Understanding educational work: exploring the analytic borderlands around the labour that enables learning.

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]