Globalizing Education, Educating the Local: How Method Made us Mad / Edition 1

by Ian Stronach

Overview

Globalizing Education, Educating the Local offers a critical and deconstructive account of global discourses on education, arguing that these overblown 'hypernarratives' are neither economically, technically nor philosophically defensible. Nor even sane. Their 'mythic economic instrumentalism' mimics rather than meets the economic needs of global capitalism in ways that the Crash of 2008 brings into vivid disarray. They reduce national education to the same 'hollowed out' state as national capitalisms, subject to global pseudo-accountancy and fads. The book calls for a philosophical and methodological revolution, arguing for more transformative narratives that remodel qualitative inquiry, particularly in addressing a more performative rather than representative ideal.

The first part of the book aims to critique, deconstruct and satirize contemporary assumptions about educational achievement and outputs, the nature of contemporary educational discourses, and the nature of the professionalism that sustains them. The second part offers innovative postmodernist ways of reconstructing a theory and methodology that aims at 'educating the local' rather than succumbing to the fantasies of the universal.

This is a very timely book in that the economic crisis re-exposes the mythic nature of education-economic linkages, putting discourses prefaced on such 'connections' into parallel crisis. Our global educational discourses have also crashed, and new futures need urgently to be found. Such a 'turnaround' is both proposed and argued for. The book will appeal to a wide range of readers who are committed to educational and cultural change, and who are interested in a new politics of education. It will have an immediate relevance and appeal in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand in particular.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415431118
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/04/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ian Stronach is Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: writing, education, research 1

Section I

1 Globalizing education: thinking global, acting local 9

2 Discoursing the global in the national: making Science sexy (and vice versa) 43

3 Global and local professionalism: the case of teacher and nurse identities 64

4 Re-locating early professional learning: the 'invention' of teachers 101

Section II

5 The global/local nightmare: Enlightenment and its 'heart of darkness' 127

6 Localizing method: reflexivity, the picturing of selves, the forging of method 141

7 Hybridizing discipline, method and writing: this case is not yet blank 160

8 Educating the local: rethinking word-crashes, concepts, stories, theories, and sensing the new 175

References 195

Index 225