Trust in Schooling System Governance and Reform

Since the 1980s there has been significant reform in the development, delivery, and evaluation of all areas of public policy and services provision, including schooling. The reforms are prompted by a general “turn” from direct government determination and provision of public services to indirect governance undertaken by a mixture of public, private, and philanthropic actors. Orthodoxies about public sector governance and schooling system reform have shifted over this time from a preference for bureaucracy to preferences for markets, contracts, and most recently social networks. Schooling system governance in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries has seen devolution of substantial statutory powers, responsibilities, and accountabilities to local parent communities or shared-interest coalitions, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Schooling policy, governance, and services provision work is now distributed across multiple state, parastatal, and nongovernmental actors. Trust in the actions of others within devolved and distributed systems is identified as an essential social lubricant of contemporary schooling governance and reform. Studies of the role played by trust in schooling systems remain relatively rare.

New shadow professionals and infrastructures around the datafied school: Topological thinking as an analytical device

Drawing upon the growing datafication of contemporary schooling, our purpose in this article is to use topological thinking as an analytical device to better understand the professionals and practices within emergent data infrastructures. We address this by attending to an influential national (and subnational) data infrastructure of school monitoring in the United States, managed by the federal Department of Education, known as EDFacts. Informed by policy documents relating to EDFacts, as well as by various related software platforms and portals, we explore the whom and how of datafication, and expose the increasing presence and influence of otherwise ‘hidden’ technology mediators, or ‘shadow professionals’. In particular, we argue that the increasing dependency of EDFacts on data has necessitated the introduction of new professional roles associated with optimising the flow of data, and thus stabilising and normalising the topological space of the infrastructure. We conclude by suggesting that EDFacts encourages teaching professionals and shadow professionals alike to engage in acts of data submission; that is, providing data to EDFacts and, at the same time, positioning themselves as wholly responsive to the infrastructure and its datafied renderings of schooling.

Relations, Aliveness, Love: Curriculum in the Spirit of the Earth

Images and practices of relations, aliveness, and love provide a way to reconcile knowledge and its schooled pursuit with the wisdom required in our current, ecologically desperate times. This desperation is rooted, in part, in threads of the efficiency movement that were inherited by education in the early 1900s and left schools with a curriculum legacy that has become exhausted and counterproductive. This inheritance can be countered with ideas from the traditions of hermeneutics and ecological thought. But they are also countered with life-affirming and life-sustaining Cree ideas: wahkohtowin, wicihitowin, and sakihitowin. Practicing these ideas can help align work inside and outside schools with the characteristic spirit (ethos) of our earthly being, and can provide the grounds for a pointed critique of, and alternative to, the regnant regimes of contemporary schooling. wahkohtowin means, briefly put, “all things are related/all things are our relations” and wicihitowin refers to “the life-giving energy that is generated when people face each other as relatives and build trusting relationships by connecting with others in respectful ways.” sakihitowin means “love.” Reimagining curriculum as constituted by living fields of relations while also considering not only the energeia, the “aliveness” that is generated in the face-to-face care of and learning the ways of such living fields, but also the deep affection that is both needed for and produced by such reimagining, increases the prospects of our ecological future and the future of the more-than-human world.

Attending to data: Exploring the use of attendance data within the datafied school

Contemporary schooling is seen to be altering significantly in light of a combined ‘digitisation’ and ‘datafication’ of key processes. This paper examines the nature and conditions of the datafied school by exploring how a relatively prosaic and longstanding school metric (student attendance data) is being produced and used in digital form. Drawing on empirical data taken from in-depth qualitative studies in three contrasting Australian secondary schools, the paper considers ‘anticipatory’, ‘analytical’ and ‘administrative’ aspects of how digitally-mediated attendance data is produced, used and imagined by school staff. Our findings foreground a number of constraints, compromises and inconsistencies that are usually glossed-over in enthusiasms for ‘data-driven’ education. It is argued that these findings highlight the messy realities of schools’ current relationships with digital data, and the broader logics of school datafications.

Iqbal and Modern Islamic Educationists, Part 1: The Perceived Aims and Objectives of Education - A Comparative Analysis

Iqbal views the schooling as well as the Madrassah systems devoid of developing a dynamic Muslim required for the renaissance of Ummah. With this realization, many Islamic educationists in Pakistan have established. Islamic schools in Pakistan. The question is whether their models are dynamic enough to create such Muslims? This research probes into the perceptions and practices of ten Islamic school educationists in Pakistan. It also probes and clearly elaborates Iqbal’s educational directives, and finally does a comparative analysis of Iqbal’s directives with the Islamic educationists’ perceptions and practices. Exploring Iqbal’s educational thought includes qualitatively drawing hermeneutical interpretationsfrom Iqbal’s two Persian anthologies of Asrar i khudi (Secrets of the Self), and Ramooz i bikhudi (Mysteries of Selflessness). Thematic data analysis was used to draw the aims and objectives for education from Iqbal’s said works. It was discovered that though the Islamic educationists carried some visions of education from Islamic perspective, they were largely following contemporary secular frame work of education in attempting to achieve these objectives. The contemporary schooling framework has been severely critiqued by Iqbal and is deplored by many educationists in the west as well for its ineptness to confirm with child’s learning psychology. This project was undertaken as my doctoral research and is presented in two parts. The first part elaborates the aims and objectives as conceived by these Islamic educationists, and as derived from Iqbal’s educational philosophy. The second part of this paper will elaborate the practices of these educationists with Iqbal’s educational directives.

Situation Selection

The ability to effectively manage one's emotions has become a fundamental work demand for leaders in a variety of professions, including principals and other school leaders. Framed by Gross's Process Model of Emotional Regulation, this study explores how secondary school principals engage in strategic leadership by utilizing strategies related to the situation selection family of emotional regulation. While prior research associated strategic leadership in schools with efficiencies that can be gained when engaging in management-based tasks, such as allocating resources, recruiting staff, and practicing instructional leadership, the findings of this study suggest that principals have had to learn to be strategic in other aspects of their work, especially in terms of how they manage themselves, their time, and their emotions. Several implications for policy and practice arose from this study, including the need to expand the academic definition of strategic leadership so it is better aligned with the realities of contemporary schooling.

Mapping Curricular Assemblages

Background/Context This article advances scholarship from curriculum theorists, educational philosophers, and educational researchers unpacking the dehumanizing aspects of education. Focus of Study The article maps the role of the tree as a measuring and organizing apparatus of curriculum and unpacks possibilities for utilizing rhizomes as a way to create movement in conceptualizing curriculum. Research Design In this article, we utilize Jackson and Mazzei's concept of thinking with theory. We bring into conversation Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical concepts of assemblage, arborescence, rhizomatics, and deterritorializing and Karen Barad's concepts of entanglement and intra-action. Conclusions The article proposes envisioning the tree and the rhizome as mutually constituted in contemporary curriculum discourses but asserts the continuing dominance of the tree as limiting the relational capacities of curriculum. Thinking curriculum arborescently dehumanizes contemporary schooling and education by reducing students, teachers, classrooms, and schools to data points. Rhizomatic thinking opens space for a relational, ethical, and ontological educative process of being∼becoming.

Environmental Education and Science Education: Ideology, Hegemony, Traditional Knowledge, and Alignment

Environmental degradation and decreasing quality of life have galvanized a generation and launched a resurgence of attention to environmental matters, raising questions about environmental education policies and practices, and their relationship to science and social responsibility. Accordingly, many programs, policies, and frameworks have emerged worldwide in an effort to understand, develop and implement environmental education. However, amidst shared concern for the environment and the recognition of the central role of education in enhancing human-environment relationships, there exist widely differing discourses and practices under the banner of environmental education (SAUVÉ, 2005). In this paper I examine environmental education in relation to: 1) the range of ideological orientations, 2) the hegemony of school-based disciplines, 3) traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom (TEKW), and 4) alignment with science education. This paper stems from my interest in understanding the location (both theoretically and pragmatically) of environmental education discourses in contemporary schooling.