Frances Vavrus

I didn't do nothin': The discursive construction of school suspension

This article examines the issue of school suspension by looking at the sociocultural factors that influence a teachers decision to remove a student from the classroom. The authors use ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to study how disciplinary moments are constructed by teachers and students in an urban high school in the Midwest. The analysis of classroom observations, videotaped lessons, and interviews from a longitudinal study at this multiethnic high school shows that suspensions frequently occur in the absence of any physical violence or blatant verbal abuse. Rather, suspensions are often preceded by a complex series of nonviolent events when one disruptive act among many is singled out for action by the teacher. This study has implications for current debates about zero-tolerance policies that disproportionately affect students of color for their misbehavior in school. Our analysis suggests that removing a student from class is a highly contextualized decision based on subtle race and gender relations that cannot be adequately addressed in school discipline policies.

Comparative Pedagogies and Epistemological Diversity: Social and Materials Contexts of Teaching in Tanzania

This article examines how epistemological differences regarding knowledge production and material differences in the conditions of teaching influence teachers’ and teacher educators’ understandings of learner-centered pedagogy. Emerging from a 5-year collaboration between teams of US and Tanzanian teacher educators, the research focuses on six Tanzanian secondary schools whose teachers participated in a workshop on learner-centered pedagogy and pedagogical content knowledge. We find that teachers’ views of knowledge production are profoundly shaped by the cultural, economic, and social contexts in which they teach. We conclude not only that teachers’ working conditions are important contextual factors in comparative studies of schooling but that the conditions themselves need to be conceptualized more fully in theories of knowledge production and global/local reforms of teacher education.

Critical Discourse Analysis in Comparative Education: A Discursive Study of “Partnership” in Tanzania’s Poverty Reduction Policies

The study of policy in comparative education has been approached using methods associated with the principal social science disciplines that have informed the field since its inception. In particular, the disciplines of history, political science, sociology, and anthropology have had a significant influence on determining the acceptable methods for comparative educational policy analysis, as evident by studies of policy published since the mid-1990s in Comparative Education Review. Given the multidisciplinary orientation of comparative education, it is curious that the discipline of linguistics remains virtually absent from the pages of the field’s flagship journal. This dearth is particularly anomalous today when one considers the interest in critical inquiry as a framework for interpreting the discursive aspects of knowledge production. Such interest makes it an opportune time to consider how one type of linguistic analysis—critical discourse analysis (CDA)—could enhance the comparative study of educational policy. The field of policy studies is a particularly fruitful area in which to explore the critical strand of discourse analysis because policies are, by definition, texts imbued with authority. Broadly constructivist in methodology, CDA asserts that knowledge is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power that are both material and discursive. It rejects the premises of structuralism and, instead, embraces the view that certain meaning systems—or discourses—are privileged by their relationship with dominant groups in society and are, themselves, constitutive of social relations (Rogers 2004). Policies, according to Stephen Ball, are particularly important expressions of social power in that they convey the values of authoritative actors and institutions whose particular forms of knowledge about the social world are reflected in these texts. Ball (1990, 17) utilizes a Foucauldian notion of discourse to explicate this power/knowledge relationship: “Power and knowledge are two

The promise and peril of education: the teaching of in/tolerance in an era of globalisation

This article addresses the pedagogical implications and possibilities that globalisation poses for educational policy and praxis as it relates to teaching about difference in an ever more diverse world. Among the most salient questions in an era of accelerated globalisation is how seemingly different cultures, civilisations, nationalities, ethnicities and races are to coexist peacefully in an increasingly borderless world, or whether they are forever destined to experience conflict based on cultural chasms in the guise of a ‘clash of civilisations’. This article highlights the tension between two perspectives on education: education as a force in cultivating intolerance and education as a panacea for intolerance. While not negating the potential for education to remedy social ills, we consider the extent to which education can produce change in the opposite direction. In the following pages, we present a context for our discussion of in/tolerance by providing an overview of the double‐edged, or Janus‐faced, qualities that both education and globalisation possess. We then draw on social‐psychological, anthropological and sociological literatures in bringing together three theoretical constructs—moral exclusion, the genocidal continuum and symbolic violence—in examining how intolerance is created and reproduced within educational settings. Following this overview, we present three vignettes to exemplify the teaching of intolerance in different historical and geo‐political contexts, namely, Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Israel. Finally, we conclude with recommendations that pay particular attention to the kind of education that that teaching of tolerance necessitates.

Girls Schooling in Tanzania: The Key to HIV/AIDS Prevention

Abstract This article explores the relationship between schooling for girls and HIV/AIDS prevention in the United Republic of Tanzania. It is based on a survey administered to upper-level primary school students in rural Tanzania designed to ascertain their numeracy and literacy skills as well as their knowledge of HIV/AIDS. The findings show that female students generally have stronger literacy and numeracy skills but less knowledge about HIV/AIDS than their male counterparts. This suggests that general education may not be the best vaccine against HIV/AIDS for young women; rather, AIDS-specific education and skills training may be required to increase the likelihood of prevention because of gender differences in how young people utilize knowledge acquired in school.

Girls’ Education and Fertility Transitions: An Analysis of Recent Trends in Tanzania and Uganda*

The effect of educating girls on economic growth and poverty reduction has become an important area of research in the field of economics. The educational level of the females in a population affects economic development in many ways including its consequent effects on fertility. In general there is a negative association between the number of years a girl spends in school and her fertility as an adult. It is hypothesized that education for girls has a direct effect on fertility through the knowledge skills and behaviors imparted through schooling that guide childbearing and child-care practices in adulthood. It is also widely believed that education affects fertility through a number of indirect pathways by delaying the age at first marriage and increasing the practice and efficacy of contraception. Furthermore education is thought to enhance women’s autonomy and control over childbearing decisions through more egalitarian conjugal relationships and increased control over economic resources. The education-fertility relationship in developing countries is most consistent among women who have completed at least 7 years of schooling. At the primary and preprimary school levels the categories into which most women in developing countries fall the inverse relationship of education to childbearing is inconsistent since an increase in the years of schooling may not lead to a decline in fertility in a linear fashion. Fertility may also be lower among women with no formal education than among those with some primary schooling in countries with low levels of literacy because even a few years of schooling may increase the likelihood of having a live birth owing to improvements in the mother’s health. A further inconsistency is that the autonomy often associated with schooling may remain limited for the vast majority of women regardless of their level of education even though a country’s fertility rate has begun to decline. This situation has been found in Bangladesh Egypt and Kenya. The variation in the relationship between women’s education and fertility suggests the need for further study of the threshold level of education beyond which fertility begins to decline in different countries especially in countries where lower fertility has not yet been achieved. (excerpt)

Introduction Knowing, Comparatively

The field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has long had an uneasy relationship with one of its central concepts: comparison. Scholars would likely agree that a study involving more than two countries is comparative, but what about multisited case studies in a single country? While such studies of education in Angola or Lebanon would qualify as international by North Atlantic standards, are they also comparative? Some would argue they are not. For example, in his presidential address to the Comparative and International Education Society, Carnoy (2006) asserted, “[A]lthough individual country case studies can be implicitly comparative, the best comparative research compares similar interventions, outcomes, processes, and issues across countries and uses similar methodology and data collection” (554). In contrast, others argue that qualitative research in international education entails inherent comparison because the norms from one’s own country cannot help but influence how another system is understood (see, e.g., Gingrich 2002). Further, some scholars have critiqued the ways in which rigid conceptualizations of comparison have regulated the production and uses of educational knowledge. For example, responding to Carnoy’s statement earlier, Levin (2006, 576) wrote, Comparative studies must not be a straitjacket for describing, explaining, and evaluating educational phenomena in different settings. Diversity cannot be extruded into similar methods, measures, and comparative interpretations. Does using PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] data really help us understand much about educational development in Chiapas in the south of Mexico with its rural, impoverished, largely indigenous population and Nuevo Leon in the north with its urban, relatively prosperous, industrial population and U.S. orientation? Should we restrict comparative analysis to the limited dimensions dictated by government, NGO, and multinationals with their own narrow agendas and interests?1

Teaching in tension: International pedagogies, national policies, and teachers' practices in Tanzania

In recent years, international efforts to improve educational quality in sub-Saharan Africa have focused on promoting learner-centered pedagogy. However, it has not fl ourished for cultural, economic, and political reasons that often go unrecognized by development organizations and policymakers. This edited volume draws on a long-term collaboration between African and American educational researchers in addressing critical questions regarding how teachers in one African country—Tanzania—conceptualize learner-centered pedagogy and struggle to implement it under challenging material conditions. One chapter considers how international support for learner-centered pedagogy has infl uenced national policies. Subsequent chapters utilize qualitative data from classroom observations, interviews, and focus group discussions across six Tanzanian secondary schools to examine how such policies shape local practices of professional development, inclusion, gender, and classroom discourse. In addition, the volume presents an analysis of the benefi ts and challenges of international research between Tanzanian and U.S. scholars, illuminating the complexity of collaboration as it simultaneously presents the outcome of joint research on teachers’ beliefs and practices. The chapters conclude with questions for discussion that can be used in courses on international development, social policy, and teacher education.

The new abolitionists? The World Bank and the 'boldness' of global school fee elimination reforms

This article explores the ambiguity within the World Banks (WB) stance on primary school fees by examining the recently launched school fee abolition initiative. Drawing on key texts from this initiative and two decades of WB educational policy, we suggest that the discursive work around school fees performed by the Bank is a reflection of broader historical shifts in its representation as a development institution. Our three-part analysis shows how the language of school fee abolition, its putative boldness as a policy initiative, and the careful construction of non-adversarial partnerships work to reposition the WB as a champion of global education rights without relinquishing its neoliberal policy prescriptions. The analysis demonstrates the inseparability of two strands of discourse analysis – the linguistic and the discursive – and the socially productive nature of their interaction.

Educational Formations: Gendered Experiences of Schooling in Local Contexts

Schools are complex sites of cultural politics and production, and they are particularly important institutions for feminist scholars seeking to understand gendered processes of cultural, economic, and political marginalization. On the one hand, schooling is imbued with the potential to transform lives by developing critical thinking, self-esteem, and broader perspectives on the world and one’s place in it; on the other hand, schooling can circumscribe opportunities for individual development and social change through the narrow content of the curriculum and the policing of gender, race, and class relations by students and teachers. This Janus-faced dimension of schooling is critical to recognize when analyzing the gendered experiences of students in different contexts. Schooling has been curiously absent from feminist scholarship in the humanities and has been limited in the social sciences beyond the interdisciplinary field of education, despite the universality of schooling as a social institution (Baker and LeTendre 2005; Meyer and Ramirez 2000). As a quotidian part of most, though certainly not all, young people’s lives, schooling’s taken-for-granted structures are often unexamined, and its role in re/producing, interrupting, and transforming gender relations and identities is frequently overlooked. The study of schooling in marginalized communities in the global North and South remains a lacuna, even among scholars of gender and international development whose attention is often focused on more distinctly political state and non-state institutions and actors. As Arnot and Fennell (2008) accurately note, “There is a sharp disciplinary divide that cuts through the research on gender, education and development” (2), a divide that this special issue of Feminist Formations seeks to bridge. In this issue, we place schooling at the center of feminist analyses of gendered social relations in local contexts and consider how such relations are shaped by global discourses of development and “progress.” Young women’s and men’s experiences of schooling are affected by complex interactions of local, national, and international forces that act to deny education or create unequal