«A New Global Ethic»: A History of the United Nations International Environmental Education Program, 1975-1995

In 1975, the United Nations, under the auspices of its Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Environment Program (UNEP), established the International Environmental Education Program (IEEP). For two decades, IEEP aimed to accomplish goals ascribed to it by UNESCO member states and fostered communication across the international community through Connect, the UNESCO-UNEP environmental education newsletter. After reviewing UNESCO’s early involvement with the environment, this study examines IEEP’s development, beginning with its conceptual grounding in the 1968 UNESCO Biosphere Conference. It examines the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, moves on to the UNESCO-UNEP 1975 Belgrade Workshop, and continues with the world’s first intergovernmental conference dedicated to environmental education held in Tbilisi in 1977. The paper then uses Connect to trace changes in the form and content of environmental education. Across two decades, environmental education shifted from providing instruction about nature protection and natural resource conservation to fostering an environmental ethic through a problems-based, interdisciplinary study of the ecology of the total environment to adopting the concept of sustainable development. IEEP ultimately met with mixed success. Yet it was the primary United Nations program assigned the task of creating and implementing environmental education globally and thus offers a particularly useful lens through which to analyze changes in the international community’s understanding of the concept of the environment over time.

The OECD as a Booster of National School Governance. The case of New Math in Sweden, 1950-1975

New Math was an international reform movement aimed at thorough changes in school mathematics with respect to both content and teaching methods. This movement started to gain influence in the 1950s, and in the 1960s several countries prepared and implemented their own New Math reforms. This movement not only attracted prominent mathematicians and psychologists but also garnered support from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The New Math reforms are examples of how OECD supported thorough and broad changes in national systems of education. In most countries, however, the influence of New Math on syllabi began to fade by the 1970s. In this paper, I discuss how the New Math in Sweden reform boosted national governance and changed power relations between the teachers, textbook producers, and the national school administration. I also suggest that OECD continued to support this power structure through the testing enterprises associated with PISA.

The school of hard knocks: Pre-service teachers’ mindset and motivational changes during their practicum

The mindset and motivation that teachers demonstrate are likely to influence their students’ mindset and motivation. While mindset and motivation of in-service teachers have been investigated thoroughly, the same cannot be said of pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers’ mindset and motivation are likely developed during in-class experiences or practicum, the latter seen as the defining experience of pre-service teachers’ preparation. Understanding the changes that pre-service teachers undergo during their practicum experiences in terms of theories of intelligence, teaching efficacy, resilience, and grit is therefore crucial. This study used these constructs as examples of mindsets, self-beliefs, capacities, and personality traits. A cross-sectional design compared American and Canadian pre-practicum versus post-practicum pre-service teachers’ growth mindset and motivation and illustrated that similar effects occur across national contexts through a primarily quantitative questionnaire with open-ended questions. Triangulated statistical and thematic analyses illustrated that post-practicum students were less idealistic about the incremental nature of intelligence and reported higher resilience and a more pragmatic approach to teaching than their pre-practicum peers. The study’s findings extended other studies’ findings illustrating that changes occur specifically in teacher mindset as well as their strategies. Teacher education programs informed by these specific changes can capitalize on the pragmatic shift of teachers’ strategy selection while also coaching them to retain an incremental view of intelligence for their students’ benefit.

Educación para el desarrollo. OCDE, asistencia exterior y reforma de la enseñanza en la España del tardofranquismo

En el transcurso de los años 60 la OCDE, a través del Programa Regional Mediterráneo, cooperó con las autoridades españolas para promover cambios educativos en el país que afianzasen el crecimiento económico. El objetivo era integrar a España en la «global architecture of education», que concebía las inversiones en formación de capital humano como un factor imprescindible para garantizar el desarrollo y la modernización de las estructuras productivas. En una dirección similar cooperaron la UNESCO, el Banco Mundial y otras organizaciones internacionales, favoreciendo la asistencia exterior en la difusión de métodos y conocimientos que influyeron en la reforma de la enseñanza acometida en España. Los planteamientos recogidos en el PRM se convirtieron en una guía orientadora para las autoridades españolas y se trasladaron a los Planes de Desarrollo, aunque más como tendencias que como realidades, al incumplirse sistemáticamente las previsiones. Pese a todo, aquella influencia internacional significó una apertura a métodos pedagógicos renovadores de la práctica docente y un revulsivo frente a un sistema anquilosado, reaccionario y clasista, que contribuyó a su paulatina transformación. Al inicio de la década siguiente se ensayó una reforma de contenido más global, con la Ley General de Educación de 1970, integrando la dimensión económica con la promoción social para atenuar los conflictos políticos que erosionaban a la dictadura. De nuevo su resultado fue mediocre, esta vez por el efecto combinado de los detractores de dentro y fuera del régimen franquista.

La resolución de problemas desde un enfoque epistemológico

La relación del sujeto con el conocimiento es una cuestión esencial en el marco del desarrollo acelerado de la ciencia y la tecnología, razón que ha instituido el aprender a aprender como uno de los pilares de la educación. Las formas de adquisición del conocimiento, son diversas, pero una de las más cotidianas y connaturales es la resolución de problemas. Un contexto tan complejo, en el que de forma acelerada se genera un enorme volumen de información, hace pensar en la necesidad de comprender y valorar el papel de la resolución de problemas como acto epistemológico, que favorece la incorporación de nuevos saberes al sistema de conocimientos del sujeto. Pero, ¿mediante qué procederes se propicia desde la docencia la resolución de problemas para que el estudiante alcance nuevos saberes? Se consultan diversas fuentes de información pertinentes al tema a la par que se muestran varias de las tendencias o perspectivas más sobresalientes en el tratamiento de la resolución de problemas como situación de aprendizaje y sus regularidades. Con este trabajo se expone una visión sintética de los recursos existentes para el tratamiento de la resolución de problemas desde un enfoque epistemológico, lo que propicia un mejor aprovechamiento de esta situación de aprendizaje orientado al aprender a aprender.

El fallo Castillo: ¿una nueva línea jurisprudencial o un nuevo eslabón en la cadena del «case law» de la Corte Suprema Argentina en Derecho a la Educación?

El foco de este trabajo se centra en la sentencia de la Corte argentina sobre la discusión acerca de la constitucionalidad de la obligatoriedad de la enseñanza religiosa en horario escolar en las escuelas públicas de educación primaria. Para poner la sentencia en contexto jurisprudencial, reconstruimos el case law de la Corte en materia de educación a los efectos de dar cuenta de la existencia de una serie de precedentes relevantes en la materia y que pueden ser considerados como antecedentes que guiaron al tribunal en su actual decisión. Luego, analizamos los argumentos plasmados en el fallo en concreto, prestando especial atención a aquellos vinculados con los principios de la neutralidad religiosa y la igualdad, en tanto ambos impactaron de especial modo en las interpretaciones que los jueces asumieron respecto de la naturaleza y los alcances del derecho a la educación y de las obligaciones del Estado (tanto federal como provincial) en la materia. Concluimos que si bien el fallo constituye un paso importante hacia la exigibilidad del derecho a la educación en Argentina, la Corte Suprema debió haber puesto un mayor énfasis argumentativo a los fines de asegurar una enseñanza pública laica, conforme a una interpretación progresiva y pro persona del desarrollo normativo educativo legal, constitucional y convencional de los derechos humanos en la Argentina.

La educación en la Technoaldea: ¿Privación de la creatividad?

No se puede atribuir a la tecnología el mal siglo XXI en materia creativa y educativa, y ser la causante de la muerte de creatividad analógica. Si bien el trabajo que aquí se presenta es una reflexión sobre la importancia de la creatividad, pero también, como la creatividad analógica, que se está sustituyendo y maltratada en términos educativos por una creatividad digital. Se debe tener presente, siguiendo los estudios y análisis desarrollados por científicos sociales en los años 70 de la pasada centuria la importancia de la creatividad. Como esa creatividad analógica (cognoscente y analógica) propia del ser humano se está sustituyendo por la creatividad de las maquinas o sobre las maquinas. Es decir, en la analogía las preguntas versan como crear para resolver problemas, en lo digital se preguntan a las maquinas para crear. Por lo tanto, para desarrollar la creatividad digital se necesita creatividad analógica. Aquí abordamos y analizamos este asunto.

Educational Transfer, Modernization and Development: The Transnational Approach in History of Education Studies

Research focused on the concept of the international or, rather, of international influences and interdependencies, has become a highly recurrent line of work that has been acquiring a notable presence in the field of the History of Education. The objective of this approach to historiographical work is justified as it attempts to explain with a better precision and accuracy what has happened within national borders, or even within more defined perimeters such as regional and local ones. The transfer of ideas and projects, the importation or imitation of pedagogical models, the transfer and influence of educational and school practices, the links and connections between different cultural scenarios and knowledge, the dependencies and interdependencies of international organizations, among other aspects, have led to new and more plausible analyses of educational processes and the political and social will that fostered them. The present work focuses on researching how these practices have evolved, and their networks of connection and exchange, in order to better understand educational and curricular policies in their historical development.

The Nuffield Physics Ordinary-level Curriculum Project in the 1960s: a Transnational Project?

The Nuffield Physics curriculum project was the first national curriculum project held in the UK. The Ordinary-level Nuffield physics project, developed between 1962 and 1966 for academic pupils in grammar schools, was one of the most interesting and innovative projects of the 1960s. It had many transnational features, with influences of ideas and practices running across national borders, as well as national characteristics. It owed many of its distinctive ideas around physics for the inquiring mind to Eric Rogers, and ultimately to the progressive school Bedales in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as American reform under the banner of the Physical Science Study Committee. These were played out at a local level, for example in Worcester, led by Ted Wenham and John Lewis. During and after the project, although there was some resistance to sharing these ideas as they developed, key figures began to engage with other national systems and projects in spreading the word about Nuffield physics. Transnationalism was at the heart of the significance and achievements of Nuffield O-level physics, no less than of its problems and limitations.

Operational Media: Cybernetics, Biopolitics and Postwar Education

This article develops the concept of «operational media» to think through the deployment of utility/useful cinema in the context of cybernetically informed educational policy. The paper argues that cybernetic concepts of communication, feedback loops and homeostasis were central to the pragmatic installation of media at the center of postwar mass education. Links are made to the dominance of cybernetic ideas in postwar social science, including social psychology, sociobiology and behaviourism. A consideration of the UN’s operational media allows for a reconsideration of the agency’s communicative mandate as biopolitical and governmental. Educational policies influenced by the UN were doubly concerned with technologized classrooms: cybernetic ideas presented themselves as politically neutral, while offering efficiencies in the delivery of content. Cold war citizenship was thus conceived as a form of training that would pragmatically lead to the rebalancing of a volatile international situation. Carrefour de la vie (1949), made by Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck for the United Nations, is presented as an example of the centrality of mental health for citizenship training in postwar biopolitical regimes. In particular, the tension between the film’s humanist and cybernetic strands are considered. Au Carrefour de la vie is considered as a transitional text, presenting a humanist story of childhood in postwar life that simultaneously prefigures the operation of a controlled society.