Community Education And Neoliberalism

This book explores community education in Ireland and argues that neoliberalism has had a profound effect on community education. Rather than retain its foundational characteristics of collective, equality-led principles and practices, community education has lost much of its independence and has been reshaped into spaces characterised by labour-market activation, vocationalisation and marketisation. These changes have often, though not always, run contrary to the wishes of those involved in community education creating enormous tensions for practitioners, course providers and participants.

This book explores the realities of adult education practice in the current political and economic climate. With a particular focus on examining the effect of the multitude of changes in policy and philosophy over the past 30 years, the book explores how the values and career expectations of adult educators have been affected, and considers the implications for adult education as a field of professional practice. As well as exploring the broader international picture, the book draws on the findings of recent research into adult and community education practitioners’ perspectives in two case study countries – England and Aotearoa/New Zealand – to illustrate how local contexts and cultures, as well as global trends, impact on the structure and organisation of adult education. By presenting the perspectives of adult educators, whose voices have been relatively absent from the recent literature, this book gives a unique insight into how their work has been adversely affected by funding and policy pressures in an increasingly insecure educational environment, and analyses their responses to the contradictions between their professional values and the expectations placed upon them by policy and funding changes. It will be of great interest to students and researchers working in Education and Sociology, and will also make compelling reading for policy-makers.

This edited collection brings together international leading scholars to explore why the education of Muslim students is globally associated with radicalisation, extremism and securitisation. The chapters address a wide range of topics, including neoliberal education policy and globalization; faith-based communities and Islamophobia; social mobility and inequality; securitisation and counter terrorism; and shifting youth representations. Educational sectors from a wide range of national settings are discussed, including the US, China, Turkey, Canada, Germany and the UK; this international focus enables comparative insights into emerging identities and subjectivities among young Muslim men and women across different educational institutions, and introduces the reader to the global diversity of a new generation of Muslim students who are creatively engaging with a rapidly changing twenty-first century education system. The book will appeal to those with an interest in race/ethnicity, Islamophobia, faith and multiculturalism, identity, and broader questions of education and social and global change.

Neoliberalism is having a detrimental impact on wider social and ethical goals in the field of education. Using an international range of contexts, this book provides practical examples that demonstrate how neoliberalism can be challenged and changed at the local, national and transnational level.

Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion offers a critical reflection on the establishment of neoliberalism as the new global orthodoxy in the field of education, and considers what this means for social justice and inclusion. It brings together writers from a number of countries, who explore notions of inclusion and social justice in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to higher education. Contributors examine policy, practice, and pedagogical considerations covering different dimensions of (in)equality, including disability, race, gender, and class. They raise questions about what social justice and inclusion mean in educational systems that are dominated by competition, benchmarking, and target-driven accountability, and about the new forms of imperialism and colonisation that both drive, and are a product of, market-driven reforms. While exposing the entrenchment, under current neoliberal systems of educational provision, of longstanding patterns of (racialised, classed, and gendered) privilege and disadvantage, the contributions presented in this book also consider the possibilities for hope and resistance, drawing attention to established and successful attempts at democratic education or community organisation across a number of countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Reconceptualizes local, national, and transnational adult education practices in light of neoliberalism and globalization. This groundbreaking book critiques the boundaries of where adult education takes place through a candid examination of teaching, learning, and working practices in the social periphery. Lives in this context are diverse and made through complex practices that take place in the shadows of formal systems: on streetscapes and farms, in vehicles and homes, and through underground networks. Educators may be family members, friends, or colleagues, and the curriculum may be based on needs, interests, histories, and cultural practices. The case studies presented here analyze adult education in the lives of sex workers, LGBTQ activists, undocumented migrants, disabled workers, homeless youth, immigrants, inmates, and others. Focusing on learning at the social margins, this book challenges readers to reconceptualize local, national, and transnational adult education practices in light of neoliberalism and globalization.

Focusing on community colleges as a unique structure within American higher education, this text investigates the specific ways in which these institutions have been impacted by a global increase in neoliberal education policies. Analyzing the effects neoliberalism has had on community colleges, the text charters discourse relating the erosion of faculty voice in academic governance, and decision making; the vocationalization of curriculum; and the impact that these factors have had on the ability of community colleges to provide students with an education that supports a democratic society. Exposing a movement away from the historical aims of community-based education, the text evidences a hijacking of community colleges to serve the objectives of the corporate elite. There has been a decline in community college faculty engagement in shared governance and their loss of recognition as academic and curricular leaders, and the book discusses the potential for redistribution of decision-making power back toward faculty. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, professionals and policy-makers in the fields of Higher Education, Education Policy and Politics, Sociology of Education, Higher Education Management and Education Politics.

This timely book situates environmental education within and against neoliberalism, the dominant economic, political, and cultural ideology impacting both education and the environment. Proponents of neoliberalism imagine and enact a world where the primary role of the state is to promote capital markets, and where citizens are defined as autonomous entrepreneurs who are to fulfill their needs via competition with, and surveillance of, others. These ideas interact with environmental issues in a number of ways and Neoliberalism and Environmental Education engages this interplay with chapters on how neoliberal ideas and actions shape environmental education in formal, informal and community contexts. International contributors consider these interactions in agriculture and gardening, state policy enactments, environmental science classrooms, ecoprisons, and in professional management and educational accountability programs. The collection invites readers to reexamine how economic policy and politics shape the cultural enactment of environmental education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.