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In times of intense migrations, securing a brighter future through education has become a growing concern in many societies. In particular, access to higher education for refugees has been the object of multiple initiatives among governments, civil society and non-government organisations. However, only 3 per cent of refugees access higher education, and there is a need to better understand, support and develop successful access for refugees among policymakers, educators and researchers. This research takes an original comparative digital approach to identifying those networks in three countries: Canada, England and France. Our findings suggest that the nature of issues for refugee access to higher education is constructed differently in each national context, as the social relations between government, civil society, non-government agencies and higher education institutions are uniquely configured.

As the world went suddenly into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sending individuals to their homes and shutting businesses and institutions, the closing of schools posed big problems. The majority of the world’s children were out of school, leading to the longest sustained period of school closures in history. We saw educators turning towards responses not aimed at collegial and community-engaged strategies for education in an emergency but at online learning cast as education/business as usual. This study explores the logic driving this global response through analyses of the documents released by three key global education actors: (1) the OECD and its paper A Framework to Guide Education Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020; (2) UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition #LearningNeverStops; and (3) the World Bank’s Guidance Note on Education Systems’ Response to COVID-19; and Guidance Note: Remote Learning and COVID-19. The authors of this article draw on Carol Bacchi’s approach to poststructural policy analysis to make visible the key concepts and binaries used within policy texts and to understand the “technologies of saving” that were invoked in each policy response, locating the education programmes, activities and actors within knowledge practices in educational reform. This article explores the World Bank, OECD and UNESCO responses using an analysis of knowledge harmonisation and difference among these institutions as well as their location as key norm-setters and governing actors in the field of education. The authors argue that all three responses privilege private-sector providers of digital technology. The consequence of these responses is that technologies of saving have centred on privatised, corporate edu-business and edu-tech aimed at online education delivery, bringing significant risks for the erasure of local knowledges. The authors’ study suggests that local policymakers, including community-based and national actors, must be invited into the discussion to envision other possibilities and to name the potential destructiveness embedded in the international organisations’ actions.

As society becomes increasingly globalized in the 21st Century, internationalization has become a noticeable priority for institutions of higher education across the world. Practices and perception...

While internationalization is among the top strategic priorities of universities and colleges globally, research into the expanse of internationalization in the kinesiology discipline is not well r...

Internationalization processes are at the fore of university strategic plans on a global scale. However, the work of internationalization is being performed through the connections between many actors at different policy levels. Our purpose here is to ask, what is happening with internationalization of higher education at the Canadian national policy level? To do so, we suggest that we must look at policies at the national level not as individual entities but rather as these policies exist in relation to each other. We examine three recent policy statements from different organizations at the national level in Canada: a federal governmental agency, a pan-Canadian provincial organization and a national educational association. Our approach involved mapping the actors, knowledges and spaces that are discursively produced through these texts and engaging a relational approach to policy analysis that questions what comes to be assembled as these policies co-exist in the national landscape.

The idea for this special issue emerged after a panel held at the 7th International Conference on Interpretive Policy Analysis in 2012 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Our goal for the panel was to bri...

While teacher learning has become a locus of school reform across many international settings, there is relatively little examination of the idiosyncratic ways in which policy discourses on teacher learning are enacted in schools. In this paper, we aim to investigate how these policy discourses are translated and configured into practices and thus, enacted into concrete realities. Using the conceptual notion of multiple ontologies, we argue that teacher learning is actualized in a multiplicity of sociomaterial entanglements, not as a single reality, but as a multiplicity of realities that coexist, simultaneously, in the mesh of assemblages that we call “school.” In this study, we describe and trace how particular socio-material configurations of teacher learning produce concrete realities of practice that mobilize and generate specific networked effects. We conclude that the postulation of multiple ontologies of teacher learning prompts a shift in how policy makers could conceive of and develop strategies aimed at transforming teaching practices.

The prevalence of technology in educational reform is a contentious issue in school systems across the globe. How might challenges emerging from the entanglement of education with technology be lev...

Internationalization of higher education has been overwhelmingly embraced by Canadian universities (Beck 2009). Yet, the decentralized nature of higher education institutions, coupled with the absence of a national governing body with responsibility for higher education, creates an interesting terrain for internationalization. Institutions assert autonomy in their international strategies but processes of internationalization involve many different actors working together and the relationship between government, national organizations and higher education institutions is not thoroughly interrogated in the Canadian scholarly literature (Shubert, Jones and Trilokekar 2009). In this paper, I examine the ideas related to internationalization pursued by one Canadian organization, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). In particular, I examine the AUCC’s response to the European strategy for internationalizing higher education, which is part of the Bologna Process. Responding to concerns from Canadian institutions and government ministries regarding their potential exclusion from global markets, the AUCC took a national lead to better acquaint Canadian institutions with the Bologna reforms, declaring an urgent need to respond to the reforms taking place in the Europe (AUCC 2008a). This response was problematic: it positioned Canadian institutions’ engagement with internationalization as necessary for national economic well-being while also re-articulating the autonomous nature of institutions. I analyze the policy knowledge, spaces and actors involved with internationalization through the AUCC’s interaction with the Bologna Process to argue a deeper entangling of universities in the ideational market-based competition embedded in neo-liberal reforms, thereby creating tensions in how autonomy can be conceived in Canadian higher education.

The chapters in this book provide a rich enquiry into the way higher education comes to be assembled amid contemporary pressures and reforms as education is entwined with public sector reforms and private interests. The organizing concept of assemblage that framed this book beckons a relational approach to thinking about the leadership and governance of higher education institutions in this context. Relational analysis in policy and governance studies has been articulated to move beyond the prevalent notion of the static institution in both research and practical terms. Theoretical and methodological insights are shifting the ways we think about governance, such as those offered through strategic-relational approaches (Jessop 2004) and approaches showing how policy creates links between agents, institutions, technologies and discourses (Shore and Wright 2011). In the study of higher education, a relational approach helps us to see how policies co-exist, suggesting gaps in our understanding of policy when we consider individual political actors (Shultz and Viczko 2012; Viczko and Tascon 2016).

This series will engage with the theoretical and practical debates regarding citizenship, human rights education, social inclusion, and individual and group identities as they relate to the role of higher and adult education on an international scale. Books in the series will consider hopeful possibilities for the capacity of higher and adult education to enable citizenship, human rights, democracy and the common good, including emerging research and interesting and effective practices. It will also participate in and stimulate deliberation and debate about the constraints, barriers and sources and forms of resistance to realizing the promise of egalitarian Civil Societies.

As higher education institutions (HEIs) are faced with increasing pressures to restructure and change their organization in line with global institutional demands, the foundational assumptions on which their leadership and governance are based are called into question. The basis of this book initiates from an assumption about an inherent democratic nature of higher education governance, whereby those who practise in HEI institutions are involved in deciding, as well as questioning, the ways in which the foundations of higher education are materialized through reform processes. Much leadership literature is focused on building a corporate university that is able to respond to market principles, economic ideology driven policies and practices, alliances with big business and industry, and strategies to internationalize for increased revenue. We take a critical approach to understanding higher education leadership and governance within this global context. The overarching questions asked in this book are: how has higher education come to be assembled in contemporary governance practices within the context of global demands for reform; and how are issues of justice being taken up as part of, and in resistance to, this assemblage?

“The Garneau Sisterhood is watching”, warns an impromptu poster in the Garneau community, following a police warning for women to take safety precautions subsequent to announcements of a serial rapist in the area. In this context, tensions exist between the individual, the state and the collective. In this interpretivist study, we invoke the lens of feminist theory to examine the relationship between identity and agency in a collective conceptualization of the citizen. Through content analysis of a sampling of public media, we present the case of the Garneau Sisterhood to consider the relationship between collective identity and agency in challenging the constraints of individualist notions of citizenship. Finally, we argue that feminist citizenship education is needed to engage the notion of collective identity and agency as a source of empowerment for students, and other citizens, to raise issues of importance in the public sphere.

Based on a qualitative case study that examined elementary teachers’ understandings of a professional development policy, we question the conceptual disconnection between professional learning and professional practices in some conceptualizations of professional learning communities. We analyse the research data using Actor-Network Theory and report that the teachers in the case study perceived a disconnection between the scenarios of professional knowledge creation and the scenarios of professional practice. Such disconnection is exacerbated due to an ambiguous treatment of the concept of professional practice in the policy documents that endorse the idea of professional learning communities. We conclude that a key element in the transformation of professional practices is the teacher’s awareness that his / her professional knowledge is enacted through his / her actions and practices, thereby concluding that professional learning is situated in the context of professional practices., Faisant suite à une étude de cas qualitative étudiant la compréhension d’enseignants du primaire à l’égard d’une politique de développement professionnel, nous questionnons la coupure conceptuelle existant entre la formation en milieu de travail et les pratiques professionnelles au coeur de certaines conceptualisations d’une communauté de formation professionnelle. Nous analysons les données de recherche en utilisant la Théorie de l’Acteur-Réseau. Nous révélons que les enseignants participant à l’étude de cas ont perçu une différence entre les scénarios de création de savoir professionnel et ceux de pratique professionnelle. Une telle coupure est exacerbée par l’utilisation ambiguë du concept de pratique professionnelle qui, dans les documents formulant les politiques, soutient l’idée de communautés professionnelles d’apprentissage. Nous en concluons qu’un élément-clé de la transformation des pratiques professionnelles réside dans la prise de conscience, par les enseignants, que leur savoir professionnel est activé à travers leurs actions et pratiques et est donc, au coeur de leurs pratique professionnelle.

Our research situates, contextualizes, and analyzes the lived experiences of ten female academics who were among the first women in the academic discipline of educational administration in seven of the ten provinces in Canada. Using institutional ethnography and life history to inform our analysis, this article explores three of the themes that emerged from participant interviews in the first stage of a multi-stage research process: mapping careers, transforming knowledge, and negotiating institutional tensions between the personal and professional aspects of their work., Notre projet de recherche situe, met en contexte et analyse l’expérience vécue par dix femmes universitaires qui faisaient partie des premières femmes formées en administration de l’éducation au sein de sept des dix provinces canadiennes. Basant notre analyse sur l’ethnographie institutionnelle et l’histoire de vie, cet article explore trois des thèmes ayant ressorti des entrevues réalisées auprès des participantes dans la première phase d’un projet de recherche se déroulant en plusieurs étapes. Ces thèmes sont l’évolution des carrières, la transformation des connaissances et la négociation des tensions institutionnelles existant entre les dimensions personnelles et professionnelles de leur emploi.