Lynette Shultz

The construction and production of youth ‘at risk’

This paper looks at policy discourse around ‘youth at risk’ (YAR) by asking two questions: First, how have problems and solutions related to YAR been constructed by Governments? And second, how do particular technologies of Government (differentiation of schools, programmes, and course streams, and the funding and identification of students with special needs) work to produce YAR? Interviews with educators at an alternative high school suggest that although policies to address YAR pay lip service to social justice concerns, technologies that serve to normalize and pathologize different groups of students present challenges to educators who are trying to disrupt the production of YAR within schools.

Citizenship education and the promise of democracy: A study of UNESCO Associated Schools in Brazil and Canada

With current manifestations of globalization creating local problems, including widening equity gaps, increased environmental destruction and burgeoning poverty, many policymakers, civil society, organizations and educators are seeking models of education that promise social justice and a democratic public sphere that reflects more than democracy of and for elites. This study of UNESCO Associated Schools, located in Brazil and Canada, identified how educators negotiate contradictory global agendas and employ UNESCO ideals of a peaceful world, human rights and democracy, and a healthy environment to create a platform for citizenship education. While there is no package of liberation and transformational education that comes with being a UNESCO Associated School, there is encouraging evidence that educators are working in creative and critical ways to educate toward more engaged citizens who are capable of contributing to a strengthened public sphere. This article compares the Brazilian and Canadian experiences with the UNESCO Associated Schools project, and examines both commonalities and differences. While global neoliberalized governance structures define much of what happens even in local contexts, the schools in this study demonstrated innovative ways in which citizenship education can be a pathway to understanding and resisting destructive global agendas while, simultaneously, maintaining a critical global awareness and citizenship engagement. Recommendations are made for citizenship education that prepares activist citizens to participate in a pubic sphere that challenges normative elitism and opens possibilities for a justice to be the common foundation of public engagement.

Conflict, Dialogue and Justice: Exploring Global Citizenship Education as a Generative Social Justice Project

If we are to live in this extensively interconnected world we need to find ways to understand the edges of democracy – those places where people and lives are moved to the margins and silenced – and to provide new ways to enact citizenship in its multiple locations with and beyond nation states. Drawing on theoretical understandings of deliberative democracy as a challenge to conventional models of liberal democracy, and the praxis of conflict transformation, this article frames processes of social justice as a platform for citizenship education. It examines the way that addressing conflict involves understanding the complexity of social change within a globalized and globalizing world. The conclusions provide conceptualizations for co-creating educational processes of engagement that work to provide expansive inclusion.

Children at Work in Alberta

This paper outlines the issues surrounding a recent move by the Government of Alberta, Canada to lower the accepted working age to 12 years old. The paper places this decision within the wider context of changes i n labour standards in North America and internationally. The lowering of the working age not only contravenes the principles of international labour agreements but is also in tension with other social policy aimed at reducing child poverty, increasing school completion rates, and providing effective transitions for youth.

Decolonizing Global Citizenship

The growth of global citizenship education scholarship across the work of scholars in multiple areas of research can only be described as remarkable in the past little while. Therefore, it is the intention of this book, coming out of a conference on the topic, to explore conceptualizations and cases of global citizenship education as it is currently being taken up in different locations.

Decolonizing Social Justice Education

In the past few years I have watched with interest as the theme “social justiceeducation” became visible in more than a few progressive education journals and meetings that resisted the neoliberalization and globalization of education and of policy. Over time, however, I worry about what it means that social justice is declared from such disparate places as conservative government education documents, activist networks, international institutions, and even a few corporations that name social justice in their efforts to project images of sustainability

Global Citizenship and Equity: Cracking the Code and Finding Decolonial Possibility

This chapter explores how global citizenship might address conditions of injustice and how global citizenship education might contribute to alleviating inequity in the world. Bringing together theories of global social justice and equity with colonial and decolonial thought, we can see the need for a concept of multi-scalar citizenship to describe and understand the uneven working and impact of global systems and relations on people in the world. Cognitive justice contributes to decolonized global justice and demands a radical democratization of knowledge spaces as a foundational condition of equity from all locations in a multiscalar system of relations. Global citizenship education then becomes a platform that demands decolonial relations to repair systems of inequality and inequity, recognizing that whether these exist in local contexts or beyond, they reflect local patterns and histories of exclusion and decitizenization.

Youth voices on global citizenship: Deliberating across Canada in an online invited space

This article examines the processes of youth engagement in an ‘invited space’ for Canadian secondary school students. The organizers created a participatory citizenship education space in which Canadian students discussed their views and visions and developed their policy position on global citizenship and global citizenship education. The content and process of The National Youth White Paper on Global Citizenship (2015) demonstrated that youth have important policy knowledge and understand they live in a globalized world that includes unacceptable inequalities and oppressions. They also understand that, through acts of citizenship, these conditions can be changed. The article discusses how students were engaged in developing public opinion and working in the public sphere while developing the policy paper on the topic of global citizenship.

Exploring Partnership Principles and Ethical Guidelines for Internationalizing Post-Secondary Education

Within the context of increasing expectations that post-secondary institutions expand their international reach through changes in policy and program, there is a tendency to focus on institutional goals and individual student learning at the expense of wider social justice considerations and implications of internationalization. These considerations include misrecognition of the multidirectionality of processes of globalization and the uneven impact of internationalization on institutions in non-Western countries in what are described as institutional partnerships.

Conclusion: Reflections on Assemblage in the Governance of Higher Education

The chapters in this book provide a rich enquiry into the way higher education comes to be assembled amid contemporary pressures and reforms as education is entwined with public sector reforms and private interests. The organizing concept of assemblage that framed this book beckons a relational approach to thinking about the leadership and governance of higher education institutions in this context. Relational analysis in policy and governance studies has been articulated to move beyond the prevalent notion of the static institution in both research and practical terms. Theoretical and methodological insights are shifting the ways we think about governance, such as those offered through strategic-relational approaches (Jessop 2004) and approaches showing how policy creates links between agents, institutions, technologies and discourses (Shore and Wright 2011). In the study of higher education, a relational approach helps us to see how policies co-exist, suggesting gaps in our understanding of policy when we consider individual political actors (Shultz and Viczko 2012; Viczko and Tascon 2016).