Amy Stambach

Finding the old in the new: on race and class in US charter school debates

This study examines how charter school advocates and district administrators in a suburban US school district work in concert, although not in unison, to create a public charter school that reinforces the interests of White, economically advantaged families. Drawing on ethnographic data, interviews, census data and charter school documents, we find that district administrators, charter school parents, and charter school officials at the US Department of Education have a tendency to ‘pass the buck’ for responsibility about enrollment and admissions. We also find that district administrators are caught within the social and political dynamics of a school system that in this case compels them to make decisions and enact policies that reinforce existing hierarchies. Our findings contribute to mounting evidence that rather than liberate students from the educational inequalities inherent within the regular public school system, charter schools hold the potential to reproduce racial exclusion and class stratification.

Education, Technology, and the "New" Knowledge Economy: Views from Bongoland.

The concept of bridging the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the world draws symbolically on nineteenth century diffusion theories of linear progress and twentieth‐century theories of modernization and development. This paper examines information and communication technology (ICT) policies and public‐access postings on http://www.bongoland.net. Bongoland evokes a quality of life that is hectic, frustrating, and slightly crazy. Where the language of policies envisions that technology will improve life in Bongoland, users’ postings suggest that technology reinforces regional hierarchies. This essay argues that, despite the disarticulation of past and present at narrative levels in policy, the past and the present emerge as related in Bongonians’ online postings.

Religion, Education, and Secularism in International Agencies.

Author(s): Amy Stambach, Katherine Marshall, Matthew J. Nelson, Liviu Andreescu, Aikande C. Kwayu, Philip Wexler, Yotam Hotam, Shlomo Fischer, Hassan El Bilawi Source: Comparative Education Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (February 2011), pp. 111-142 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Comparative and International Education Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657650 . Accessed: 15/04/2011 10:47

The rationality debate revisited

Horton, Robin. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xi + 471 pp. including chapter references and index.

What We See, What Is Missing, and What Has Fallen Away: The 2011 "Comparative Education Review" Bibliography

64.95 cloth Masolo, D. A. African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. ix + 301 pp. including chapter references and index.

Changes in the Field: Analysis of the 2010 Comparative Education Review Bibliography through a Lens of Global Norm Making

39.95 cloth,

Rethinking culture and education

15.95 paper.

Faith in Schools: Toward an Ethnography of Education, Religion, and the State

Each year, the CER publishes a free, open-access bibliography that records the previous year’s published research in the field of comparative and international education. The bibliography serves as a guide for researchers, teachers, policy makers, and students who wish to track developments within the field of comparative and international education. The bibliography also provides an opportunity to analyze patterns and trends that appear within the categorized list of articles. After offering a few words about the 2011 CER bibliography itself, in this essay we briefly describe several such trends that emerge from the collection of articles cataloged this year and since the year 2000. Our essay suggests three ways to approach reading and using the CER bibliography. It then analyzes arguments advanced by authors whose work is represented in the CER bibliography section titled “Methodology and Theory.” Based on a review of this and previous years’ work cataloged in this section, we reflect on what we see, what is missing, and what has fallen away.

Global Norm Making as Lens and Mirror: Comparative Education and Gender Mainstreaming in Northern Pakistan

The 2010 Comparative Education Review (CER) bibliography references 201 open-access, peer-reviewed online journals (listed in appendix table A1, which is available in the online edition of the CER) and 2,071 articles (see the bibliography, available online) published in 923 peer-reviewed print-only journals. The purpose of the CER bibliography is to provide references from a wide range of sources that, even in this Internet age, can be easily overlooked or assigned a low relevancy ranking by electronic search engines and to aid researchers, journal editors, and publishers in drawing comparisons in publication topics and themes across years. A further purpose is to provide references in a time-saving structure usable for the CER readership. To facilitate use, articles in the 2010 bibliography, as in previous years, are categorized by theme and geographic region. The CER bibliography has been an annual feature of the CER since 1959. Compiled over the years by (in chronological order) John A. Laska, Lily von Klemperer, Priscilla Balkemore, Janet Abernathy Robertson, Janice Currie, Brenda Gates, Robert Dischner, Y. G. M. Lulat, Erwin H. Epstein, and Rosalind Latiner Raby, previous annual bibliographies are available on the CER Web site (http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/compeducrevi/biblioindex.html). Beginning in 1967, only journal publications were included in the review; previously, gray matter and newsletter articles, along with journal articles, had been included. Between 1959 and 1983, the bibliography was published in various issues of the CER during the year. In 1984, it was expanded in scope and added to the August issue. Later, the bibliography was published both in print and on the CER Web site, and beginning in 2004, it was solely placed on the CER Web site. Since 2003, Rosalind Latiner Raby has championed the effort to highlight publishing trends in the field of comparative education. Raby’s annual bibliographic essays reveal that new interests and themes, such as environmental education, are emerging; older topics, including student mobility, have re-

Confucius Institutes in Africa, or How the Educational Spirit in Africa is Re-Rationalised Towards the East

Rethinking culture and education begs the question: why? Anyone familiar with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological works might quickly respond, perhaps tautologically: ‘Because culture and education are good to think with.’ The phrase ‘good to think with’ is a virtual mantra within schools of anthropology that stress the value of critical scholarship for understanding – and changing – social life. Authors as different as Jean Comaroff (Comaroff and Kim 2011) and Elsie Rockwell (2011) have invoked Lévi-Straussian ideas to call for a more engaged scholarship. Although Lévi-Strauss was a basic not engaged anthropologist, and was speaking of the value of animal categories not social theory for structuring human thought (Lévi-Strauss 1963), his argument that ideas and concepts themselves nourish the human mind points to the very educative qualities of the social sciences and humanities that I wish to focus on and endorse here. In other words, social theorizing, like animal categories, is good to think with. It is educative, it is structuring, and it is constitutive of reality.