Ranilce Guimarães-Iosif

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.

The Death and Life of a School-Based Environmental Education and Communication Program in Brazil: Rethinking Educational Leadership and Ecological Learning

This article presents an exploratory case study of the sustainability of an environmental education and communication (EEC) project at an elementary public school in Brazil. Our analysis shows that a narrow view of institutional educational leadership and ecological learning negatively affected the resilience of that particular EEC development. We conclude our study by suggesting that the idea of distributed leadership be expanded into the field of environmental education and communication as a potential solution to the unsustainability of similar projects. It is hoped that our discussion will assist those interested in making decisions that will have the longest positive influence on the social, physical, and natural environments of schools.

The internationalization of higher education in Brazil: A marketing policy

This article discusses how the ongoing processes of globalization are creating educational policies that pertain to, or are deliberately attached to the internalization of higher education in Brazil. With that being the case, these policies have become predicated on market based agreements, and have thus become important components of the overall commercialization of education as a service that should be available to those who have the means to claim it. It is with this reality that education may no longer been seen as a fundamental human right, but as something that is available in the general market of global exchanges and transactions. The paper critically the important interplays of these and related issues, and weighs the neoliberal versions of education against possible systems of learning that afford people their social and citizenship rights.

Governance: concepts and emergence in Brazilian education

The text discusses the polysemy of the term governance in different fields of knowledge, with a particular emphasis on the field of Education. Then, it discusses the state-of-the-art of governance in the education area, from an analytical-descriptive literature review based on content analysis. This paper analyzes governance in specialized literature by conducting a survey of the papers found in the databases of the Scientific Electronic Library Online and the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations during the period 2004–2015. The results indicate that the term governance has been increasingly used in discussions about changes in the state’s role and the phases of educational public policies, by force of the public-private partnerships. However, there is also a need to broaden the debate on educational governance in Brazilian academic circles, in view of the limited number of studies identified.O texto problematiza a polissemia das concepcoes do termo governanca em diferentes areas do conhecimento, com destaque para a Educacao. Em seguida, discorre sobre o estado da arte da governanca na area de Educacao, a partir de uma revisao bibliografica analitico-descritiva fundamentada na analise de conteudo. O artigo analisa a governanca na literatura especializada, a partir do levantamento das producoes academicas e cientificas registradas nas bases Scientific Electronic Library Online e Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertacoes, no periodo compreendido entre 2004 a 2015. Os resultados apontam que o termo governanca tem sido cada vez mais usado nas discussoes acerca das mudancas no papel do Estado e nas fases das politicas publicas educacionais, por forca das parcerias publico-privadas. Todavia, evidencia-se a necessidade de ampliar o debate sobre a governanca educacional na academia brasileira, tendo em vista o numero reduzido de pesquisas identificadas.

The Contradictions of Corporate Governance in Brazilian Higher Education

The expansion of higher education in Brazil in the last three decades, especially in the private sector, has attracted the attention of national and international investors due to its extraordinary potential for profit. Under the influence of neoliberalism, the government’s function is increasingly limited when faced with the strong lobby formed by education entrepreneurs, although it still retains an important role in the regulation of higher education. This chapter discusses the emergence of corporate governance in Brazilian higher education and examines the contradictions generated by this new management model. The new model simultaneously exerts great attraction to investors and entrepreneurs due to substantial opportunities for profit, but also provokes rejection by certain stakeholders due to the often devastating consequences on the work of professors and on the quality of education. Despite this worrying scenario, the chapter recognizes that corporate governance also offers space and negotiation opportunities for organized civil society. It is possible to identify whispers of democracy arising from the struggles of some professors and students who seek to expose the voracity of large educational groups in their search for absolute control of the private higher education market in the country. However, since such grassroots initiatives are still very tentative, the chapter highlights that the present moment is ripe for new discussions and initiatives on the subject.

Colonial thinking, educational policy and social development: The Calliandra in bloom

This paper addresses problems of educational governance in globalization contexts, exploring actions that might become social development options, taking mainly into account Southern authors´ formulations geared towards social development. We suggest, at the end, that such foundations may contribute for the construction of educational policies that will foster global citizenship in the context of the extremely competitive governance arena.