Caroline Dyer

Decentralisation for educational development? An editorial introduction

This special issue is the third collection of papers Compare has published from the 2003 UKFIET/Oxford conference on The State of Education: Quantity, Quality and Outcomes. The papers presented here were originally given in the Education and Decentralisation symposium organised by Caroline Dyer, Mark Poston and David Theobald, and in the Michael Crossley and Keith Holmes symposium on Culture, Context and the Quality of Education.

Decentralisation to Improve Teacher Quality? District Institutes of Education and Training in India.

Decentralisation is often expected to improve democratic participation and empowerment, and improve government responsiveness to local needs. International experience demonstrates that striking the right balance between centralisation and decentralisation remains highly challenging, and that developing appropriate institutional capacity to discharge new responsibilities is difficult and often neglected – yet both are crucial to effective decentralisation. Taking a sample of six district institutes of education and training (DIETs) across three states as a case study, this paper explores Indias policy and processes of decentralising teacher education. It identifies as major barriers to the emergence of DIETs their recruitment and staffing policies, and contested agendas of power, control and accountability. Yet it also finds evidence from two districts of progress towards establishing productive partnerships, in an emerging process of decentralisation that is allowing the DIETs to play a significant role in supporting teachers. Here, the DIET idea is justified, and the potential of a decentralised teacher education system to improve systemic accountability towards quality improvement and primary teachers is demonstrated.

Education and Social (In)Justice for Mobile Groups: Re-Framing Rights and Educational Inclusion for Indian Pastoralist Children.

Social exclusion is not random, but concentrated in already marginalised groups and often related to the “frozen accidents” of particular forms of thinking about education and development that come to dominate policy and strategies for service provision. This paper examines how accessing the recently enacted right to education raises a range of justice concerns for mobile, and particularly transhumant pastoralist, children in India. It argues that provision of formal education reflects institutionalised patterns of economic discrimination and status inequality that deny such children what Nancy Fraser terms “participatory parity”. The policy norm of habitation‐based provision fails to fulfil the rights criteria of making schooling available and accessible, while the colonial criminalisation of mobility leaves an enduring legacy of discrimination. Formal education is complex and contradictory in relation to both moral dimensions of the human right and its contribution to social justice.

Education and inclusion: re-examining the narratives

Governments, donor agencies and other interested parties have long promoted the expansion and improvement of education systems as a means to foster more inclusive societies and a better quality of ...

Human Capital, Social Capital and Lifelong Learning: An editorial introduction

BAICE was delighted when colleagues at the University of Nottingham proposed that the 2002 BAICE conference address lifelong long learning from human and social capital perspectives. These are topically important constructs in social and educational analysis, and taken together they allow enquiry into all fields of learning at all stages of life, in ways that encourage focused examination of the social and economic dynamics of purposes, processes and effects. The six papers included in this issue of Compare were all presented to the 2002 Nottingham conference. John Morgan (its convenor) and his colleagues, Janet Hannah and Steven Drodge, selected the papers for Compare and undertook initial reviewing. In a welcome innovation, the Nottingham team has also produced a CD of the conference proceedings, which includes the text of all papers received by the end of 2002 [1]. About 150 people attended the conference, with 90 making presentations. Most positioned their work, more and less explicitly, in relation to selected aspects of the overall theme. Few attempted an overarching conceptualisation and perhaps, given the complexity of each of the issues and the links between them, this is inevitable. To present this conference issue of Compare, we introduce in the following paragraphs current thinking about human and social capital, and ways in which it is shaping lifelong learning debates.

Formal Education and Pastoralism in Western India: Inclusion, or Adverse Incorporation?.

The education exclusion of pastoralists is increasingly recognised as a critical area for attention in progress towards Education For All. This article sets out two interlinked propositions as to what underlies barriers to education inclusion for pastoralists in India: a conflation of ‘education’ with schooling; and ambiguity over whether pastoralism is a relevant contemporary livelihood. Taking an adverse incorporation and social exclusion perspective on marginality, policy narratives of education inclusion are explored using its construct of ‘terms of inclusion’. Empirical evidence showing how pastoralism and formal education intersect demonstrates multi-faceted exclusions which simultaneously drive demand for schooling and impose highly adverse terms of incorporation for pastoralism in the globalising economy. Policy strategies currently undervalue ‘education’ as situated learning with a crucial role in pastoralist livelihood sustainability, recognition of which is essential to considering how such ‘education’ can interface with institutional arrangements and tackling the delegitimisation of pastoralism by hegemonic, place-based schooling.

Education inclusion as a border regime: implications for mobile pastoralists in Ethiopia’s Afar region

Abstract This paper extends and enriches debates on migration, borders and education by conceptualising education inclusion as a border regime. It applies a regime analysis to illustrate the borders of education inclusion for a community that migration studies have hitherto neglected: mobile pastoralists. It argues that education inclusion signifies a new form of social belonging and border crossing that many mobile pastoralists are undertaking, often precipitated by dispossession from their traditional, mobile livelihood. Supported by empirical data from Ethiopia’s Afar region, the regime analysis reveals how educational opportunity for these learners is regulated by border ‘checkpoints’. It identifies persisting and emerging inequalities of opportunity under current regimes of education inclusion that challenge the Sustainable Development Goal pledges to reach the last first. A re-appraisal of scholarly boundaries is called for to support the interdisciplinary effort needed to place mobile pastoralists among those who count first.