Daniel Schugurensky

The political economy of higher education in the era of neoliberal globalization: Latin America in comparative perspective

During the last two decades, Latin American universities have experienced intense pressure to abandon the main principles established in the 1918 Córdoba Reform (i.e., autonomy and autarchy). While funding for public higher education has declined, they are pressured to relinquish a large portion of institutional autonomy in order to accommodate to market demands and to a new set of control strategies emanating from the state.We argue that current changes in Latin American higher education cannot be examined in isolation from larger political and economic changes in the region, which in turn are related to the dynamics of globalization. After the decline of socialist and welfare-state models, neoliberal regimes have become hegemonic in many parts of the world. In most countries, changes in financial arrangements, coupled with accountability mechanisms, have forced universities to reconsider their social missions, academic priorities and organizational structures. Concerns about equity, accessibility, autonomy or the contribution of higher education to social transformation, which were prevalent during previous decades, have been overshadowed by concerns about excellence, efficiency, expenditures and rates of return. The notion that higher education is primarily a citizen’s right and a social investment – which has been taken for granted for many decades – is being seriously challenged by a neoliberal agenda that places extreme faith in the market.Though we focus on the international dimension of university change, it is important to note that global trends are promoted, resisted and negotiated differently in each national context and in each individual institution. In the emerging knowledge-based society, the polarization between North and South is expected to increase even further if the scientific and technological gaps are not narrowed. Latin American universities have a crucial role to play in this regard. The paper is organized in two parts. The first describes the context of university change, focusing on issues of globalization and neoliberalism. The second examines the main features of university restructuring in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on Latin America.

From Córdoba to Washington: WTO/GATS and Latin American Education

This article examines the educational dimension of the General Agreement on Trade in Services of the World Trade Organisation (WTO/GATS), with a special focus on its potential implications for the Latin American region. This ambitious strategy to transform education into a tradable commodity in a global economy cannot be isolated from other international treaties and from the neoliberal policies that have impacted Latin American societies for the last two decades. In this regard, we argue that the WTO/GATS educational agenda has the potential to further the project of privatisation to a higher level, opening the door for international competition. In a continental political economy characterised by large asymmetries in educational export markets and in interactive technologies, such competition will not take place on an even playing field, as the USA is better positioned than most countries in the region to take advantage of a ‘free educational market’. If the proposed WTO/GATS goes ahead in such a context, Latin American countries can be adversely affected in terms of their sovereignty on cultural policy, the quality and accessibility of their public education systems, the training of scientists and researchers oriented towards national development, and the contribution of their education systems to the common good and to the equalisation of opportunities in largely unequal societies. We recommend that Latin American governments do not commit themselves to the educational agenda of the WTO/GATS before holding a wide process of public participation, information and reflection in national parliaments and in civil society.

Volunteer Work and Learning: Hidden Dimensions of Labour Force Training

This chapter explores the links between learning and voluntary work, a topic that is usually absent both in the academic literature and in policy debates. Two reasons may account for the scant attention paid to this issue. First, unpaid work (such as household work and volunteer work) is seldom considered as ‘real’ work, and therefore the literature on labour force training tends to focus on paid labour, often within the formal sector of the economy. Second, most of the learning connected to volunteer work falls into the category of informal learning, a field that only recently has captured the attention of educational researchers, who traditionally have focussed their efforts on the formal education system. In the late nineties, however, this situation began to change, as the interest of researchers in both areas grew

Transformative Learning and Transformative Politics

Since its beginnings in the late 1970s with Mezirow’s (1978) publication of a pioneer study of women returning to community college, the field of transformative learning has grown considerably, inspiring a large body of research and scholarly debate. In the last two decades, transformative learning theory has attracted the attention of a great variety of adult educators who have come to the field from different traditions. With the fading of the concepts of “andragogy” and “conscientization” (popularized by Malcolm Knowles [1970] and Paulo Freire [1970], respectively, during the early 1970s), the notion of transformative learning captured the interest of many adult education scholars and practitioners alike. At least in the United States, it has been claimed that by the mid-1990s, transformative learning had replaced andragogy as the primary theory of adult learning (Hanson, 1996). During the late 1990s, the field continued consolidating and growing, including the completion of a critical mass of doctoral dissertations (Taylor, 2000) and the successful organization of an annual conference on the topic, starting with the first one held in 1998 at Columbia’s Teachers College. At the moment of this writing the organization of the fourth conference (held in November 2001 in Toronto) is in full motion, and the amount and nature of the papers that are coming from various parts of the world show an increasing interest in both the explanatory and the emancipatory potentials of the concept.

Informal Civic Learning Through Engagement in Local Democracy: The Case of the Seniors' Task Force of Healthy City Toronto

This chapter explores the dimensions of informal civic learning of a local democracy initiative known as Healthy City Toronto (HCT). It examines one of the programmes of HCT, the Seniors’ Task Force, particularly the content and process of the participants’ learning. This study is part of an international research project that explores the pedagogical dimension of participatory democracy, with a focus on the informal learning acquired by citizens in programmes of shared decision making at the level of municipal government. It attempts to shed light on these issues by addressing three areas that are relatively underrepresented in the research on citizenship education: adult populations, informal learning and local democracy. First, a cursory literature review suggests that most large-scale research on citizenship education, from the pioneering work by Almond and Verba (1963) to the recent international study coordinated by Judith Torney-Purta (2001), has concentrated heavily on K-12 schooling, and particularly on secondary school programmes. These studies range from curriculum analysis to observation of teaching practices to surveys of students’ civic knowledge and attitudes. Moreover, the field of adult citizenship education, at least in countries with high immigration rates like Canada, tends to be understood almost exclusively as courses for the naturalization test, and is sometimes conflated with English as a second language (ESL). Second, research on citizenship education seldom pays attention to the area of informal learning. The low attention given to informal learning in the field of citizenship education is not an anomaly, as it reflects an overall neglect for this area in educational research and policy (Livingstone, 1999; Eraut, 1999a, b). Since citizenship education focuses on school settings, most references to informal learning tend to be limited to the discrepancies between the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum, such as the assessment of the democratic or anti-democratic nature of the classroom environment. Informal civic learning outside of educational institutions is rarely addressed.

Parceria universidade-empresa e mudanças na cultura acadêmica: análise comparativa dos casos da Argentina e do Canadá

This paper studies the changes in academic culture public universities have suffered these last decades. From a historical and comparative (with cases from Argentina and Canada) standpoint, it analyses the features of university and academic culture during the post-war (1950-1970) and end of century (1980-2000). In a context of neo-liberal policies that commercialize knowledge, reduce public funding and redirect funding according to external actors, a model of academic capitalism has gradually taken over during this last period and university has undergone a gradual shift from autonomy to heteronomy.

Views from the blackboard: neoliberal education reforms and the practice of teaching in Ontario, Canada

This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging ‘culture of fear’ in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy.

The ‘New Cooperativism’ in Latin America: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises and Socialist Production Units

Abstract In the first decade of the 21st century, efforts to create alternatives to neoliberalism emerged in many parts of Latin America. Social movements across the region took to the streets, occupied abandoned factories, and started to create new democratic spaces, solidarity networks, and social economy initiatives. In one country after another, progressive governments began to take office, promising a break from the past. It was in this context that the new cooperativism emerged in Latin America. In contrast to traditional cooperativism in the region, this new movement emerged as a direct response by workers and communities to the economic and political crisis of the late 1990s, displays stronger horizontal organisation and democratic values, and has deeper connections to surrounding communities. In this paper, we present two case studies that exemplify this new cooperativism: Venezuelas Socialist Production Units and Argentinas Worker-Recuperated Enterprises. Using the framework of social movement learning, we argue that in both these cases participants learn new values and practices, and collectively create prefigurative knowledge that anticipate post-capitalist social relations. This is done through a variety of everyday activities, and in particular, through democratic participation in self-governance. However, this new cooperativism faces important challenges from both the state and market forces, suggesting that their autonomy is subjected to shifting and contested dynamics.

Volunteer work, informal learning and social action

This chapter reports findings from an inquiry into the learning of housing cooperative volunteers. The volunteers who participated in this study are involved in the self-governance of their housing co-operatives. These mini-democracies are an excellent context in which to tease out some of the informal learning of volunteers related to the democratic process. Two main research questions guided this exploration. First, what do housing co-operative members learn through their volunteer work in the co-operative? Second, how do they learn? The first question relates to the content of the learning, and the second to the process by which such learning is acquired. In order to set the conceptual and institutional context for the presentation of the findings, we introduce the paper with a general discussion of housing co-operatives and learning. The findings on learning include both content and process dimensions. The learning content is presented in six areas: self-governance; housing co-operative; leadership; attitudes and values; political efficacy; and other competencies. We explore the learning process dimension through different analytical categories: conferences; workshops; materials; mentorship; daily interactions; networking; and learning by experience. The chapter closes with a series of conclusions and recommendations that emerged from the research process.

The 'accidental learning' of volunteers: The case of community-based organizations in Ontario

Every year, millions of individuals all over the world engage in volunteer work in a great variety of community organizations. In the field of adult education, our knowledge about the learning dimension of volunteer work is still negligible. The scarce available research on this topic tends to focus on the training efforts of volunteer organizations and other non-formal education activities, with scant attention paid to informal learning. However, a recent survey conducted in Canada by the New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL) found a particularly strong association between informal learning and community based volunteer work. The survey revealed that the approximately 40% of Canadians who are involved in community work, devote an average of 4 hours a week to community-related learning, including interpersonal, communication and managerial skills, and learning about social issues.