Liz Jackson

Religion in Hong Kong education: representation in liberal studies textbooks

Hong Kongs Liberal Studies curriculum (implemented in 2009) aims in part to teach young people about diversity in society, including cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. This essay considers how religions and religious diversity are represented in Liberal Studies, analyzing how minority forms of religion are visible and invisible in the four most popular Liberal Studies textbook sets. The analysis will answer the questions of (1) how Hong Kongs religious diversity is expressed in the textbooks and (2) how different religions are depicted in relation to the society overall. Textbooks are the primary source material teachers use, particularly in new subjects, as reflections of prevalent attitudes, beliefs, and norms, and as formal sources of curriculum content. This essay therefore provides a glimpse of the latent knowledge about religious diversity in the educational publishing and decision-making community of Hong Kong, relating gaps in text coverage to the subjects aim of developing student understanding and appreciation of diversity.

‘Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?’ Emotions, child poverty, and post-humanitarian possibilities for social justice education

Abstract Under models of moral and global citizenship education, compassion and caring are emphasized as a counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neo-liberal globalization. According to such views, these and related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act righteously to aid others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own. When applied to the contemporary issue of alleviating child poverty, it seems such emotions are both appropriate and easily developed through education. However, emotional appeals increasing a sense of urgency regarding such a dire issue should not necessarily be prioritized in the face of competing possibilities. Emotions can be difficult to develop, regulate, and sustain. Their appropriate expression and application in global contexts can be problematic, as people’s valuation and understanding of feelings varies across societies. Additionally, there are tensions between discourses of emotional care and compassion and rational duty to social justice. This article examines competing views on education for understanding and responding to child poverty, and defends post-humanitarian imaginaries and the possibility of non-relational care ethics. Care, compassion, empathy, and emotion may be involved in learning about child poverty, but an a priori rational orientation is also essential in such grave matters of social injustice.

Silence, words that wound and sexual identity: a conversation with Applebaum

In this paper, I continue a conversation initiated by Barbara Applebaum on how to manage irreconcilable difference, harmful language or ‘words that wound’ and various implications of power in the classroom. Referencing emerging works on the nature of speech and silence, classroom power and queer identity, I pose three questions to Applebaum in order to continue thinking through the timely situations with which she grapples. What is the nature of reasonableness is the classroom setting? Must speech reflect power; and silence, oppression? In what ways does the nature of sexual identification further complicate Applebaums scenario and similar situations many of us face in teaching about diversity in public settings? In exploring these questions, I hope to add to the conversations on speech and power in the classroom as framed by Applebaum, Megan Boler and John Petrovic, among others.

Challenges to the Global Concept of Student-Centered Learning with Special Reference to the United Arab Emirates: ‘Never fail a Nahayan’

Abstract Student-centered learning has been conceived as a Western export to the East and the developing world in the last few decades. Philosophers of education often associate student-centered learning with frameworks related to meeting the needs of individual pupils: from Deweyan experiential learning, to the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and other social justice orientations. Yet student-centered learning has also become, in the era of neoliberal education, a jingoistic advertisement for practices and ideologies which can be seen to lead to a global devaluation of the educational profession, and the bolstering of the view of the student as a customer. In this article, I want to disentangle these views and explore some limitations of either model of student-centered learning. To add context, I consider education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) today, which provides an extreme example of the risks involved with prioritizing student’s self-identified needs and interests above all else, as in an idealized or exaggerated student-centered concept. I conclude with brief comments on amending the philosophical concept of student-centered learning to be useful in diverse contexts today.

Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors among Secondary Students in Hong Kong

Purpose – Although researchers have identified correlations between specific attitudes and particular behaviors in the pro-environmental domain, the general relationship between young people’s development of environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors is not well understood. Past research indicates that geographic context can play a role, while social factors such as age and gender can have a more significant impact on predicting attitudes and behaviors than formal education. Few studies have systematically examined the relationships between education and environmental attitudes and behaviors among youth in Hong Kong. The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study comparing secondary school students’ environmental attitudes and behaviors with age and related factors in two international schools and two government schools in Hong Kong. Students’ attitudes and behaviors were compared based on school type (curriculum), while the authors additionally compared the significance of social f...

Comparing Race, Class and Gender

As Mark Mason writes in this volume (p.253), “comparative educational research yields the most worthwhile results, from an ethical perspective at least, when researchers attempt, from the very conceptualisation of their projects, to identify the axes along which educational and other goods are differentially distributed, and to disaggregate their object of study along those axes”.

Islam and Muslims in U.S. Public Schools Since September 11, 2001

Abstract While much research has considered the way Muslims are represented in the mass media in recent years, there has been little exploration of the way Muslims and Islam are discussed in U.S. public schools. This article considers how Muslims and Islam are represented in educational standards, textbooks, and supplementary resources, with an eye to the need since September 11, 2001, to provide a broad understanding of this religion and group as part of the diversity of public life within U.S. society and across a global community. The author concludes that greater teacher preparation is needed to enable teachers to make good use of outside resources, in order to aid understanding, rather than put forward one sided, if “matter-of-fact,” information such as that typically found in textbooks and supplementary resources today.

Collective writing: An inquiry into praxis

This is the second text in the series collectively written by members of the Editors’ Collective, which comprises a series of individual and collaborative reflections upon the experience of contributing to the previous and first text written by the Editors’ Collective: ‘Towards a Philosophy of Academic Publishing.’ In the article, contributors reflect upon their experience of collective writing and summarize the main themes and challenges. They show that the act of collective writing disturbs the existing systems of academic knowledge creation, and link these disturbances to the age of the digital reason. They conclude that the collaborative and collective action is a thing of learning-by- doing, and that collective writing seems to offer a possible way forward from the co-opting of academic activities by economics. Through detaching knowledge creation from economy, collaborative and collective writing address the problem of forming new collective intelligences.

‘Asian’ Perspectives on Education for Sustainable Development

Consensus among the global elite has recently emerged that key natural resources are finite and that environmental degradation, climate change, and resource scarcity challenge human survival and flourishing and fuel human conflicts (Gadotti, 2008). That humans must change their approach to living on earth or face dire consequences is behind intergovernmental organizations and others’ calls for education for sustainable development (ESD). However, as a framework, ESD lacks a substantive foundation in educational research or philosophy. Though philosophers and educators have at times pondered and reflected on the implications of humankind’s interrelations with the natural world (e.g. Benson, 2000; Lights & Rolston, 2002), ESD has largely been a political movement, fueled by United Nations and related groups’ urgings for action (Hopkins & Mckeown, 2002). As a result, answers to critical questions for implementation remain essentially contested, such as how individuals, societies, and the world should move forward (Blenkinsop, 2013; Gadotti, 2008; Maniates, 2001); how to conceptualize the relationship between humans and the natural world (e.g. Krasny & Roth, 2010; Lundholm & Plummer, 2010); and how educators can change attitudes and/or behaviors related to sustainability (Connolly & Prothero, 2008; Vare & Scott, 2007). Due to the complexity of challenges that are not just environmental but also political and economic, and due to perceived clashes of sustainability and development aims, some argue now that ESD and sustainability are neoliberal buzzwords (Bengtsson & Ostman, 2013; Stevenson, 2007). In this context, educators and policy-makers have observed that Global North and Western and Western-centered frameworks for exploring ESD have proliferated in comparison with Global South, indigenous, Eastern, and other perspectives. While the challenge of cultivating scholarship and research that is more geographically and culturally inclusive is well known, particularly in philosophy, how diverse perspectives can productively engage fundamental sustainability issues and questions has not been well elaborated. On the other hand, some suspect that it is a part of Western liberalism itself or Christianity that causes sustainability issues to be inadequately conceptualized in Western postindustrial societies. Lynn White posited in 1967 that the Christian view of the earth as a domain for humanity’s use has challenged Christian scholars and others coming from Judeo-Christian cultural contexts to cultivate critical environmental understanding. Wapner (1996) and Tamara Savelyeva (in this issue) identify dualisms of mind/body and man/environment as part of the liberal

Lifting the Publishing Curtain: The editor interview project of the EPAT Editorial Development Group (EDG)

Academic publishing has undergone a vast transformation in the last decade, along with clear beneficial and harmful impacts for higher education researchers. Journals cannot ignore the value of going online, something that was viewed as daring at the turn of the twenty-first century. At the same time that higher education leaders around the world have largely accepted an ideology of continuous data-based performance evaluation systems—for universities, sub-units, departments, and individual researchers—data emerging from online publishing enables new and influential forms of comparative analysis of journals and fields. Pressure to publish for younger scholars seems forever on the rise, and not in just any peer-reviewed journal. With increased employer demand for publication and limitless space online, the labor of journal production has risen dramatically. New levels of profit are possible for savvy academics, and ‘savvy’ is now something to which doctoral candidates across fields increasingly aspire. Journal editors have faced exciting and risky challenges during this online revolution. Though no two experiences are the same, either in the traditional or new production modes, all editors have had to make choices about new modes of publication, with financial and intellectual implications. In recent years, journal editors have begun sharing their views and perspectives regarding their participation in the ongoing transformation of academic research norms (Brooks, 2012; Burbules, 2014). Meanwhile, the field of philosophy of education has been heavily and uniquely influenced by the recent decades of restructuring and revaluation of academic knowledge and the functions of higher education institutions. Around the world, conferences in the field have normalized a role as a support group for an apparently disadvantaged new generation of researchers, with society presidents taking on the charge to protect a field at risk of irrelevancy in a neoliberal world (Roberts, 2009). The nurturing of junior scholars has been deemed essential by our societies and the editors of our leading journals (see, for example, Smeyers & Burbules, 2011). The success of novices is widely recognized to correlate with their interactions and relations with mentors and other more practiced members of a field, and journal editors in philosophy of education have begun to take seriously the newly theorized