Studies In Education Culture

In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability – in local living as well as in education – is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.

"Grounded in the field of adult education, this international compilation offers a range of critical perspectives on popular culture as a form of pedagogy. Its fundamental premise is that adults learn in multiple ways, including through their consumption of fiction. As scholars have asserted for decades, people are not passive consumers of media; rather, we (re)make our own meanings as we accept, resist, and challenge cultural representations. At a time when attention often turns to new media, the contributors to this collection continue to find “old” forms of popular culture important and worthy of study. Television and movies – the emphases in this book – reflect aspects of consumers’ lives, and can be powerful vehicles for helping adults see, experience, and inhabit the world in new and different ways. This volume moves beyond conceptually oriented scholarship, taking a decidedly research-oriented focus. It offers examples of textual and discursive analyses of television shows and films that portray varied contexts of adult learning, and suggests how participants can be brought into adult education research in this area. In so doing, it provides compelling evidence about the complexity, politics, and multidimensionality of adult teaching and learning. Using a range of television shows and movies as exemplars, chapters relate popular culture to globalization, identity, health and health care, and education. The book will be of great use to instructors, students, and researchers located in adult education, cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, cultural sociology, and other fields who are looking for innovative ways to explore social life as experienced and imagined."

This book presents a collection of critical thinking that concern cultural, social and political issues for science education in the Nordic countries. The chapter authors describe specific scenarios to challenge persisting views, interrogate frameworks and trouble contemporary approaches to researching teaching and learning in science. Taking a point of departure in empirical examples from the Nordic countries the collection of work is taking a critical sideways glance at the Nordic education principles. Critical examinations target specifically those who are researching in the fields of science education research to question whether conventional research approaches, foci and theoretical approaches are sufficient in a world of science education that is neither politically neutral, nor free of cultural values. Attention is not only on the individual learner but on the cultural, social and political conditions and contexts in science education. The different chapters review debates and research in teacher education, school teaching and learning including when external stakeholders are involved. Even though the chapters are contextualized in Nordic settings there will be similarities and parallels that will be informative to the international science education research community.

This book analyses higher education from cultural perspectives and reflects on the uses of intellectual devices developed in the cultural studies of higher education over the last decades. It presents fresh perspectives to integrate cultural studies in higher education with wider societal processes and studies the internal life of higher education. The book uses cultural perspectives developed in previous studies to understand a variety of processes and reforms taking place.

The Handbook of Cultural Studies in Education brings together interdisciplinary voices to ask critical questions about the meanings of diverse forms of cultural studies and the ways in which it can enrich both education scholarship and practice. Examining multiple forms, mechanisms, and actors of resistance in cultural studies, it seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by examining the theme of resistance in multiple fields and contested spaces from a holistic multi-dimensional perspective converging insights from leading scholars, practitioners, and community activists. Particular focus is paid to the practical role and impact of these converging fields in challenging, rupturing, subverting, and changing the dominant socio-economic, political, and cultural forces that work to maintain injustice and inequity in various educational contexts. With contributions from international scholars, this handbook serves as a key transdisciplinary resource for scholars and students interested in how and in what forms Cultural Studies can be applied to education.

This book explores the fascinating and complex interactions between the ways that culture and education operate within and across societies. In some cases, education is imagined as an integrated part of general cultural phenomena; in others, educational interventions become the means for transforming the cultural circumstances of different populations. The contributors to this volume show how certain educational practices produce new cultural and professional knowledge; discuss the impacts of initially foreign educational ideas and institutions on established cultural institutions in very different societies; and explore the impacts of modernity and modern educational ideas on more traditional gendered and religious practices and communities. The book also provided striking examples of when these impacts were not benign. Increasingly powerful twentieth-century governments attempted to use education and schools to produce new, reformed citizens suitable for their newly created colonial, national, socialist, and fascist states. The expectation was that cultural and social transformation might be engineered, in major part, through schooling. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

Cultural Studies and Education is a timely introduction to cultural studies and the ways in which it can enrich both education scholarship and practice. An extensive field that in the last few decades has transformed many academic disciplines, cultural studies has yet to be fully considered by educators and education scholars. Cultural Studies and Education redresses this great shortcoming, bringing cultural studies and its implications for education to the fore. The book aims to serve three main purposes. First, it is an introduction for educators and education researchers to some of the most important theoretical debates and analytic frameworks that have shaped the field of cultural studies. Second, it offers an introduction to and examples of three important areas of inquiry in which education and cultural studies overlap: gender and queer studies; postcolonial and ethnic studies; and popular culture and youth studies. Third, it illustrates how education scholars have dealt with the conceptual challenges of cultural studies and how education offers unique perspectives and contributions to the broader debates in the field."

This anthology contains selected papers from the 'Science as Culture' conference held at Lake Como, and Pavia University Italy, 15-19 September 1999. The conference, attended by about 220 individuals from thirty countries, was a joint venture of the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group (its fifth conference) and the History of Physics and Physics Teaching Division of the European Physical Society (its eighth conference). The magnificient Villa Olmo, on the lakeshore, provided a memorable location for the presentors of the 160 papers and the audience that discussed them. The conference was part of local celebrations of the bicentenary of Alessandro Volta's creation of the battery in 1799. Volta was born in Como in 1745, and for forty years from 1778 he was professor of experimental physics at Pavia University. The conference was fortunate to have had the generous financial support of the Italian government's Volta Bicentenary Fund, Lombardy region, Pavia University, Italian Research Council, and Kluwer Academic Publishers. The papers included here, have or will be, published in the journal Science & Education, the inaugural volume (1992) of which was a landmark in the history of science education publication, because it was the first journal in the field devoted to contributions from historical, philosophical and sociological scholarship. Clearly these 'foundational' disciplines inform numerous theoretical, curricular and pedagogical debates in science education. Contemporary Concerns The reseach promoted by the International and European Groups, and by the journal, is central to science education programmes in most areas of the world.