Research in Comparative
and International Education

ISSN 1745-4999

Volume 2 Number 4 2007

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

Kari Smith & Rune Krumsvik. Video Papers – a Means for Documenting Practitioners’ Reflections on Practical Experiences: the story of two teacher educators, pages 272‑282
Christopher S. Collins. A General Agreement on Higher Education: GATS, globalization, and imperialism, pages 283‑296
Dionyssios Gouvias. The ‘Regulatory’ State and the Use of ‘Independent’ Agencies as Legitimising Mechanisms of Educational Reform, pages 297‑312
Ararat L. Osipian. Corruption in Higher Education: conceptual approaches and measurement techniques, pages 313‑332
S. Megan Che. Technical and Vocational Education in Cameroon and Critical Avenues for Development, pages 333‑345
Timothy G. Cashman. Malaysian Educators and their Perspectives on the Iraq war: a case study, pages 346‑354
Cindy Naumann. The Rebirth of Educational Exchange: Anglo-German university level youth exchange programmes after the Second World War, pages 355‑368

BOOK REVIEWS VIEW FULL TEXT
Comparative and International Education: an introduction to theory, method, and practice (David Phillips & Michele Schweisfurth), reviewed by Thyge Winther-Jensen, pages 369‑370
From Sites of Occupation to Symbols of Multiculturalism: reconceptualizing minority education in Post-Soviet Latvia (Iveta Silova), reviewed by Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva, pages 370‑371 doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.370

Video Papers – a Means for Documenting Practitioners’ Reflections on Practical Experiences: the story of two teacher educators

KARI SMITH & RUNE KRUMSVIK Department of Education, University of Bergen, Norway

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.272

This article is documentation of the personal professional reflection processes as well as staff discussions reflecting the staff’s ongoing efforts to improve the quality of teaching in the teacher education programme at the University of Bergen. The documentation is two-dimensional: video clips have been inserted into the traditional text form. This allows the reader to personally view the discussed issues and thus better form a personal opinion of the situation, without having to rely solely on written documentation and the authors’ subjective analysis. The authors claim is that video-paper as a form for publication allows for a more comprehensive presentation of the data and enables the reader to examine the documentation on which the authors base their reflections and discussions. The validity of the findings is improved as they are open to examination by a wider audience.

A General Agreement on Higher Education: GATS, globalization, and imperialism

CHRISTOPHER S. COLLINS University of California, Los Angeles, USA

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.283

Through successive rounds of negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) encourages countries to commit their higher education system to the mandates of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The WTO is an organization committed to the aggressive trade liberalization of services like higher education. This ideology, known as neoliberalism (Apple, 2005) is redefining the role of higher education. Through critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), three genres of documents have been analyzed in search of the ideology and power relations imbedded in the texts. These genres include informational documents, the legal text of GATS, and proposals from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan calling for the reduction of trade barriers in higher education. The relationship between the developed countries who are calling for a reduction in trade barriers and developing countries who are struggling to provide public education could be further strained through an international set of trade rules like GATS. Language and text can create, shift, or maintain ideologies. In the case of GATS, the ideology reflects a new imperialism where more powerful countries retain developing countries as markets in which they continue to rule intellectually.

The ‘Regulatory’ State and the Use of ‘Independent’ Agencies as Legitimising Mechanisms of Educational Reform

DIONYSSIOS GOUVIAS Department of the Sciences of Pre-School Education and Educational Design, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.297

The emergence – at the dawn of the new millennium – of ‘independent agencies’, ‘national commissions’ and ‘councils’ around the world, has been based and justified on grounds of ‘impartiality’, ‘reliability’, ‘democratic-principles guardianship’, or even ‘technical competence’. These ‘independent’ agencies are compared to state agencies, which traditionally have been responsible for the formulation of education policies. By using analytic tools from the Marxist, as well as from the neo-Weberian theoretical traditions, it is argued that the constitution of these new ‘independent agencies’ is a response to the post-modern State (what the author calls the ‘regulatory State’) legitimacy crisis. By including representatives from various interest parties, the dominant interests within the State mechanisms –always in accordance with the current power balance in the various social fields– vest the inherently unequal social relations with the magic cloak of ‘social partnership’.

Corruption in Higher Education: conceptual approaches and measurement techniques

ARARAT L. OSIPIAN Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.313

Corruption is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Forms of corruption are multiple. Measuring corruption is necessary not only for getting ideas about the scale and scope of the problem, but for making simple comparisons between the countries and conducting comparative analysis of corruption. While the total impact of corruption is indeed difficult to measure and even more so internal changes in corruption, some aspects of corruption may be quantified and measured. This article presents major conceptual approaches to corruption and develops a technique for measuring the distribution of graft in a higher education industry by using some ideas about bribery and other forms of corruption among the faculty members in higher education institutions in transition and developing nations. In order to measure the level of corruption and its changes over time or changes due to government intervention and other anticorruption efforts, the author combines two indicators, namely the number of corrupt faculty members who take bribes in a given period of time and the value of the average bribe, calculated as weighted average. The author also introduces the Distribution index (DI), the weighted DI, and the share weighted DI in order to capture internal changes in the distribution of graft. The proposed methodology may be applied in measuring corruption in higher education across the nations and making comparisons.

Technical and Vocational Education in Cameroon and Critical Avenues for Development

S. MEGAN CHE Department of Teacher Education, Eugene T. Moore School of Education, Clemson University, USA

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.333

Technical and vocational education (TVE) can influence development and economic progress for post-colonial societies. Some newly independent sub-Saharan African countries attempted curricular transformation that might produce a skilled workforce through widespread access to versions of TVE. In Cameroon, no such post-colonial curricular revolution was enacted. This article qualitatively analyzes fourteen Cameroonian secondary mathematics teachers’ spontaneous discussions about the possibilities and perceived necessity for increased TVE avenues in Cameroon. Relationships between TVE, the problem of educated unemployed, the public and private sectors, and development are explored. This article views teachers’ discussions from a lens of critical theory.

Malaysian Educators and their Perspectives on the Iraq War: a case study

TIMOTHY G. CASHMAN Department of Teacher Education, College of Education,University of Texas at El Paso, USA

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.346

This case study provides perspectives on the War in Iraq with information collected from Sabah, Malaysia, educators. The author has analyzed input from Sabahan teachers regarding their discussions of United States-led war efforts in Iraq. The implications for discourse in Sabahan classrooms are described. The author then argues that Sabahan perspectives can impact discussions of the war’s overall effects in American classrooms and, in turn, broaden the curriculum in American schools.

The Rebirth of Educational Exchange: Anglo-German university level youth exchange programmes after the Second World War

CINDY NAUMANN Department of Education, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.4.355

In the early years of the Second World War the British had already begun post-war planning for education in Germany. They expressed a need to re-educate Germans and re-establish personal contacts with German people. One tool conceived to achieve these policy objectives was educational exchange. This paper will examine British educational exchange policy in post-war Germany, including how educational exchange came to be a part of post-war educational policy in Germany, what types of exchange programmes were established and how exchange programmes addressed educational policy objectives. It will focus on programmes for university level youth, utilising documentary evidence from archival sources and an historical approach to analysis. The aim of the paper is to provide a clearer conception of how educational exchange programmes between the British and Germans developed in the immediate post-war period.

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