New trajectories in globalization studies: Theories, methodologies and teaching
Time: 1pm-4pm, March 10th Room: Winsor
Instructional Staff
• Dr. Tavis D. Jules, Loyola University Chicago, USA (coordinator)
• Professor Susan L. Robertson, Centre for Globalisation, Societies and Education, University of Bristol, UK.
• Dr. Mario Novelli, University of Sussex, UK
• Dr. Peter Jones, Bath Spa University, UK
• Dr. Xavier Bonal, Globalization, Education and Social Policies research center (GEPS), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
• Dr. Toni Verger, Globalization, Education and Social Policies research center (GEPS), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Globalization processes and global actors defy our traditional methods of doing comparative education, encouraging us to search for more adaptive methods of inquiry. Thus, the objective of this workshop by the CIES Globalization and Education SIG is to bring together scholars and practitioners working on issues, concepts, and methodologies associated with the study of globalization as both researchers and teachers. It will focus on three core areas of globalization studies: (i) methodological issues (ii) theoretical developments, and (iii) teaching about globalization. The workshop will address two core questions: a) How globalization changes our idea of how to do comparative education? and (b) How do you identify the global? The workshop is likely to be of interest to researchers and scholars interested in re-conceptualizing the role of globalization and the ways in which we think about it within education. The goal of this workshop is to help participants to develop their understanding by focusing on new and diverse ways to study, theorize, and conceptualize globalization and education. Participants will have the opportunity to listen to and discuss presentations which will map out some of the new trajectories in globalization studies, and to engage in workshop activities, including but not limited to, conceptual mapping, brainstorming ideas, and group discussion.
The first part of the workshop will develop around a presentation from Susan Robertson called “Studying global/ising education policies: between epistemology and methodology”. It will ask participants to examine how might we study global/ising education policies? This section of the program will argue that what is required to begin this process is a more nuanced way of thinking about the global; as discourse, political project, condition of the world, scale, reach, or habitus. These analytically discrete, though not disconnected, understandings and materialisations of the global both invite, and demand, different methodological approaches. The discussion will develop consideration of how to develop a processual account of education policies, an approach that is simultaneously attentive to both the movement of education policies and to the efforts to materialise and institutionalise these policies in new locations, which in turn alter education sectoral landscapes. A key proposition which will be discussed is that we need to see education under conditions of globalization as involving projects of ‘layering’ (Streeck and Thelen, 2005) where new projects and mandates for policy are layered on top of existing institutional processes, but in ways that set in motion a reorganisation of the sector.
In the second part of the workshop, attention shifts to questions of methodology. Peter Jones and Tavis D. Jules will introduce and lead a discussion of an approach to researching the institutions involved in the globalization of education policy. Ethnographic Discourse Analysis (EDA) is presented as an elaboration of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Discussion will consider the implications of the foundational move of EDA which is to shift attention away from the discourse of text, the primary data source for analysis of supra-national institutions, because it is seen as constituting a barrier to understanding the context of text production, reproduction and influence. This part of the workshop will seek to develop understanding of the implications of trying to study-up by engaging with the rationale for an articulation of ethnography and discourse analysis which consists of four key propositions: (i) that discourse and text are moments in complex social processes; (ii) that ideology and strategy cannot be merely read off from official texts; (iii) that the need for ethnographic investigation is based on the understanding that institutions and institutional actors are involved in multiple processes of signification with a number of implied audiences; and (iv) that each ethnographic study will provide a window into the social production of discourse and text which, because of the difficulties of access, can function as both an explanation of a case and exemplification of the likely factors at play in commensurate examples of supra-national, institutional life-worlds of signification, power and strategy.
The third part of the workshop will be led by Xavier Bonal and Toni Verger and will focus on teaching about globalization and education. The main objectives of this section are, first, to explore different ways to introduce “globalization” into our comparative education and education policy courses and, second, to provide workshop participants with ideas, teaching strategies and specific tools that can contribute to improve their teaching practices in relation to this area of knowledge. Here, a range of lecturers that are researching and conceptualizing the relationship between globalization and education will reflect on their teaching experience in the context of the globalization-related courses they give. Specifically, they will share with the workshop resources and ideas on how to structure such type of courses, the most successful assignments and practical exercises they do with students, the most appropriate and updated reading materials for both graduate and under-graduate courses, multi-media tools, internet data sources, etc.
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