Public Policy

This chapter presents a series of public policy measures that were implemented in educational contexts in Brazil and in most South American countries during the pandemic period. These measures, like guidelines, methodological suggestions, analogue and digital teaching materials, kits, and even the provision of food for the poorest members of the population, among other factors, sought to cover a wide variety of realities. The relevant fact is that many educational problems are still being faced and that these actions were incipient since they had to cover public schooling in basic education, a level where there was no experience of distance education, with the emergency implementation of remote teaching. This means that we must be more sensitive to specific actions in certain regions and also to adaptability, creativity, and inventiveness to rethink basic distance learning.

Internationalization Policies of Public Schooling and Neoliberal Discourses: A Stephen Ball Informed Analysis

This article examines the neoliberal underpinnings of current internationalization policies of public schooling in Canadian contexts. It goes beyond the existing institutional practices and approaches to internationalize K–12 public schooling and focuses more on the federal and provincial international education policies and strategies that govern the institutional practices. The article pays more attention to the neoliberal developmental contexts of these governmental policies. It employs Stephen Ball’s writings, particularly his views of policy as text and policy as discourse, to analyze the ways in which global neoliberalism and its public discourses on public education marketization, privatization, and expansion of policy communities relate to the development of current internationalization policies of K–12 public schooling as texts and as discourses in Canada. The analysis suggests that the global neoliberal ideology and its public discourses are the contexts that promote and legitimize the development of current market-oriented internationalization policy texts and discourses. These neoliberal discourses view public education as an internationally tradable commodity that the private sector may provide for international students and contribute to its policy development. In that context, current international education policies pay more attention to the recruitment of fee-paying K–12 international students with an increased role for the private sector in this process.

Miseducation in South African Public Schooling: the case of To Kill a Mockingbird

A racial incident revolving around the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in a South African school has prompted this examination of how set works are implicated in the dissemination race-related beliefs. The way the book is taught, it is argued, cements the continuation of the alienation of blackness by affirming ubiquitous white normativity. It perpetuates the notion that the fault lies in an ‘existential deviation’ that inheres in black people. This examination highlights how, through the purposive propagation of white normality, the book exhibits anti-black sentiments. The sympathetic white psyche that subsists simultaneously with the continuing enjoyment of racial favouritism, is appraised. The stance of the book is confronted by noting the contrived largely absent voices of black people in the narrative. This book positions the black characters as props, for the absolution of the white protagonists (and by proxy sympathetic white people) during circumstances of the unremitting and deadly racial oppression.

The Push and Pull of Inclusive Practices in Contemporary Public Schooling

In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay, Carrie C. Snow reflects on her experiences as both a recipient of pull-out services as a young child and as a special educator. She highlights the complex nature of special education services and how their provision is rife with gray areas. Negotiating various tensions in decision-making around whether to provide push-in or pull-out services to students with special educational needs, special educators can embrace this sense of gray to create and sustain flexible practices that forefront quality learning for their students. She discusses ways that pull-out services for students with distinct needs can work to support their learning, as well as ways they do not. For students to cultivate a trust for schooling, feel an interconnectedness, and experience joy in learning, teachers’ decisions around special education service delivery can never be cut and dried.

What kind of global citizen? A framework for best practices in world history civic education

Scholars have long identified fostering democratic citizenship as a primary purpose of public schooling in the United States, as schools should intentionally prepare students with the knowledge and skills needed for active, informed democratic citizenship. In addition, global interconnectedness has reshaped needed civic competencies to participate in civic life. This conceptual article considers the intersections between civic and world history education, assessing the relationship between the two disciplines in order to create a framework of best practices in world history civic education. Global citizenship discourse is analyzed using this framework, considering how different forms may reinforce or undermine world history’s purpose of preparing students with pluralist understandings for global democratic living. Drawing on components of history education, world history, and global citizenship education scholarship, this article seeks to establish epistemological clarity as to how world history can contribute to meaningful civic education and vice versa.