Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 6 Number 3 2008

CONTENTS

[click on author's name for abstract and full text]
 

Paul Washington Miller. Overseas Trained Teachers in England: a policy framework for social and professional integration, pages 280‑285
Simon Batterbury. Tenure or Permanent Contracts in North American Higher Education? A Critical Assessment, pages 286‑297
Rob VanWynsberghe & Janet Moore. Envisioning the Classroom as a Social Movement Organization, pages 298‑311
Seamus Mulryan. Hegel’s Hold on Conceptions of Human Development, pages 312‑322
Phillip Kalantzis-Cope. The TRIPS Agreement: challenges and possibilities in the negotiation of justice at the transnational level, pages 323‑330
Christopher G. Robbins. ‘Emergency!’ Or How to Learn to Live with Neoliberal Globalization, pages 331‑350
Michael A. Peters & John S. Drummond. Political Economies of Health: a consideration for international nursing studies, pages 351‑362

BOOK REVIEWS VIEW FULL TEXT
Impossible Bodies, Impossible Selves: exclusions and student subjectivities (Deborah Youdell) reviewed by Kalervo N. Gulson and Mary Lou Rasmussen, pages 363‑367
Haunting the Knowledge Economy (Jane Kenway, Simon Robb, Johannah Fahey & Elizabeth Bullen) reviewed by Daniel Araya, pages 367‑369 doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.363

ANNOUNCEMENT VIEW FULL TEXT
University of Illinois College of Education Masters Degree Program, page 370 doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.370

Overseas Trained Teachers in England: a policy framework for social and professional integration

PAUL WASHINGTON MILLER Highlands School, Enfield, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.280

Overseas trained teachers (OTTs) have become an important part of the make-up of England’s primary and secondary education system. Through inadequate, and in some cases a lack of, initial induction and support for professional development, many are at risk of performing sub-optimally and some have become an endangered species. Failure to integrate OTTs in the norms, customs and nuances of the United Kingdom’s (UK) system and teaching culture is tantamount to professional neglect and has, in certain cases, led to adjustment problems. With an ageing UK population and more skilled professionals moving abroad, the UK’s dependency on OTTs is set to continue. After almost a decade of using the services of OTTs, the government remains non-committal in establishing a framework for effective integration. The expedient use of OTTs must give way to an inclusive and multifaceted integration approach involving governmental and non-governmental organisations and institutions, at all levels of society.

Tenure or Permanent Contracts in North American Higher Education? A Critical Assessment

SIMON BATTERBURY Department of Resource Management and Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.286

This article offers a critical perspective on the academic tenure system in the USA. Academic tenure is most frequently defended for the protection it affords freedom of speech in higher education, and it is attacked for its cost and lack of flexibility in a rapidly changing sector. The paper makes a third argument, that tenure sustains an unhealthy divide between tenured, untenured, and non-tenure-track staff members. It leads to differences in status, income, and job satisfaction that are inimical to basic principles of social justice. While financial considerations are a powerful factor in university efforts to constrain or challenge tenure, the maintenance of the tenure system and its use to control entry to permanent employment needs further examination. The author explores the system of ‘permanent’ contracts common in British and Australasian universities as an alternative for the USA – not because it benefits entrepreneurial university managers and administrators, but for its potential to offer a greater range of career positions for actual and potential staff members.

Envisioning the Classroom as a Social Movement Organization

ROB VANWYNSBERGHE Department of Human Kinetics and Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
JANET MOORE Centre for Dialogue, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.298

This article describes the impact of an innovative higher education initiative called the Learning City Classroom, a project based on the presupposition that the classroom can raise awareness, foster solidarity and construct a collective identity consistent with being part of the sustainability movement. The Learning City Classroom is portrayed as an organizing, designing and implementation entity and as having all the qualities of an emerging social movement organization. The Learning City acts as a social movement organization by identifying shared objectives as critical to the sustainability movement. The outcome of this research shows not only that the university can support the sustainability social movement in concrete and tangible ways, but also, that it can do this in ways that are empowering for grassroots community groups as well as for students.

Hegel’s Hold on Conceptions of Human Development

SEAMUS MULRYAN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.312

The use of development is ubiquitous in everyday language, and theories regarding it can be found in the social sciences and humanities. Although much work has been done to examine the meaning of development and its history, little attention has been paid to Hegel’s role as the philosophical anchor for the modern life of development. By revisiting Hegel’s Philosophy of History and analyzing some of the most influential thinkers in modern theories of human development – spanning economic, social, cognitive and moral – the author argues that these theories are far from escaping the Hegelian logic of Development. Furthermore, he warns of the potential violence necessarily assumed in such theories, and that revolutionizing the philosophical framework upon which developmental theories rest would be a worthwhile endeavor.

The TRIPS Agreement: challenges and possibilities in the negotiation of justice at the transnational level

PHILLIP KALANTZIS-COPE The New School for Social Research, New York, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.323

This article explores the relationship between the ideal of justice and institutional ‘structures’ administering justice/injustice within the contemporary international system through a study of the Trade Related Aspects of Property Right agreement specific focus is the question of ‘who counts’ in the negotiation of global justice, and the relationships between those affected by the global economic, political and social forces emanating from the agreement. The article problematises the territorial boundedness of questions of justice within a Westphalian horizon of political community. It also seeks to address the challenges that emerge through the example of the TRIPS agreement, and the possible trajectory of political community in a post-Westphalian world.

‘Emergency!’ Or How to Learn to Live with Neoliberal Globalization

CHRISTOPHER G. ROBBINS Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.331

The author explores the cultural politics of neoliberal globalization, its deformations of critical facets of public culture as it has returned home, and he explores the politics of emergency. Rather than seeing the politics of emergency as something indicative of an emerging ‘emergency regime’ attendant to the terror war, he argues that the current politics of emergency is rooted in neoliberal globalization more generally, especially in terms of the need for powerbrokers to institutionalize insecurity and anxiety as central facets of a ‘new normal.’ He then turns to the criminalization and militarization of schools as examples of how the process of institutionalizing insecurity has unfolded in the last decade, suggesting that public schools are an ostensible and crucial site (being the one of the last sites to be precaritized) because the types of subjects and agents required for neoliberal globalization must learn how to live (in fear) with neoliberal globalization. Without an understanding of how schools are being leveraged to produce a ‘new normal,’ strategies for engaging schools as democratic public spheres will be potentially under-developed or mis-directed.

Political Economies of Health: a consideration for international nursing studies

MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
JOHN S. DRUMMOND School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Dundee, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2008.6.3.351

This article introduces and explores the concept of political economy. In particular it focuses upon the political economy of health while also considering the implications for international nursing studies in the context of health care more generally. Political economy is not only about budgets, resources and policy. It is also about particular kinds of political power that can be difficult to grasp. Often, analyses of power in the nursing literature relate to power at the interpersonal level between say nurses and patients, the interprofessional level between nurses and medics, or at the institutional level between managerial policy and actual practice that often, if not always, relates also to national issues in health care. While acknowledging the value of these analyses, this article seeks to add the dimension of the power of political economy of health at both the national and global level. No political economy is without its underlying political philosophy or ideology which defines the means–end rationality of both desired outcomes and financial pragmatism. This is particularly the case in services such as education and health, in which the differences between various ideological approaches can often be quite remarkable, and not without impact on actual services. The purpose of this article therefore is to firmly place the concept and practice of political economy into international nursing studies by giving examples of its changing nature, its various manifestations and the challenges they present.

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