Nadine Dolby

Research in International Education

Until recently, international education has existed at the margins of educational research. However, in the current context of globalization, international education has moved closer to the center of educational research throughout the world. In this article, the authors identify, describe, and analyze six distinct research approaches to international education: comparative and international education, internationalization of higher education, international schools, international research on teaching and teacher education, internationalization of K-12 education, and globalization of education. Within each approach, the authors discuss the historical context and the global political, economic, social, and cultural shifts that have shaped the research approach; map the major research trajectories that have developed; discuss the audience and research community; and analyze strengths and weaknesses. The authors conclude with a discussion of emergent trends within research in international education.

Popular Culture and Public Space in Africa: The Possibilities of Cultural Citizenship

Abstract: Popular culture in Africa is increasingly intertwined with the public space of nations. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on popular culture, citizenship, and identity in transnational and global contexts, this article analyzes the phenomenal success of the television show Big Brother Africa in 2003 and argues that peoples everyday engagement with popular culture, including television, must be a central component of understanding emergent public spaces and citizenship practices in Africas present and future.

Globalisation, Identity, and Nation: Australian and American Undergraduates Abroad

In this essay, I explore how two groups of undergraduates — Americans and Australians — participate in the reformulation of the “global imagination” through their experiences of studying abroad. Specifically, I question the assumption that the global imagination constitutes one shared, common experience that is the same across nations. In contrast, I demonstrate that though American and Australian students are certainly among the elite in global terms, their shared economic position does not necessarily correspond to a common global imagination. Instead, they have markedly different notions of both national and global identities. American students’ strong national identity often prevents them from exploring the possibilities of global affiliation. Australian students’ relatively weak national identity allows for a robust global sense of place, but is sometimes constrained by a limited tolerance for racial and ethnic diversity. In conclusion, I argue that the global imagination has not one, but numerous manifestations, which have the potential to both enable and constrain the enhancement of justice and democracy in a global context.

Making White: Constructing Race in a South African High School

Abstract As a social and cultural phenomenon, race is continually remade within changing circumstances and is constructed and located, in part, in institutions’ pedagogical practices and discourses. In this article I examine how the administration of a multiracial, working-class high school in Durban, South Africa produces “white” in an era of political and social transition. As the population of Fernwood High School (a pseudonym) shifts from majority white working class to black working class, the school administration strives to reposition the school as “white,” despite its predominantly black student population. This whiteness is not only a carryover from the apartheid era, but is actively produced within a new set of circumstances. Using the discourses and practices of sports and standards, the school administration attempts to create a whiteness that separates the school from the newly democratic nation-state of South Africa. Despite students’ and some staff’s general complacency and outright resistance, rugby and athletics are heralded as critical nodes of the school’s “white” identity, connecting the school to other, local white schools, and disconnecting it from black schools. Dress standards function in a similar manner, creating an imagined equivalence between Fernwood and other white schools in Durban (and elite schools around the world), and disassociating Fernwood from black schools in South Africa and the “third world” writ large. This pedagogy of whiteness forms the core of the administration’s relationship with Fernwood students, and maps how race is remade within a changing national context.

Racism and education: coincidence or conspiracy?

Taylor and Francis CBSE_A_381671.sgm 10.1080/01425690902815011 British Journal of Sociology of Education 0142-5692 (pri t)/1465-3346 (online) O ginal A tic e 2 09 & Francis 3 000May 00 D TraceyReyn ld reyn lt @lsbu.a .uk Racism and education: coincidence or conspiracy?, by David Gillborn, London, Routledge, 2008, xv + 250 pp., £22.99 (paperback), £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 9-78041541-898-0 (paperback), ISBN 9-78-041541-897-3 (hardback)

A Small Place: Jamaica Kincaid and a Methodology of Connection:

In this article, the author looks at the methodological implications of Jamaica Kincaid’s (1988) book, A Small Place, for ethnographic inquiry. Kincaid’s incisive critique of tourist practices in her birthplace, Antigua, forefronts the significance of connection as a paradigm for ethnography. Drawing on Kincaid’s writing, the author argues that researchers’ analysis of everyday practices and places must be situated within the global connections that Kincaid places at the center of her analysis. To illustrate the possibilities of this approach, the author draws on contemporary ethnographic inquiry, including her own research with youth in a South African high school.

Afterword: a research agenda for international education

Four years ago, I (with then graduate student, Aliya Rahman) published a review of scholarship in the field of international education (Dolby and Rahman 2008). Faced with multiple, conflicting hist...

Youth, Culture, and Identity: Ethnographic Explorations

Portraits of youth’s lives are often marked by extremes. On one side is the despair of poverty and the endless cycle of gang violence; on the other side, the self-absorption and materialism of middle-class youth who pass their lives in a postmodern haze of images and consumption. Although certainly there is validity (and cause for concern) in both of these representations, youth’s lives cannot be reduced to simple boilerplates, a point underscored by the three ethnographies under review in this essay. Conventional research on youth is dominated by psychological and sociological models that emphasize the “storm and stress” of the transition from childhood to maturity (Griffin, 2001) and conceptualize youth as a “problem” (Wulff, 1995). A significant challenge to this mainstream research approach emanates from the rich tradition of the Birmingham School, located at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Birmingham School produced numerous classic studies of youth (perhaps the most famous of which is Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs) that centered youth’s cultural production, locating it within larger social, economic, and political contexts. Most significantly, the Birmingham School (and its followers and even its many critics) refused the model of youth as simply a transitional space between two more meaningful locations (childhood and adulthood). Instead, youth in itself was an important time and space—for individuals, but also for society as a whole. The Birmingham School recognized youth’s agency and its power to resist societal structures, often through flamboyant and spectacular subcultures (Hall & Jefferson, 1975; Hebdige, 1979). Youth culture research through the late 1980s and 1990s both expanded and questioned the notion of “resistance” and was further complicated by theoretical moves within poststructuralism and postmodernism that weakened the grand narratives undergirding much of the Birmingham School research (Griffin, 2001). The three studies under review in this essay draw on the traditions of the Birmingham School, recognizing its formative role in shaping inquiry into youth, culture, and identity. All take seriously the agency and creative cultural power of youth. But each author also takes us beyond the “resistance” and “conformity” paradigms that oversimplify the complicated patterns of youth’s lives. In this sense, the authors are representative of a new generation of youth culture researchers, whose work is theoretically innovative, ethnographically rich, and willing to challenge standard analyses of youth, culture, and identity.

Understanding veterinarians as educators: an exploratory study

A new emphasis on ‘non-technical competence’ in veterinary medical education has drawn attention to the reality that veterinarians are not solely technicians, but instead take on a wide variety of roles in their daily practice. This article discusses one largely overlooked role that veterinarians engage in on a regular basis – that of educator. Drawing from Beijaard, Verloop and Vermunts teacher professional identity model, we discuss an exploratory survey conducted with 29 veterinary students, and how the students understand themselves as ‘subject-matter experts’ and ‘pedagogical experts.’ We focus on two areas of current concern in veterinary medical education: animal welfare and the human–animal bond. The data suggests that there is a need to expand the veterinary medical curriculum to accommodate changes in the contemporary role of veterinarians in society, and their increasingly visible and significant role as educators to clients and the general public.

Globalization and Postnational Possibilities in Education for the Future: Rethinking Borders and Boundaries

Modern educational structures and systems are largely a product of the nation-state. As scholars have reflected (Green 1997; Spring 2002), the schools that we have inherited in the twenty-first century were designed within national boundaries, and with national purposes – economic, political, and social – as the highest priority. Thus, schools were, and in many cases today, still are, one of the most significant locales in which young people learn what it is to be an “x” – either formally, through what is explicitly taught, or informally, through adapting to the practices that structure daily life (McDonald 2002). Despite the historic strength of the relationship between a nation and its schools, significant fissures are emergent. As is clear from the abundance of scholarly literature produced within the past two decades, the processes of globalization have spawned multiple forces – privatization, hypercapitalism, neo-liberalism, among others – that have begun to weaken the tight bond between the states and educational systems.