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Studies of europeanisation have made a significant contribution to knowledge about education and how it has respatialised since the turn of the 21st century. This line of inquiry initially historicised the 1990s as a means of researching the emerging European space of education, but then morphed into studies of governing through the field of comparative policy studies. The research on governing Europe made the space of education visible in particular ways, which raises questions about the space of experiencing Europe: specifically, about how education is seen by professionals and with what effects. This paper uses the concept of 'space-time' to investigate the respatialisation of education. We review three case studies that historicise the europeanisation of education to problematise the space of governing, conceptualise the space of experience at three scales and illustrate how these entangled transnational topologies, analytic borderlands and spaces of orientation re-made the space of visual education in the 1920s.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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. (Contains 1 table.)

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 worker-citizens. The paper concludes by suggesting that VET teaching expertise is an unacknowledged resource in the productivity challenge that could be mobilized in sustainable ways through professional renewal.

This paper explores the trend towards a decentred social organization of learning that has become evident over the last 30-40 years. This is illustrated by the shifting imagery of education, from the red brick school to dispersed learning networks, or "learning bubbles", that constitute new learning spaces. In the context of our large funded research project that aims to assess new learning spaces, we problematize this decentring of education and consider theoretical social and spatial resources that help us to understand this shift in the social organization of learning. We draw these insights together as suggestions for framing a socio-spatial research agenda and the key themes that help us to interrogate decentring and the emergence of new learning spaces, how these trends are manifest in educational practices, and the implications for affective learning, learners and their life chances. (Contains 2 figures and 3 notes.)

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. (Contains 1 figure.)

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.

Reports findings from an ethnographic study of educational restructuring at an institute of technical and further education in Australia. Documents Australian governments' adoption of hyperrational educational-improvement strategies by reworking institutional roles framing daily practices. Countersteering geared to other values and priorities often interrupts governmental steering. (Contains 30 references.) (MLH)

A discussion of the issues addressed in a conference on the new eleventh and twelfth grade curriculum for Victoria (Australia) focuses on political aspects of curricular and educational change and policy formation. Implications for research on the social context within which educational policy is made are examined. (MSE)

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]

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]

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]

Introduces a series of articles about educational reform in Kazakhstan.

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 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]

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.

For many years the EERJ Roundtable has been a standing event within the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). In a discursive style it addresses issues related to contemporary relationships between educational research and educational policy in Europe. The changing educational landscape, together with shifting practices and discourses of educational research, prompted researchers to discuss the need for increased self-governance. It was taken up as the topic for the 2013 EERJ Roundtable and couched as a question: What is the possibility of a ‘moot’ for educational research in Europe? This article reports on the 2013 Roundtable. Its three short presentations and subsequent audience discussion have been summarised and reflected upon to make a case for a moot: a self-governing space for educational research. It reveals ECER, and particularly the EERJ Roundtable, as a scholarly and a political arena where the interplay between research, policy and larger patterns of social change can be reviewed, interrogated and appropriated critically into the disciplinary logics of educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]