Ritesh Shah

Mind the gap: global quality norms, national policy interpretations and local praxis in Timor-Leste

Increasingly, the imperative for improving educational quality in schooling systems throughout the developing world is harnessed to a particular set of teaching and learning practices, such as child-centred, child-friendly or learner-centred pedagogy (LCP). Such was the case in Timor-Leste where, after independence, LCP was heavily promoted as a panacea for an education system that was perceived to be irrelevant, outmoded and of poor quality. While LCP was readily adopted into policy discourse, less support and attention were given to the substantive incorporation of LCP into teacher practice. When strategically borrowed in such a fashion, the paper suggests little promise remains for LCP to meaningfully improve student learning processes or outcomes in Timorese classrooms.

A conceptual framework to analyse the multiscalar politics of education for sustainable peacebuilding

ABSTRACT A critical and more nuanced understanding of the multifaceted relationship between projects of peacebuilding and educational provision is starting to develop. Drawing on an epistemological and ontological anchor of critical realism, and a methodology informed by the application of cultural political economy analysis and the strategic relational approach to understanding educational discourses, processes and outcomes, we illustrate how the ‘many faces’ of education in conflict-affected situations can be better theorised and conceptually represented. In doing so, we link goals of peacebuilding to those of social justice, and reinvigorate the notion of education playing a transformative rather than a restorative role in conflict-affected contexts. Making such ideas concrete, we provide examples of how such an analytical framework can be employed to understand the multi-faceted relationship between education and projects of social transformation in conflict-affected environments across the globe.

Transformative teachers or teachers to be transformed? The cases of Bolivia and Timor-Leste:

Applying the Strategic Relational Approach, this paper analyses the circumstances behind and educators’ strategies in response to education reforms in two nation-states undergoing socio-political transformation – Bolivia and Timor-Leste. Despite the starkly different histories and contemporary context of each nation, we suggest that transformation in both settings is driven by a desire to unshackle histories of colonisation and social conflict. Education reform, at least discursively, aims to dislocate past practices and replace them with a new material reality. In such spaces, we find that teachers are acting as strategic political actors, but in ways that are historically situated and driven by real and perceived personal and professional constraints. Their actions lead to particular types of ‘resistance’ and strategic action, leading to outcomes that are simultaneously continuous and disconnected from the past.

‘The fruit caught between two stones’: the conflicted position of teachers within Aceh's independence struggle†

ABSTRACT This paper explores the challenging situation faced by teachers as professionals and members of the community in Aceh, Indonesia during the provinces civil war. It reveals how teachers’ sense of agency during this period was deeply influenced by the economic/material, political and socio-cultural condition at that time – conditions and experiences which today have bearing on a place for teachers in the post-conflict peace-building process occurring in the province. During the conflict, teachers struggled to balance their strategic societal positioning – as civil servants and community members – and found themselves caught in the middle of a complex range of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces at play. This position of constraint, we argue, limited the ability of teachers to act as peace-builders during the conflict, and continues to influence teachers’ ability to function in such ways today.

Situating studies of education and conflict within the evolving field of comparative and international education: past, present and future

As two of the convenors responsible for the thematic group on Education and Conflict at the 2013 Comparative Education World Congress in Buenos Aires, we envisaged, in line with the conference theme of New Times, New Voices, a group of papers which would show how studies investigating the myriad faces of education in conflict are situated within the broader discipline of comparative and international education.

Community Participation in Schooling: Redefined in Bolivarian Venezuela?

Calls for increasing levels of partnership and collaboration between schools and the communities they operate in have been heavily promoted on the global stage over the past decades. This has largely been driven by neoliberal rationalities that view parents and students as self-interested ‘clients’ and ‘consumers’ of their schools. However, counter-hegemonic projects in Latin America have sought to strengthen the role of citizen-actors in state functions, including education, as a mechanism for deepening democratic deliberation and repositioning the entitlement of citizens to shape the purposes and functions of primary education. This chapter examines how reforms to school governance structures in Bolivarian Venezuela appropriated greater ‘voice’ to citizen-actors over the actions of their schools and how these changes brought about the possibility for a changed role and purpose for schools within their communities. The specific possibilities and challenges that participants within these governance bodies faced are situated in the broader political discourses, social structures and institutional histories within which they operated in 2006, when the empirical work for this chapter was conducted.

Myanmar’s Education System: Historical Roots, the Current Context, and New Opportunities

This chapter provides an overview of the historical development of educational provision in Myanmar. Starting with pre-colonial forms of schooling, which occurred almost entirely outside the confines of the state, the chapter traces the evolution through colonisation and the country’s independence to the non-state and state-provided education systems that exist today. In charting this evolution, the chapter highlights how, while the general intent has been for the state to centralise control and have a monopoly over education provision for the purposes of nation-building, strong dissent, particularly from minority groups, and a lack of sufficient access and quality has led to a continuation of a fragmented and de-facto decentralised system. In light of the current sector-wide reforms within education, there are particular challenges and grievances—around redistribution, recognition, representation and reconciliation—that this context creates for the reforms’ broader ambitions.

Education and Policy Challenges of a Situation in Flux

This chapter explores, in some depth, the key drivers and processes behind Myanmar’s recent reforms to the education sector. It gives careful scrutiny to the peacebuilding dimensions of these reforms—both in terms of their possibility to recognise and redress past grievances, and to locate education as a key part of the transformative remedy. A key concern raised in this chapter, is the relative absence or recognition of the country’s enduring conflict, and the consequences it has had and continues to play in the education sector. This, the chapter suggests, severely limits the possibilities for such reforms to effectively address concerns raised by a multitude of stakeholders on the education system’s complicity and role in creating or addressing the underlying conditions of conflict.