constrained learning through measurement. I argue current education compromises humans facing challenging climate futures but could provide knowledges to support 'the other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the lead-up to the 2007 Australian federal election, Labor candidate Kevin Rudd described climate change as the 'great moral challenge of our generation'. In the years since then, the heat in Australia has been rising - in terms of both temperature and climate politics -, but government action has slowed down. Endorsement of economic growth is prioritised, with only intermittent recognition of environmental costs. At grassroots level, citizens' attitudes are influenced by social norms. This kind of social learning is a major constraint on sustainability. Therefore, it seems useful to consider how educators might help build sustainable futures. To understand how historical context entangles social learning in ways that complicate policies associated with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and practices of Education for Sustainability (EfS), the author of this paper draws on the concept of 'space of orientation'. Focusing on adult education, she traces the contradiction between 'globalisation' and 'sustainability' through policy logics, relational practices in Australian adult education and the 'necessary utopia' which provides a point of reference for making futures. She argues that spaces of orientation are a critical resource in this era of intensifying conflicts of interest between economic priorities of globalisation and environmental priorities intended to slow global warming, because they mediate context and orient learning in ways that clear a path towards sustainability through the entangled histories of this present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euphemism '21st century contexts' is often used to capture the transition from solid twentieth century education towards more uncertain social and educational conditions. These contextual narratives acknowledge the complexities of contemporary education that make decision-making, professional practice and leadership seem difficult. But they rarely explain the context of uncertainty, which, as research suggests, is linked to rapid change in practices of governing and their effects on nation states, the inter-state order, and established national educational knowledge-authority orders. This disjuncture raises questions about how, and with what effects, contexts shape educators ways of knowing and doing education. I use the concept of 'educational space-time' to understand how educators contextual understandings are implicated in educational change by drawing examples from studies of educational change in different historical periods and governing regimes. I argue that the way educators navigate change and uncertainty has effects on learning and citizenship but should also acknowledge the effects of changes in governing regimes. Contextual understandings that acknowledge shifts in governing-learning regimes can open the way to educational work that is not locked into binary choices between territorial government or multilateral governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is the major confronting challenge of higher education worldwide. And internationalization has become a response of higher education to meet the demands and challenges of globalization. In the recent decades, Chinese government has developed different policies to steer education reforms in order to achieve the aim of internationalization. The internationalizing process has produced contradictory changes in academic workplaces. This study explores how globalizing processes affect academic work and academics’ workplace learning in China. It reports on a series of policy changes, and the effects of these policies on the workplace learning of academics. The changing policies positively affect academics by bringing rich information and resources to their workplaces. But at the same time, academic work is becoming increasingly restrictive and controlled. The self-interests of the academics are reconstituted in terms of the interests of government and university, producing tension in academics’ workplaces. Moreover, the conflicts among different policies cause confusion. We argue that the changing policies in relation to the internationalization of higher education have affected academics in both positive and negative ways. Therefore, there is a call for policy-makers to adjust the existing policies in order to create a better policy environment for academics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary global transitions are remaking education as a social institution and re-positioning educators in a lifelong learning political order. In this paper, I reflect on a research project that investigated the teaching occupation in learning societies in order to explain the concept of ‘educational work’: the form of labour that makes, orients and enacts spaces, which yield learning and build citizen capabilities. I report on a case study of educational work in a global-national lifelong learning space, a small private training provider in Melbourne to illustrate this analysis. The analysis reveals how educators formed, supported and secured an educational space for learning, and its effects on citizen capabilities. I argue that the transition from the political order of public education re-frames and reforms education and the labour of educating that historically formed citizens but it does not dissolve educational work, or the importance of securing citizen capabilities. Understanding ‘educational work’ as a practice of governing and a contradictory process of making ‘subjects’ and ‘citizens’ reframes the debate about ‘education’ and ‘training’ and highlights its continuing importance as a means of securing democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Globalising processes are shifting the established nation-building project of twentieth-century national education systems. This historic axis between education and territorialised state power is being re-spatialised and remade as a globally networked, lifelong learning educational order. Political sociology of education theorises these de- and re-territorialising trajectories; yet the practical processes of remaking educational spaces are less well documented. The concept of ‘boundary work’ provides a lens for understanding the interplay between political and sociological processes that remake educational spaces over time and scale. Analysing two visions of education at the start of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I track the shifting configuration of actors and processes involved in boundary work. I argue that educational spaces are ‘things of boundaries’ and lifelong learning reforms indicate processes of boundary work involving emergent educational actors: ‘professionals-who-educate’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The results of Australia's first national research assessment, excellence for research in Australia, provoked considerable discussion about the state of educational research in Australia. Understanding the nature of this field of research became the focus for empirical research and analysis that was intended to inform strategic planning. This paper provides an overview of the articles in this special issue, bringing together research on Australian educational research and insights from international researchers who research the effects of research assessment in educational research in their own countries. These sources inform a commentary on Australian educational research and suggest an agenda for further action on strategic capacity building for Australian educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of national research assessment, such as Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) are a type of audit technology that confronts and steers established institutional identities and traditions. This nexus between policy and practice drives boundary work that diffracts prevailing policy logics, organisational practices, and habits of mind. We use this notion of 'boundary work' as an analytical lens for understanding the nature and effects of ERA in the Australian educational research space. This paper explains the methodology that informed the AARE-ACDE research reported in Strategic Capacity Building for Australian Educational Research. It documents the policy logic of ERA and the way it cuts across the established ecology of educational research, revealing social and symbolic work that is remaking the boundaries of educational research. We report on the historical trajectory of Australian educational research, the way ERA codes research outputs, and how educational researchers are repositioning in this shifting research space. We argue that there are specific loci of boundary work where capacity building in Australian educational research can make a difference to future educational knowledge building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between higher education and vocational education and training in Australia is under discussion as a result of the Bradley Review of Higher Education. This reform process, which is intended to create a more inclusive, mass tertiary education sector, has significant implications for VET. This article examines the implications of this reform agenda for pedagogy and the different knowledge traditions that are conveyed through learning cultures, which have developed differently in higher education and VET. We draw on recent theorisations of craft and craftsmanship to critique the persistence of the mental-manual division of knowing that underpins relations between VET and university learning. Approaching craft as an integrated form of knowing, we suggest that VET pedagogy supports the development of 'knowing practice' and recognises open conceptions of knowledge that can engage learners who, traditionally, have not gone to university. We argue that the distinctive learning cultures associated with VET may be at risk in an emerging tertiary education landscape where current debates about knowledge and knowing privilege intellectual ability and are often blind to other forms of knowledge and knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was prompted by the call for submissions to the Rudd government's 2020 Summit in April 2008. It analyses the impacts of VET reform on the VET workforce in order to identify strategies that might inform an agenda to build the workforce capacity to support economic and innovation. The paper argues that VET reforms since the 1990s created disturbances and uncertainties in VET teachers' and managers' work, and working lives. In particular, these reforms failed to recognise and endorse teaching expertise that sits at the heart of VET practice. Top-down reforms and funding constraints, coupled with lack of recognition of VET occupational expertise, created perverse behaviours. These contradictory trends prompted occupational boundary work that drove innovations in the character and reach of VET teaching, yet without establishing the terms and conditions necessary to sustain such occupational expertise. Consequently these innovations continue to be vulnerable because new initiatives-identities cannot compete with established identities in the competition for recognition and resources. These trends run counter to government efforts aimed at engineering change in VET to support skill building in an innovative Australia. This model of reform is not followed by other countries, which recognise and deploy teaching expertise in productive ways to build capacities for innovation amongst young and older workercitizens. The paper concludes by suggesting that VET teaching expertise is an unacknowledged resource in the productivity challenge that could be mobilised in sustainable ways through professional renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the way social partnerships tend to be represented as either horizontal localised networks or neo-liberal policy instruments. Building on two empirical studies of partnerships, we argue that partnerships cannot be understood in either/or ways but are negotiated at the interface between central agencies and local networks. They are mediated by networks operating through the partnership and through government and community, and by the different organisational logics of agencies. These complexities challenge our ways of analysing and representing partnerships, and justify further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses three examples of educational innovation emerging in the contemporary context of market-liberal reform as a focus for exploring the patterns and possibilities of civic formation. The first part of the paper contextualises contemporary civic formation within the long historic struggle between capitalism and democracy, highlighting the way citizen learning is being reconfigured as markets and state are mediated by community interests. The last section attempts to draw out the key features of this community-based citizen learning and its implications for citizen learning and action. This discussion provides a basis for clarifying the kind of civic and citizenship education that is needed to take community-based learning beyond localism towards formal civic engagement that can sustain and protect democracy. The idea of a learning citizen is suggested as a way of conceptualising and acknowledging the contradictions within this citizenship agenda that holds the imperatives of lifelong learning in tension with the imperatives of educating citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the politics of neo-liberal reform of education and training in the specific context of social partnerships. Social partnerships are hybrid social spaces formed when a range of interests/partners work together for mutual benefit. Partnerships are one of a series of hybridized social spaces which have been formed as a consequence of the trend to neo-liberal governance. The paper begins by situating the study of social partnerships in wider concerns about neo-liberal reform and politics. It reviews literature on social partnerships as a way of identifying the different approaches to the conceptualization of conflict or practical politics. These are role conflict, interest conflict, and regime conflict. It also draws on a series of empirical research projects on social partnerships in Australia which have identified persistent points of tension within partnership formation and maintenance. Drawing these conceptualizations and persistent points of tension together provides a framework which can guide systematic inquiry of social partnerships. The paper suggests that this framework facilitates research by naming different types of political action. It encourages a multi-dimensional analysis of partnership politics rather than presenting partnerships as either a celebratory or categorical expression of neo-liberal political rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from an enthographic study of educational restructuring in an Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Victoria Australia. Educational restructuring is analysed as a process of institutional redesign and theorized in relation to recent debates in institutional theory concerning the nature of institutional change. The review distinguishes between hyperrational approaches to institutional redesign based upon assumptions about rational actors and their motivations and behaviours, and social and cultural perspectives on institutional redesign that sees purposeful institutional change achieved through processes of 'institutional gardening'. The paper documents the way Australian governments have adopted hyperrational strategies aimed at changing education and training by reworking institutional rules that frame the day-to-day practices within particular organizations. Reworking these practices of organizing serves to steer change by restructuring and rearticulating relationships, practices and centres of power within organizations. Data drawn from interviews with the TAFE Institute Director, and various managers and teachers are used to track the effects of government steering in the TAFE Institute. This analysis shows that government steering drives management steering in the TAFE Institute, creating new imperatives and work organization. These organizational changes are influenced by local conditions and management priorities. They also call forth counter-steering by teachers and managers as they attempt to deal with change. The paper suggests that hyperrational government steering drives towards probable educational futures but is also interrupted by counter-steering oriented to other values and priorities. While there are probable futures, there are also preferred futures to be willed for and worked for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the concerns, parameters and silences emerging in the field of English research on contemporary educational restructuring. The research effort oriented to the investigation of Thatcherism and the marketisation and its neglect of alternatives to Thatcherism is noted. This pattern of emphases and silences in research seems to have arisen as a result of changes in the research-policy context, and because of the way Thatcherism has been conceptualised in educational research. I argue that these devolopments have encouraged a narrowing of both research and political horizons in education. I suggest that a more comprehensive framework for analysing educational restructuring can be developed by recontextualising Thatcherism and drawing on recent social science research on institutional design. Such aframework would appear to offer a basis for tackling the empirical and normative work of assessing probable futures and the possibilities of preferred futures in the practical work of education reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of an international controversy which erupted in 1982 over state authortsed changes to Japanese history textbooks. The dispute is analysed in terms off our convergent political, economic and social dynamics. These are the crucial nature of the Japanese state and its educational arm in Japan, the roots and focuses of post-1945 political struggle, the pattern of Japanese postwar development, and the impact of recession and second cold war. The changes to history textbooks are considered to be a state response to promote domestic stability and to legitimise Japan's remilitarisation. The case study highlights the relationship between the state and the educational sphere. It emphasises the political nature of curriculum and curriculum content and challenges the ideology of a 'non-political' educational sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes democracy with reference to the election of Victorian premiere Jeff Kennett and the functioning of his government. Though the strategy adopted by Kennett government was legally democratic, the governance eroded the opportunity for public debates. Governance can be overlapped with leadership and other practices within a wider area of democracy without proper realization. But franchise means not only the duty to vote for the public. It also denotes the capacity to participate in governance procedures through public debates.

Current research suggests partnerships between universities and schools create learning advantages for pre-service and beginning teachers while opening new research avenues and school relationships for academics and universities. This paper argues that these findings are often based on a business-orientated definition of 'partnership' and originate from studies that examine partnerships which are frequently based in North America and Europe. Thus, the existing studies often focus on partnerships that create learning advantages, but only in profitable or scalable ways that might lead to formal or enhanced collaborations. This paper critically examines the literature and problematises their findings amongst four case studies of partnerships of various sizes and levels of bureaucracy to determine if the literature's broader conclusions remain true when applied to less business-driven views of partnerships that consider 'partnership' in a broader definition. The paper makes a scholarly contribution by informing the audience of what benefits can come to those involved in school and university partnerships of different sizes, and when not preoccupied with creating partnerships for immediate or potential profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on lessons learned from efforts to rebuild the Kazakhstan public education system in 2003. Facts about Kazakhstan; Challenges facing efforts to rebuild public education for human security in Australia.

This special issue documents and theorises ‘educational work’ that examines the ways in which adult learners, educators and policy-makers are remaking education as they navigate ‘hot spots’ created by the intersection of national institutional trajectories and globalising processes. Our aim in compiling this special issue is to address the question, how best to conceptualise, to document and to analyse – in other words, to make visible – the new (and disparate) forms of educational labour, cultures and identities being created by globalisation. We bring together a collection of case-based analyses of ‘educational work’ developed through a transnational knowledge building project, ‘The Teaching Occupation in Learning Societies’, funded by the Australian Research Council (2009–2012). The project was based at Monash University in Australia with international research collaborators in Germany, Finland and the UK. We suggest that the interlinked concepts of ‘educational work’ and ‘educational boundary work’ offer a useful theory frame for understanding education and educational effects in global transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines research into initial teacher education in light of current Australian policy initiatives concerned with both the quality of research conducted in higher education and the quality of teacher education programs. The purpose of the paper is to explore some ways in which the research is, and can be, positioned in the current policy context. The paper begins with a brief overview of some of the main characteristics of the research concerned with initial (pre‐service) teacher education in Australia over the last decade. In terms of scope, scale and methodology, the research can be characterised in the following way: typically small‐scale; many one‐off studies; localised in nature; and a growing application of qualitative research methods. An obvious strength of this type of research is that it is closely tied to practice and to the day‐to‐day workings of initial teacher education programs. An equally obvious weakness is that the research does not necessarily have so called ‘impact’ in relation to policy debates and/or other measures of success in the wider research community. The paper charts some possible new directions for teacher education research in ways that build on the strengths and address the weaknesses. The directions can be characterised as follows: a ‘big funding’ approach; an ‘institutional aggregation’ approach; and a ‘platforms and protocols’ approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian government now mandates initial teacher education (ITE) providers to form partnerships with schools in order to maintain accreditation. The emphasis on partnerships as the crucial means of improving ITE is not new, and a body of literature from the Australian context describes a vast number of partnerships that have been enacted over the past few decades. In this literature, however, the specific work arrangements and practices of teacher educators are generally overlooked. And yet, it is the work of teacher educators that is critical in initiating and sustaining these partnerships. This paper seeks to address this disparity by employing the theoretical framework of practice architecture to consider the role of the teacher educator in partnership work. We have found that the ways in which the work of teacher educators is constrained in cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political domains significantly impact the possibility of "enduring" partnerships with schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational research has long been the subject of lively and agitated debate, not least because of its diversity. Ranging in scope from academic development and broad-scale policy research through to student engagement and discipline-specific research, it includes methods of traditional academic inquiry and investigations and also less traditional modes of research. However, the topography of Australian educational research and the characteristics of the people who undertake this complex body of work are currently unclear. This paper explores some of the complexities of the Australian research community, drawing on the findings of a national online survey of academics who identified as researching in the field of education from within and outside education schools and faculties. The survey attracted 504 responses from 38 of Australia's 39 universities, and just over two-thirds of respondents were located in a school or faculty of education. We draw on the results to answer the questions of who is undertaking educational research and who how they might be supported. We utilise a conceptual model that 'segments' the educational research workforce represented by the survey respondents, and we conclude by indicating strategies that might be utilised to address research barriers indicated by educational researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the geography of Australian educational research in the context of the ERA 2010 and 2012 assessments results. These results reflect significant changes to the nature of educational research over the past decades, where this research is conducted and by whom. We recap the historical changes to the formation of educational institutions and their impact on research outputs to demonstrate that interdisciplinary work is growing in a context where there has been a shift in research outputs away from the traditional area of school education. The ERA results demonstrate a high level of research activity in the intersections between previously distinct discipline areas, particularly in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The future of ERA itself is addressed in order to propose interventions that might make a difference to an ecology that is anchored in traditions and tends towards inertia. Finally, we argue that efforts by universities to build research capacity are likely to continue to be competitive, to focus on the individual rather than on departments and schools, and to be subject to an increasingly pervasive culture of accountability. Against this discourse of accountability, and an accompanying loss in autonomy and creative 'think-time', we propose that academics in education actively engage in a community of research. We conclude with interventions designed to build a high-quality, analytical and theoretically intensive research culture to underscore educational research in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research assessment exercises aim to identify research quantity and quality and provide insights into research capacity building strategies for the future. Yet with limited knowledge of the ecology of Australian educational research, there is little chance of understanding what research audits might contribute towards a capacity building agenda for such a complex field. This paper draws on secondary data analysis of research outputs submitted by 13 Australian higher education institutions to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2010 and 2012 national research assessment exercises, to show where Australian educational research is conducted. Findings offer a profile of education researchers by location in academic organisational units within universities. By analyzing data not accessible through reported ERA data we were also able to present information about appointment profiles, specifically levels and type of appointment within universities, as well as data on institutional and geographic region, and patterns associated with type of outputs (books, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers and other outputs) and field of research. Analysis of the data reveals definitive shifts in the nature of the published outputs and in employment profiles of researchers and their location across university and regional groupings. Research audits are administrative processes that reshape institutional and disciplinary governance structures, policies, individual outputs, work practices and careers, but they are not the sum total of the field per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human service work is being reconfigured by welfare state reforms driven by neo-liberal globalization. Sectors are being merged, ‘hybrid’ occupations formed and occupational boundaries renegotiated. Yet time is rarely considered in the study of such boundary work. This article conceptualizes time as generated by human action, in different orders that may operate in tension with one another. Three case studies of reform in educational work, from Finland, England and Germany, each illustrate a particular configuration of these competing time orders. The article concludes by arguing for a politics of time to create a more democratic climate for education and other human services work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a lack of applied research, social partnerships are increasingly being adopted by both government and non-government agencies to meet localised needs in education and other fields. This article discusses the findings of an investigation of how social partnerships can best be formed, developed and sustained over time. Earlier work identified partnerships arising from community concerns, governmental enactment and negotiation between community and government agencies. However, across these distinct kinds of social partnerships, the partnership work that was central to their operation was particularly relevant. In the study reported here, researchers engaged with ten longstanding social partnerships to elicit, synthesise and verify the principles and practices underpinning their work. The principles and practices that are proposed as most likely to assist the effective formation, development and transformation of social partnerships over time comprise building and maintaining: (i) shared goals; (ii) relations with partners; (iii) capacity for partnership work; (iv) governance and leadership; and (v) trust and trustworthiness. These principles stand as ideals and goals to guide the development and continuity of social partnerships that can support important educational initiatives, and provide bases for evaluating partnership work. However, rather than being benign, this work and these practices are often underpinned by contested relations as much as collaborative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shares thoughts about managing, teaching and learning in a performance culture. Practices of education for democratic citizenship in learning communities; Possibility of educational renewal for a civic society; Sociology of education to a critical theory of learning.

Presents a response to an article on Vocational Education and Training (VET) implemented in Australia. Phase history of VET; Key terms in the history-telling of VET; Silences in the history-telling that constrain the imagination of people; Ways that the history of VET can be told.