Microsoft Word - rev1352Shah_fnl.docx Shah, P. P. (2015, March 11). Globalization and education: Integration and contestation across cultures by Nelly P. Stromquist and Karen Monkman (Eds.). Education Review, 22. March 11, 2015 ISSN 1094-5296 Stromquist, N. P., & Monkman, K. (Eds). (2014). Globalization and Education: Integration and Contestation across Cultures. Lanham, Md.: Roman and Littlefield Publishers. Pp. iii + 322 ISBN: 9781475805284 Reviewed by Payal P. Shah, University of South Carolina United States The second edition of Globalization and Education: Integration and Contestation across Cultures provides important updates to an already established stronghold in the field of International and Comparative Education. The book examines the complex and multifaceted dimensions of globalization and its connection to education and culture. This examination is explored both conceptually and grounded in empirical studies. The second edition expands on the already large breadth of issues covered in the first edition and provides the base for a comprehensive introduction to the intersection of globalization and education. This book continues to serve as an excellent primary text for graduate courses in comparative education, global education policy, globalization studies, and anthropology and sociology of education. Similarly to the first edition, the editors continue their exploration of globalization from an educational and cultural perspective to balance the more common economic and technological perspective. The first edition helped to catalyze significant new scholarship on education and Book review by Payal P. Shah 2 globalization, which has expanded the issue to several new areas. These areas include the salience of global policies with an education orientation (i.e., Education For All and the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals), the expansion of higher education, greater emphasize on vocational training, and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Thus, the second edition seeks to include the knowledge and experience gained over the fourteen years since the first edition, comprising chapters written by many of the original authors, but also several new ones. Authors who contributed to the first edition have rewritten or revised their chapters with new data and analysis, “demonstrating the dynamic nature of globalization and its wide range of consequences” (p. v). Six new chapters addressing methodological and topical issues have been added to this second edition. The contributors represent both well-known scholars in the field of international and comparative education, as well as newer scholars. The book presents a broad range of issues related to globalization and education in accessible, yet theoretically grounded detail. Each chapter explores conceptual issues with a thorough exploration of the academic literature and in-depth analysis, representing a variety of methodological orientations and levels of examination (from the global to the local). New to this edition is a methodology chapter on a qualitative approach especially well suited to the exploration of globalization and education. Each chapter explores, embedded within the discourses of convergence, dissonance, and conflict, the tensions between the national and the global, and cultural homogeneity and the development of a global orientation. The editors assert that: while education is gaining widespread attention as a means to individual social mobility and national economic competitiveness, educators and policy makers must continue to give globalization close scrutiny if we are to assess its impact on education in developing countries and on the interplay that is occurring Education Review 3 between central and less developed countries (p. vi). To explore the consequences of globalization on education, the book is divided into three sections. The first is a series of eight chapters (by Nelly Stromquist and Karen Monkman, Martin Carnoy, Karen Mundy and Caroline Manion, Monisha Bajaj, Kathryn Moeller, Noel Bough, Catherine A. Odora Hoppers, and Lesley Bartlett and Frances Vavrus) that explores the central conceptual and methodological issues underlying notions of globalization, internationalization, and multilateralism. The second is a set of four chapters (by Jan Currie and Lesley Vidovich, Rosalind Latiner Raby, Peter Kelly and Jane Kenway, and Shirley Walters) that provides empirically grounded examples of shifts and transformations due to globalization within a specific level or modality of the education system. The third is a set of six national case studies: Lynne Parmenter (Japan), Rosa Nidia Buenfil (Mexico), Molly N.N. Lee (Malaysia), Nancy Kendall and Rachel Silver (Malawi), Salim Cally and Carol Anne Spreen (South Africa), and Jill Blackmore (Australia) that detail the impacts of globalization at multiple levels of the educational system across the globe. The first section begins with an essay by the editors where they lay out definitions of globalization and assessments of its implications for all levels of education. They assert that the market and the transnational corporation are the primary actors imposing themselves on education policy agendas, affecting not only the formal educational sectors but also the construction and restructuring of local cultures. They critique current discourses of globalization for glossing over the possibility that new knowledge generated through global processes and new technologies is likely to generate losers and winners at national and individual levels, instead of automatically providing everyone opportunities for the development of a “comparative advantage”. The editors incorporate a discussion of culture and gender into this argument reminding readers that schooling needs to be examined critically in regards to its transformative potential in recreating gender identities and addressing issues of Book review by Payal P. Shah 4 domestic violence and sexual harassment. They also note the implications of globalization in creating transnational global spaces and its impact on nationally oriented educational systems. The editors conclude their discussions with important questions related to the purpose of education in the globalization age. They remind of the importance of looking not only at the extremes of the globalized and nonglobalized economies, but also at the interaction between the local and the global so as to not miss the important dynamics that exist at both and between. In this way, the editors assert that we can illuminate spaces for positive transformation – how local groups reshape their identities to be simultaneously local as well as global. They end their essay by positing whether education in the globalization age will “succumb to pressure to make us more productive and increase our ability to produce and consume, or [whether] it will be able to instill in all of us a democratic spirit which values the common good” (p.16). Following this introduction, the rest of the chapters provide, in varying ways, definitions of globalization and assessments of its impact. The chapter by Conroy addresses the impact of information communication technologies (ITCs) on the education system and the consequences of globalization on the nation state. He argues that “the coming together of globalization and ITCs have greatly increased economic competition in the world economy, put increased emphasis on education as a key sector contributing to economic growth, and helped raise the economic returns to higher educated labor” (p. 21). He also notes that this confluence has increased stress on nation states to improve the quantity and quality of their educational systems, relying heavily on measuring and comparing incomes, and placed educational technology centrally in education reform efforts. He concludes that despite improvements in technology, ICTs’ impact on student learning has been mixed, in part because of problems related to delivery and usability – i.e., computer access and teacher training. At the university level, the emergence of new forms of virtual education seems to promote increased access to knowledge to large groups, but Education Review 5 it remains to be seen to what extent such initiatives, such as massive online open courses, enable quality knowledge at lower costs. Despite influences of globalization supporting privatization of education policies and programs, Conroy finds evidence that some functions of the state has been weakened, but some also strengthened, and that overall the nation state still retains significant decision making authority. The chapter by Mundy and Manion takes a historical perspective to examine global governance in education, and in particular the work of global institutions and transnational actors with educational mandates. Drawing on theories of global governance and international relations, they ask “how changes in world order and the international society of states over the last half- century have shaped existing institutions, and how global institutions have in turn developed new patterns and possibilities for global governance” (p. 39). The authors begin with analysis of the United Nations mandate in education, focusing on the emergence of the World Bank as the predominant global governor of the international education for development regime. They then analyze the Education for All movement along with the consideration of other sources of global governance in education: nonstate actors and networks, the private sector, and emerging world powers. They conclude their chapter with analysis of current shifts in global patterns of geopolitical and economic power, and their implications for global governance in education. In chapter four, Bajaj centrally places human rights into her discussion of globalization and education. In this chapter, Bajaj examines the ways that the contemporary forces of globalization and human rights are negotiated in educational policy discussions, textbook revisions, teacher education, and the every day life of schools. She analyses the concepts of human rights in global education policy discourse using three orientations – education as a human right, education with human rights, and education for human rights. Using the case study of the Right to Education Act in India (RTE) and the concepts of decoupling and lose Book review by Payal P. Shah 6 coupling, Bajaj considers how human rights concepts assume different meanings, uses and definitions. She contends that the RTE Act in India illuminates the “productive plasticity of rights talk and how human rights concepts are strategically engaged due to their international currency and discursive popularity” (p.66). Thus, engaging rights talks enables the Indian education system to go beyond access to schools and achieve a more wide- ranging vision of access and quality for Indian children. The text next moves to examine transnational corporation engagement education in the chapter by Moeller. This chapter critically examines the Nike Corporation’s “The Girl Effect” campaign, which targets adolescent girls and young women. Through her ethnographic account of The Girl Effect campaign in Brazil, Moeller illustrates that the program, which as first seems to have merit with its attention to girls as a vulnerable group, is in reality based on an instrumental logic linked to job preparation and economic growth, upon which corporations are able to capitalize for purposes beyond educating girls. She reveals that this logic does not provide for sustained and in-depth problematizing of gender issues or accountability to the girls, women, and communities that they are supposedly serving. Gough’s chapter on curriculum is informed by narrative theory and poststructuralism, from which he seeks to understand “how globalization works” rather than “what globalization means”. In this chapter Gough illuminates what curriculum workers (teachers, administrators, academics, researchers) do and produce, with the concept of globalization” (p. 87). To do so, he explores transitional curriculum conversations related to global perspectives on school curricula and of the internationalizing nature of the field of curriculum studies. Hopper’s chapter moves us from the level of curriculum to the level of democratic functioning and well being in Africa. Hopper provides us a sharp critique of globalization as a new path to democracy and illuminates how, due to its Western orientation, further marginalizes many peoples and cultures in Africa. She contends that global Education Review 7 processes, led by international financial and development agencies, view African governments’ as incapable of carrying out educational reforms, and thus impose external education agendas which do not strongly affirm African values and perspectives and their role in the production of knowledge. The first section of the book concludes with a methodological chapter by Bartlett and Vavrus where they present a qualitative approach appropriate for capturing the complexities when examining processes of globalization. This approach, the vertical case study (VCS), is heavily informed by Tsing’s theorization of “global connections” which necessitates understanding the impact of globalization on education at multiple levels – the international, national and local. Informed by sociocultural studies of education policy, actor network theory, reconceptualizations of space, and policyscapes, the authors argue that a multi-sited ethnographic approach is needed for nuanced, multi-faceted understandings of globalization. They explain how the VCS approach unfolds along three “axes” – the vertical, the horizontal, and the transversal – to enable simultaneous attention to and across micro, meso, and macro levels, or spatial scales. Thus they contend that the interconnecting nature of global phenomenon occurs in local contexts, with networks that stretch across space and time, and connects scales, places, and actors. Bartlett and Vavrus then present a case study of learner-centered pedagogy in Tanzania to demonstrate the VCS approach. The second section of the book discusses the impact of globalization on various educational levels. Currie and Vidovich focus their analysis of globalization’s impact on the university level in France, the Netherlands, and Australia. In particular, they focus on how these three countries’ university systems are responding to the positioning of Europe in the global marketplace of higher education. They show how the dominance of the English language in higher education institutions globally has made for an uneven playing field in terms of nations creating globally competitive Book review by Payal P. Shah 8 institutions. Raby provides a discussion of the diffusion of the community college model of post- secondary education. In outlining the various forms it takes, she finds similarities across structures and locations, but also unique local interpretations. She closes the chapter by identifying five repercussions of globalization: financial, academic, cultural, applied, and philosophical. Kelly and Kenway focus their chapter on vocational education and training (VET) sector, and in particular the restricting of gender education and work following the global financial crisis of 2008. They rely on individual narratives and analysis of a chef training program to show how vocational training can catalyze transformation for young people marginalized from and by education and labor markets. Walters analyzes various aspects of adult education in South Africa as they are impacted by economic globalization. Given post apartheid South Africa’s particular situation, Walters examines South Africa’s national qualifications framework – a policy designed to recognize the knowledge and skills acquired through prior work experience – which has now been instituted in almost 150 countries. In her examination, Walters shows how globalization has impacted the world of work, and consequently identifying criteria to recognize prior knowledge and skills has become increasingly complex, complicated by issues of power and authority. Further, she shows that global developments defining the status of adult education complicate the adoption of adult and lifelong learning strategies at local and global levels. The third section of the book presents six case studies to illustrate how globalization engages with education in different contexts around the globe. Paramenter examines the case of Japan to demonstrate how the concept of globalization is appropriated, negotiated, and contested within schools and in higher education. She reveals the tensions in Japan between promoting global citizenship and assuming homogeneity. Using the Modernizacion Educativa, a Mexican education policy, as her point of examination, Buenfil argues that globalization is a “mutual contamination and clash between universalism and particularism, Education Review 9 homogenization and heterogeneity” (p. 218). She details how the international meets the local through analysis of how an international recommendation becomes national policy, how it is implemented in schools, and finally how teachers appropriate and implement this policy in classrooms. Focusing on Malaysia, Lee examines how globalization has impacted recent educational reforms. She begins her chapter with a discussion of how globalization has affected the economic and social contexts of Malaysia, and then examines how these changes have influenced the educational system at both the school and tertiary level. She concludes that two concurrent but opposing themes – homogenization and particularization – come together to impact the direction and nature of educational changes in Malaysia. Kendall and Silver artfully examine the consequences of global mass education in Malawi. Their chapter asks “how students, parents, teachers, and community and national leaders in Malawi make sense of the failure of mass primary schooling…to improve their lives” (p. 247). Through the lived experiences of Malawi students, this chapter reminds us that Education for All is “not simply a technology to increase human capital: it is fundamentally a negotiation about who is responsible for people’s well being in the current era of globalization” (p. 264). In the second chapter situated in South Africa, Vally and Spreen illustrate how skills development has relegated education to economic rationales and success in international competition. The authors assert that this narrowing of education’s purpose, embedded in educational policies that are social justice oriented, relate directly to global trends fueled by neoliberalism, ignoring the broader purposes of education. The book closes with Blackmore’s chapter on Australia, which examines the impact of globalization in higher education to show that structures and policies associated with globalization also affect marginalized groups and individuals in industrialized countries. This chapter illuminates how neoliberal norms guide university strategies to be marked oriented, and impact women differently. She demonstrates that while the numbers of women Book review by Payal P. Shah 10 attending university in Australia have increased, patriarchal hierarchies, resulting in lower academic positions at the university and uneven participation across fields of study, remain uncontested. Through its varied conceptual and empirical chapters, this book provides a comprehensive examination, from multiple perspectives, of the major issues salient in the field of international and comparative education. Each chapter raises important questions about the relationship between globalization and educational systems around the world. The relationships among the chapters and adherence to the central theoretical strands of the book are exemplary. Further, this book enhances discussions of alternative visions of globalization and provides concrete examples of the ways that selected countries have responded. Scholars and educators interested in integrating gender as a level of analysis into theoretical and policy-oriented discussions will find this text useful. This book will also be insightful for researchers from a variety of disciplines interested in intersections with education as well as for policy-makers, planners, and development professionals. About the Reviewer Payal P. Shah Assistant Professor University of South Carolina Payal P. Shah, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Qualitative Inquiry at the University of South Carolina. Her work focuses on gender, development, and education in developing countries, with regional expertise in South Asia. Education Review 11 Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Review, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. 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