To empower or oppress: approaching duality in educational histories

PurposeThis paper introduces key themes and debates in education and educational history that engage education's complicity in injustice and violence, as well as those that continue to position education as a vehicle for positive change and possibility. The paper introduces the papers that comprise the special issue “Challenges of Contested Spaces: Constructing Difference and its Legacies in Educational History”.Design/methodology/approachThe paper canvasses pertinent historiographical, theoretical and methodological debates that shed light on education's dual capacity to empower and oppress.FindingsPapers in this collection reveal the many ways that agendas justified in the name of education, training and reform have often invoked that name as justification for actions that harmed, discriminated or oppressed, and yet also, how despite this, education can still be imagined as a space of possibility and transformation.Originality/valueThe paper offers a summative introduction to the themes and papers of the special issue.

Geography, Ties, and Knowledge Flows: Evidence from Citations in Mathematics

Combining data on locations with career and educational histories of mathematicians, we study how distance and ties affect citation patterns. The ties considered include coauthorship, past colocation, and relationships mediated by advisers and the alma mater. With fixed effects capturing subject similarity and article quality, we find linkages are strongly associated with citation. Controlling for ties generally halves the negative impact of geographic barriers on citations. Ties matter more for less prominent and more recent papers and have retained their quantitative importance in recent years. The impact of distance, controlling for ties, has fallen and is statistically insignificant after 2004.

I Just Don’t Want to Be Judged: Cultural Capital’s Impact on Student Plagiarism

This research explores how college students’ broader educational histories affect their decisions to plagiarize. While research typically categorizes plagiarism as intentional or unintentional, explanations revealed in interviews of first-generation, working-class, and/or racial minority students suggests that these typologies inadequately capture the complex reasons some students express for plagiarizing. Specifically, students in this study plagiarize primarily because they are concerned that not only are their vocabulary and writing skills subpar, but that they do not fit into the college student role. Their explanations are situated within Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital, whereby students’ decisions to plagiarize are rooted in the outcomes stemming from educational practices that reinforce class hierarchies. Consequently, students’ plagiarism experiences are contextualized within their broader educational histories rather than limited to the immediate circumstances surrounding their academic dishonesty.

Competing Justifications

This chapter addresses the anxiety of justification, which asks about the selection among competing types of argumentation and the challenge of arriving at a common judgment from diverse starting points. This challenge is exacerbated for a British shariʻa council, as it lacks a shared set of laws or jurisprudence on which to base decisions. Each scholar has his or her own repertoire of texts and traditions, practical knowledge (of Britain, Pakistan, or elsewhere), and ideas about rights and fairness. They have different educational histories and have developed individual theological allegiances to different Islamic legal schools and to different ways of interpreting scripture. They also differ in what legal scholars call judicial temperament: how to weigh multiple criteria, such as the value of precedent, the practical effects of a decision on litigants, and the intent of lawgivers. The chapter then explores the moral, theological, and epistemological debates regarding the practice of justification.

Listening for More (Hi)Stories from the Arctic’s Dispersed and Diverse Educational Past

RésuméAlors que les marques profondes laissées par le système d’écoles résiduelles du Nord canadien refont surface, il est important de poursuivre l’étude des politiques en matière d’éducation en parallèle avec les expériences vécues par les élèves dans des lieux et des contextes d’instruction variés. Dans le cas des Inuits, cette recherche fut incomplète. L’auteure avance qu’il faut approfondir les études sur l’implication du gouvernement fédéral dans les premiers systèmes d’éducation dans les Territoires. Ces travaux devraient prendre en compte les disparités locales et régionales ainsi que les expériences des élèves. En mettant l’accent sur les contradictions et les différents impacts causés par l’éducation dans ces communautés dans le passé, et notamment sur les enseignants sans expérience de la vie nordique, cela permettrait de trouver des manières pour décoloniser l’éducation de nos jours. AbstractAs the widespread and deep impressions left on the Canadian North by the residential school system come to light, it is also important to continue examining educational policies alongside the experiences of students throughout a range of schooling sites and forms. Such research on Inuit schooling has been insufficient. I argue that more detailed educational histories of the federal and early territorial school systems should feature local and regional variability in implementation of policy and in student experience. Illuminating the inconsistent and multifaceted ways education affected communities in the past, particularly for teachers new to the North, serves to illustrate the ways education in the present necessitates decolonizing.

Psychological and neural responses to art embody viewer and artwork histories

The research programs of empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics have reflected deep concerns about viewers' sensitivities to artworks' historical contexts by investigating the impact of two factors on art perception: viewers' developmental (and educational) histories and the contextual histories of artworks. These considerations are consistent with data demonstrating that art perception is underwritten by dynamically reconfigured and evolutionarily adapted neural and psychological mechanisms.