Education And Identity In Rural France

Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote farming community in the Auvergne, Dr Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She demonstrates how parents and children subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is sustained and valued, through a complex interplay of schooling and family life. This book explores the role played by history, identity, and power in local responses to a national institution. A significant contribution to the anthropology of education, this book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation. Dr Reed-Danahay also provides lucid and critical discussions of sociological theories on education, including those of Bourdieu.

This edited collection challenges the urban-centric nature of much feminist work on gender and education. The context for the book is the radical reconfiguration of rural areas that has occurred in recent decades as a result of globalisation. From a range of diverse national contexts, including Kenya and South Africa, Australia and Canada, and the United States and Pakistan, authors explore the intersections between masculinity, femininity, and rurality in education. In recognition of the heterogeneity of categories such as ‘rural girl’ and ‘rural boy’ they attend to how educational exclusions can be magnified by differences in relation to social locations such as class, race, or sexuality. Similar critical insights are brought to bear as authors examine what it means to be a male or female teacher in rural environments. Contributors draw on data ranging from contemporary feature films to historical materials, along with detailed ethnographic work and participatory approaches, to produce a compelling narrative of the need to understand education as experienced by those who are not part of the urban majority. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

This study examines the evolution of national and regional, cultural and political identities in that northern region of France which borders Belgium, over the two centuries which followed the French Revolution. During that time the region was transformed by the development of the industrial economy, population shifts, war and occupation, and numerous changes of political regime. Through an analysis of a wide range of issues, including language, regional and national political movements, educational policy, attitudes towards immigrants and the border, the press, trade unions, and the church - as well as the attitude of the French State - the author questions traditional interpretations of the process of national assimilation in France. At the same time he illustrates how the Franco-Belgian border, originally an arbitrary line through a culturally homogeneous region, became not only a significant marker for the identity of the French Flemish, but a real cultural division. TIMOTHY BAYCROFT is lecturer in French history, University of Sheffield.

State Schooling and Ethnic Identity examines the influence of state schooling on Tibetan students' ethnic identity. Zhiyong Zhu has developed a case study of Changzhou Tibetan Middle School after a preferential educational policy was put in place by the Chinese government in the early 1980s. By examining and analyzing student diaries, Zhu has developed a theoretical model for the construction of ethnic identity.

The primacy of education in development agendas is unquestioned. With the gradual acknowledgement of the potential benefits that migration can hold for development, the relationship between migration and education is a growing area of research. Migration, Education and Socio-Economic Mobility explores how the decisions people make in terms of both their migration choices and educational investments, mediated as they are by gender, class, caste and nationality, can potentially contribute to earning incomes, building social and symbolic capital, or reshaping gender relations, all elements contributing to the process of economic and social mobility. Much of the existing literature examining the links between migration and education focuses either on the investment of migrant remittances in the education of their children back home or on ‘brain drain’ that refers to the migration of skilled workers from the developing to the developed world. Most of these discussions are firmly rooted in materialist arguments and while undeniably important, tend to underplay the social processes through which migration and education interact to shape people’s lives, identities and status in society. Along with economic security, people also aspire to social mobility and status enhancement. The ideas presented in this book take a more varied and nuanced view of the relationship between education and migration. This book was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

This volume surveys the new global landscape for democratic civic education. Rooted in qualitative researc, the contributors explore the many ways that notions of democracy and citizenship have been implemented in recent education policy, curriculum, and classroom practice around the world. From Indonesia to the Spokane Reservation and El Salvador to Estonia, these chapters reveal a striking diversity of approaches to political socialization in varying cultural and institutional contexts. By bringing to bear the methodological, conceptual and theoretical perspectives of qualitative research, this book adds important new voices to one of educationOs most critical debates: how to form democratic citizens in a changing world.

In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a nationwide school system to buttress its power. Although the Communists, contemporary observers, and more recent scholarship have all depicted rural society as feudal and these educational reforms a failure, Elizabeth VanderVen draws on untapped archival materials to show that villagers and local officials capably integrated foreign ideas and models into a system that was at once traditional and modern, Chinese and Western. Her portrait of education reform both challenges received notions about the modernity-tradition binary in Chinese history, and addresses topics central to debates on modern China, including state making and the impact of global ideas on local society.

In 1918, the end of the First World War triggered the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France after almost fifty years of annexation into the German Empire. Enthusiastic crowds in Paris and Alsace celebrated the return of the 'lost provinces, ' but return proved far more difficult than expected. Over the following two decades, politicians, administrators, industrialists, cultural elites, and others grappled with the question of how to make the region French again. Differences of opinion emerged, and reintegration rapidly descended into a multi-faceted struggle as voices at the Parisian centre, the Alsatian periphery, and outside France's borders offered their views on how to introduce French institutions and systems into its lost borderland. Throughout these discussions, the border itself shaped the process of reintegration, by generating contact and tensions between populations on the two sides of the boundary line, and by shaping expectations of what it meant to be French and Alsatian. Borderland is the first comprehensive account of the return of Alsace to France which treats the border as a driver of change. It draws upon national, regional, and local archives to follow the difficult process of Alsace's reintegration into French society, culture, political and economic systems, and legislative and administrative institutions. It connects the microhistory of the region with the macro levels of national policy, international relations, and transnational networks, and with the cross-border flows of ideas, goods, people, and cultural products that shaped daily life in Alsace as its population grappled with the meaning of return to France. In revealing the multiple voices who contributed to the region's reintegration, it underlines the ways in which regional populations and cross-border interactions have forged modern nations.